AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter One
Chase sat on the edge of the twin bed in his rehab room and stared blankly out the window, wondering what the hell came next. He had no home. He didn’t have a dime to his name after sixty days of rehab and the extra week he tacked on after... the unimaginable happened.
Choked up, thoughts of Juliana filled his every thought.
Her dropping to the floor.
Him giving her CPR.
Something overtaking him until he collapsed beside her.
When he woke up in the hospital, the cops told him she’d OD’d on fentanyl-laced heroin. He’d done the same when the drugs from her skin absorbed into his as he gave her mouth-to-mouth. She’d been dosed intentionally, him by accident. Fentanyl was fifty to one hundred times more potent than morphine. She died. He lived.
He’d cheated death. Again.
His brothers, Hunt and Max, showed up unannounced and unwelcome at the hospital last week. They eagerly pointed a finger and accused him of wastingtwo months and all his money on rehab if he was just going to use the second he got out. Even after being told the OD was an accident, Hunt and Max still left angry and skeptical.
They didn’t see how determined he was to get back to his little girl.
They didn’t care.
Sometimes it felt like no one cared about him anymore.
He should be grateful his brothers bothered to check on him at all. It didn’t go well. They’d come because their mother would have wanted it. But she was also the reason they wanted nothing to do with him. So they did their duty to appease their conscience for Mom’s sake, then delivered Chase once he was released from the hospital back to rehab for another week to get his head straight with little faith he’d changed or gotten his act together. They left, basically washing their hands of him yet again.
All Chase wanted to do was see his little girl, and that meant facing her mom, Shelby, and convincing her he’d changed his ways and wanted to put Eliza first.
He prayed he could make Shelby believe him.
He pulled out his phone and scrolled through pics of Eliza. Shelby had sent him a new one every day since Eliza was born. One look at her sweet, smiling face and all the tension went out of his chest.
It wasn’t just the photos Shelby sent that made his day. Shelby had even hooked up a private webcam in Eliza’s nursery. He could log in with his password anytime and see his little girl in her room. Some days, the pictures and seeing the livestream had been all thatkept him sane while he was serving overseas. He’d spent every night in rehab watching his baby sleep.
It went a long way to stitching up his bleeding heart.
Shelby never called to talk to him about anything except Eliza. But since he got out of rehab and ended up right back in, she’d left him several messages he hadn’t listened to because if her reaction to him OD’ing again matched his brothers’ responses, he was in deep shit.
He didn’t want to hear her tell him not to come back this time.
“Mr. Wilde,” a nurse called from the door. “I see you’re all packed up and ready to go.”
He wished he knew exactly where he was going.
“There’s someone in the lobby to see you.”
Definitely wasn’t his brothers. His dad wanted nothing to do with him either.
It had to be his buddy Drake. Chase wondered if Adria, Drake’s girlfriend and Juliana’s sister, was holding it together after losing her twin.
Maybe she came, too. He wanted to talk to her and tell her how sorry he was for not being able to save Juliana. He’d tried but failed miserably.
“I’m headed out now,” he told the nurse.
“Good luck. And remember, take it one day at a time.” She smiled and left.
He rubbed his hand over his aching chest, swallowed down the guilt, stuffed his feet in his boots, laced them, stood, grabbed his duffel bag, and headed out the door. He’d already had his last session with his psychiatrist and picked up his meds at the pharmacy. All he had left to do was figure out where he was going and how he would get there.
Back to Wyoming to see his kid first, then... he didn’t know.
