Page 8 of The Fixer

I’d been flirting with a mourner.

With the daughter of the deceased.

At her father’s fucking funeral.

“Eliza?” Her name fell from my tongue on a whisper.

Even as tears welled in her eyes, she gifted me with a small smile.

“Thank you, Jet,” she told me, squeezing my arm before slowly pulling away. “For everything.”

She left on the arm of the old man, Niles. I wanted to follow. To stand there at her side. To bring back the glorious smile she’d shown me, to unwrap every delicate inch of her and make her mine.

Instead, I watched as she hovered over her father’s lifeless body, eyes dripping tears down her peach-tinted cheeks, hands reaching for the hands of the man lying in a borrowed casket. I watched as she cried on Niles’s shoulder, as they closed the lid and rolled her father to the front of the room.

I stood there watching, wondering how I’d missed the signs.

Wishing this was something I could fix.

3

Eliza

The crosstown traffic was a bear, the cars bumper to bumper, horns blaring, and the sharp smells of the city seeping in through the cracked windows to the back seat of the sedan. With the many things that were floating through my head, time meant little to me. The cars and buses crawled along at a snail’s pace, and every time I looked out the window, all I saw were lines of vehicles and hordes of faceless people walking along the busy sidewalks, every last one of them going about their lives.

By the time the sedan pulled up in front of my building, my mind was spinning so fast I thought I might be sick. I was dizzy as I stepped out onto the curb, felt like falling as the driver called me back to pay my fare.

All I wanted was to climb into my bed, to curl up in a ball until the dizziness subsided and the blessed numbness I’d been living in since my father’s death came sweeping back in.

Tears were already falling from my eyes as I crossed the lobby to the elevator. But that numbness had set in by the time I made it upstairs, and, on wobbly legs, I stumbled to the couch. Grabbed a pillow and curled around it, content to stop the movement that had the dizziness churning through me.

How could he do this to me?

How could my father leave me, then leave me this?

I needed my dad. I needed the comfort he always gave me. The advice he dispensed with a level head.

I needed his guidance, and he should have known I would. Shouldn’t have given me more than I could handle.

But he did.

The sun drooped in the sky, casting ghosts of shadows around the room. Sleep would have been welcome, anything to dull the pain, but a tiny bell jingled as it moved across the room. It was enough to pull me from the fog of sleep, to remind me of the anguish and the heartache, to remind me of the responsibilities I now had.

Still, I didn’t move from my spot. Not until a pounding on my door made me nearly jump from the couch. I stayed silent, praying whoever it was would go away. But luck had left me since my father died, and the pounding came again.

“Elizabeth Dawn Westbrook, I know you’re in there. Open the damn door.” I groaned and buried my face in the pillow I had clutched to my chest. “You’re not fooling me, I can hear you!”

“Go away,” I muttered loud enough for her to hear.

“Can’t do that.”

“Then use your key,” I told her, rolling onto my back.

“Can’t do that either.”

“You lost it, didn’t you?” I threw the pillow to the floor and rose on shaky legs, then picked my way across the room using the kitchen counter and table for support. When I pulled open the door, my best friend, Brooke, pushed through, barging in with a box in her arms.

“I didn’t lose it, I misplaced it.” Then under her breath, she muttered, “Again.”