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“Thank you,” she whispers, and I shove all the pain sitting on my chest like a lead weight into a tiny box, then lock it up, where I’ll keep it until the day I have no choice but to say goodbye to her.
Only, I don’t know the time for that will come sooner than either of us realize…
Roman
40.7644°N 73.9772°W
1:11 p.m.
I jolt awake when someone pounds on my bedroom door, lifting my head off my pillow to look across the expanse of the dimly lit room.
“What?” I bark, and the naked female sprawled out on the other side of the mattress opens her eyes to look at me.
“Roman!” Clifford calls through the thick wood, and I shake my head.
Fuck no. “I’m sleeping.” My head falls back against the pillow, and I close my eyes.
“It’s Valentino.”
My muscles tense.
“Fuck.” I toss back the sheet that barely covers me and get out of bed. After walking across the room to the door, I turn the lock and throw it open. When I see the look on Clifford’s weathered face, my knees weaken. “What happened?”
“You need to get dressed, kid,” he says quietly.
“What happened?”
“Roman, please, get dressed.”
“Just fucking tell me!” I bite out, and he shakes his head as his eyes fill with sympathy.
“He’s in the hospital.”
The hospital?
“How bad?”
“You need to get to him.”
I need to get to him.
My vision dims around the edges as dread crawls up my throat. “Can you get her home and call for my car?”
“Of course,” he says, dipping his chin, and then I hear him quietly talking as I walk across the room to my closet.
Having no idea that two hours later, my life is going to be irrevocably changed forever.
1
ELORA
45.8918° N, 123.9615° W
Working at a bar, a place where people come to have a good time is the last place I would’ve thought I’d find some semblance of solace after my mom’s passing. But over the past five months, I’ve discovered that other people’s problems are a great distraction when your own life is in shambles.
It’s a morbid way to look at things, but my mom always did say “No matter how big your problems are, Elora, there is always someone, somewhere, dealing with a situation worse than yours.”
She was right. If you pull back the curtains and look through the front that most people have up, you’ll find everyone is just trying to survive some kind of tragedy.
