She’s wrecking me. And I can’t do anything about it.
“Just pretend I’m her,” she tells me.
“That’s crazy,” I mutter, trying to tug my hand back. She won’t let me. Her grip isn’t strong. It’s rooted in persistent kindness. “My mother wasn’t great at making decisions,” I confess before I know what I’m doing.
She takes a deep breath and nods once. “Well, talk to me like she was.”
“You’re not going to let me out of this are you?”
A sad smile appears. “No.”
On an awkward laugh, I shrug and squeeze her hand back. “You have to let this go. I’m not used to the whole touching thing.”
“No.”
“Jesus,” I mutter.
“Go ahead, Sugar.”
What do I have to lose?
“I used to know what I wanted to do with my life.”
“Which is what? What did you want to do?”
“Something you wouldn’t understand. But I did it. And now I don’t have a purpose anymore. I’m just…wandering. I’ve been traveling for eight days on my own and it didn’t have to be like this.”
“Why? You married? Did you run away?”
“No,” I whisper. “Not married. Just met someone who made my life…better.” My voice is so filled with regret and emotion that it’s only a low rasp now. “I broke his heart.”
The bell dings and she lets go of my hand out of instinct, a slave to the sound. A couple is walking into the diner, chatting about something. On a quick frown, she taps the table with her nails and whispers, “Hold that thought.”
As if I can think of anything else.
But she never comes back. The place starts filling up, and I scan for a wall clock to see why it suddenly got busy in here. Sure enough, there’s one over the register telling me it’s noon.
This must be how people feel in therapy sessions when their time is up.
Drinking down my coffee, I pull out Jett’s card and lay it down. My plan is to pay him back when I can get some cash. I’ll steal some soon. Not worried about that. There’s always some asshole in a bar who will try to make an unwanted move. Then he gets his nuts kicked in, my knee to his face as he bends over, and his wallet stolen before he can even grunt, “Fucking bitch.”
But Jett’s going to think I’m an even bigger bitch when he sees these charges.
Still…he hasn’t stopped the card. Huh…I hadn’t thought about that.
Aloud, I whisper a question I’d never thought to ask, “Is he tracking me?” The idea that Jett might be nearby, making sure I’m okay, or trying to think of a way to talk to me immediately kicks my heart into gear.
The waitress hurries over. She’s the only one on this shift. “I’m so sorry, Sugar! What horrible timin’!”
I hand over the card. “You helped.”
“Oh good!” She takes it and returns quickly for me to sign, too busy to notice a man’s name is on it:
Jerald Cocker.
Pretty sure I don’t look like a Jerald. And neither, in fact, does Jett.
No wonder he’s pissed at his dad.
Smiling at this thought, I wave to her. I’m almost out the door, the bell’s still dinging, when she touches my back. “Sugar, when you said you broke his heart. Do you know you broke yours, too?”
As the cook’s call, “ORDER UP!” she hurries away.
Jett
“Fuck, this is beautiful, man,” I tell my brother Jaxson, as we sit over coffee in his renovated barn-house home, a toasty fire burning across from us. “This all reclaimed wood?”
He nods and points to the high ceiling. “Had all this redone. The frame is the barn that stood here, but the roof was useless. Those joists and beams there? I got those off an old church in southern Georgia. Preserved well because the townspeople cared for it more than their own homes back in the day. Place was being demolished, so I took the wood. Also the shutters you saw outside.”
“You do all this yourself?”
“Hired guys, but I was in there workin’ with them. You know me.”
“I was gonna say,” I smirk, intimating that my older brother would never let another man do his job.
He smiles, staring out eight feet high windows onto the farm he owns, hazel eyes filled with memories. “Pretty much every day they’d come back expectin’ yesterday’s job finished by me while they were home eatin’ dinner.”
I chuckle, because I can see him doing that. “I bet. Did they slack off?”
“Nah. Made ‘em work harder. They didn’t like me showin’ ‘em up. Got the job finished a few weeks earlier.”