Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 111400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111400 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 557(@200wpm)___ 446(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Even now, his cowboy hat was resting on the couch between us next to him—brim side up, and don’t fucking get him started on why you can’t set a cowboy hat down any other way. We sometimes teased him that he was more Texas than Michigan, despite having been born and raised right up the road.
“What about your sisters?” Moretti asked. “Can they help?”
“They’ve got jobs and kids, and Amy lives an hour away. They can’t really do much.” Beckett pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ll probably have to hire someone eventually. There’s no way he’ll move to a facility, and I can’t babysit him all day.”
“That’s a good idea,” Moretti said. “I once dated a girl who did that—home care for an elderly guy. She’d help him get dressed and all that.”
“Dated her for how long?” Beckett gave him the side eye.
“At least an hour,” Moretti quipped, tipping up his beer. “Long enough for her to undress me. I dressed myself.”
We laughed, and I felt more like my old self. It was good to be around the guys, even though I was so tired I couldn’t stop yawning.
“What’s going on with you?” Moretti asked me. “You look a little rough. Cheyenne keeping you up nights?”
“Ha. Right. At my mom’s house?”
“You’ll be in your new place soon enough.”
“Yeah,” I said, grabbing my beer bottle off the table.
“That’s cool about you and Cheyenne,” Beckett said. “So is it serious?”
“Um, yeah, you know.” I took a sip of beer. “I guess it’s serious. I asked her to move in with me. To the new house.”
“Shit, did you really?” Moretti looked surprised.
“Yeah.” I shifted in my chair.
“That is serious,” said Beckett.
“And Mariah’s doing okay with it?” Moretti asked.
I shrugged. “She says she is.”
“You don’t believe her?” Beckett paused with his beer halfway to his mouth.
“I do, it’s just kind of hard to believe she doesn’t have any issue whatsoever with me being in a serious relationship. She’s always been so scared of losing me. At one point she made me promise I’d never get remarried.”
“But this is Cheyenne,” Beckett pointed out. “It’s not some stranger. She’s known Cheyenne her entire life.”
“Right, but that’s exactly why she might not feel like she can be entirely honest about how she feels. She doesn’t want to hurt Cheyenne’s feelings.” It was total bullshit and I knew it, but for some reason, I couldn’t stop talking.
“And wasn’t she really tiny when she made you promise that?” Moretti asked. “I remember it, but it seems like it was a long time ago.”
“Yes, she was only five, but that doesn’t mean the fear isn’t still there—in fact, I worry that it’s moved from her conscious mind into her subconscious and she doesn’t even recognize it. But is it going to blow up later?” My lip was starting to twitch, and I covered it with my beer bottle.
“I don’t know, man.” Moretti frowned and shook his head. “You and Mariah have such a great relationship. I feel like she’d be up front about her feelings with you. And she seemed fine that day at the house.”
“You don’t know her as well as I do,” I shot back, sitting up taller in my chair. “There was this period of time last year where she was writing these letters to me and hiding them in her room. They were full of questions she was too afraid to ask me.”
“Oh.” Moretti’s face was grim. “I didn’t know that.”
“And she’s been having these nightmares.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. My hands started to shake, and I set my beer bottle down and crossed my arms over my chest, hiding them in my armpits.
“What kind of nightmares?” Beckett asked.
“She’s, um, alone in the dark. Trapped. And there’s a monster or something that’s going to attack her and she can’t escape. So she’s just like waiting in there to be attacked.”
“That sucks. You know what my sister did when my nephew was having monster nightmares?” Moretti said. “She had this spray bottle and she put a label on it that said Anti-Monster Spray, and every night she’d spray his room. Worked like a charm.”
I couldn’t even smile. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work in this case.”
“Does she see a therapist?” Beckett asked. “If not, you might consider it.”
“She does.”
“What does the therapist say about the nightmares?”
“Um, I don’t know. Mariah never tells me what they discuss.” I swiped my beer off the table and took another drink in the attempt to disguise my trembling lip. But my hand shook so much I knocked the lip of the bottle against my tooth. I set it down again. “I just need to talk to Cheyenne.”
“That’s a good idea,” Moretti said. “Maybe Cheyenne can help her. She’s good with kids.”