Page 45 of The Cul-de-Sac War

Now when she wasn’t in the hospital Anna just sat on her bed in her filtered room, hearing the distant whistles and shouts of children playing outside.

Bree’s hand slipped to her backside, where even now, seven months later, she could remember the pain of the needle pushing through her cortical bone, and marrow bone, to get to the marrow.

It was supposed to work.

There wasn’t supposed to be graft failure.

And yet here they were.

Her throat stung.

Bree took a sip of her coffee to manage it.

“Did you get to the bottom of the box yet? I found the thing you wanted.” She pressed her toe between the slivered crack of the porch’s second step.

Anna gasped. “You found it!”

Bree smiled but also managed to shoot another eye-dagger at Chip as he passed. He wore a new hole-ridden T-shirt today and jeans covered in caulk and many colors of paint. When Bree took note of the sweat beading at the back of his neck and the little flip of his damp brown hair, her teeth clenched.

This man had woken her up at 3:13 a.m. This filthy, sweaty, disgusting man.

She turned her attention back to Anna. “If my niece wants an 1100-piece Lego Heartlake Shopping Mall set, my niece gets an 1100-piece Heartlake Shopping Mall set.” Her eyes shifted to the red Buick slowly rolling down the street. “Hey, I gotta go. The folks are here. Talk tomorrow?”

Already Bree could hear the sound of cardboard ripping open. “You bet.”

Bree hung up and took a shaky breath. Every good-bye, even when it would only be hours until the next hello, felt like another step toward the last one. Four months ago, she had said her last good-bye to Nana.

She never wanted to experience that again.

Not with Anna.

Stop. She couldn’t let her thoughts go down that path.

Bree set her phone on the porch step, jumped up, and dusted herself off. She ignored Chip’s oncoming figure as she stopped at the mailbox, waving to the car that pulled toward her house.

As if it were possible her parents could drive past her on the cul-de-sac going five miles an hour. As if they hadn’t visited three times in the last six months.

Her smile broadened as she spotted her mother’s face through the windshield.

Her entire life she had been told how uncannily they resembled each other. That was partly due to the narrow age gap between them, as Bree had been born when her mother was barely nineteen. Beyond that, they shared the same high cheekbones and the same wildly red, thick hair, though her mother kept hers short and tamed. But most of all they shared the same expression when they were genuinely excited about something—their eyes turned an even more brilliant, effervescent green. Their mouths puckered to form the same O shape. Looking at her mother right now was like looking in a mirror.

Bree bounced on her toes as the car rolled into the driveway. Her feet were nearly crushed under the weight of the rolling car as her stepfather finally put the car in park. She yanked open the passenger door.

“Happy birthday to me!”

Bree pulled her mother out of her seatbelt and into a hug. It was April 7 and her birthday was two weeks past, but for all intents and purposes, today was the day.

“Happy birthday, sweetheart,” Bree’s mother said, wrapping her daughter in a tight hug. “And look at you—you wore your birthday sweatshirt.”

Bree opened her eyes in the hug and caught Chip’s grin as he watched them. His eyes drifted to the colorful sweatshirt covered in scribbled birthday well-wishes from family and friends, some dating all the way back to 2000. Everything in his expression said, Birthday sweatshirt?

She scrunched her nose at him, frowned, and closed her eyes again.

“Now where are the presents?” She moved to examine the back seat.

“Ah. Thirty-four years old and not a day more mature.” Bree’s stepfather stepped out of the car with open arms and an amused smile.

As Bree was moving around the car to give Dan a hug, she heard a familiar sound. She froze midstep as she saw the dog blast through the open door. He skidded to a stop on the front porch, staring at Bree like he’d reached heaven.