by Piper Lennox
“I don’t care about that.”
“I would.”
My inhale was drawn-out and sounded, even to my own ears, too sarcastic. Of course Walt would focus on the free trip. It was how he put a positive spin on just about everything: pointing out whatever personal gain could be harvested.
“I want to go, Daddy!” London chirped. She’d turned herself into the Joker, but with spaghetti sauce.
“You have school.” I ripped off a paper towel and passed it to her. It didn’t help; she just swiped the sauce back and forth on her skin.
She pouted. Walt slid her chocolate milk closer. “Drown your sorrows, kid. We’ll have a blast while your dad’s gone—I’ll take you to the teahouse again.”
London sat up and grinned. I glared at him.
“What?” he asked innocently. “Walt and London Tea Parties are our thing.”
“I didn’t say I was going.” My eyes landed on the letter again. “I have zero interest in meeting the family.”
“Sure. That’s why you’ve had that letter sitting there all afternoon.”
My hands fumbled with the tongs for the garlic bread, until I gave up and grabbed it with my hands, mostly so I could get on his germaphobic nerves. “I feel obligated, but I don’t want to go. That’s why I’ve had it sitting there.”
“We both know you’ll feel guilty forever if you don’t. So go. It’ll be like a vacation.”
“A vacation? Meeting the woman whose kid—”
Both of us froze and glanced at London. She was blowing bubbles in her milk, blissfully ignorant.
“I think,” Walt went on, “it’ll be good for them. And you, just to go someplace with fresh faces. You need to socialize.”
“I socialize plenty.”
“As much as I love dragging you to parties and bars, we both know none of my friends can give you what you need.”
“Oh. You meant dating.” I couldn’t disagree with him, there: my socialization was fine when it came to friends. Girlfriends, however, were a different story. A nonexistent one.
It wasn’t like I’d closed myself off to dating. I’d simply resigned myself to a few more years of loneliness, until I was older. Meaning, until girls my age were older.
No one wanted to be a stepmom at twenty-three. And the ones that did usually fell short, treating London like a doll they could dress up, parade on Facebook, then cast aside whenever they wanted “just us as a couple” time.
Walt and his friends harassed me for being too picky, but they didn’t understand. None of them had kids. “I’m not just finding someone for myself,” I told them, again and again. “I’m finding someone for London, too. Dating material is easy. Mom material...not so much. Not at our age, anyway.”
“Who says it has to be a mom?” Reid teased, more than once. Just about every time the conversation happened, actually.
“Yeah,” one of them would add, usually Cedar or Justin. “London can always have two dads.”
At that point, I’d laugh their teasing off. Their lamentation of my heterosexuality was a running joke in our circle, and the jokes rarely changed. Including the one where Walt pretended to take enormous offense: “Um, excuse me? London basically does have two dads, thank you very much.”
And again, I didn’t disagree. Walt had been there for London—for me—from the beginning. I doubted I could have made it through the worst of the illness without him.
In fact, the day he moved in, I’d just started an email to London’s grandmother.
“You were right. She needs more than I can give her.”
He’d reached past me, saved the email as a draft, and told me to sleep on it. I’ll never stop being grateful for it. Most days, London’s the only reason I get out of bed.
The letter fluttered under the push of the fan overhead. I picked it up.
“Maybe I will go,” I said quietly. London and Walt high-fived.
So here I am, at the center of a party I’m still not sure I want to attend.
A woman in a red dress, flocked by reporters, gives me hug without asking. “This is so....” Her teary whisper ends in a sigh. I guess it’s a happy one, although I have no idea what word she’d use to finish her sentence. This whole thing is so...something. I don’t know what, but it’s the “so” part I agree with: whatever I’m feeling right now, there’s too much of it.
“I, uh...I want to thank you,” I tell her. A flash from one of the photographers—and at least fifty smaller flashes, from the guests’ cell phones—blinds us. “I have a daughter, myself. I can’t imagine what it was like for you to lose yours.” The sting in my throat shocks me. I clear it.
Rochelle’s smile trembles. She hugs me again. Flashes explode.
Thankfully, the attention wanders off me the second the other guest of honor arrives: a thirty-something woman from Virginia, who was blinded as a child. I watch from across the room as Rochelle looks into the woman’s eyes. Her daughter’s.
It breaks me.
The crowd is thick, but I barrel my way through like a tank.
Outside, I find an alcove in the brick exterior and sit, head on my knees, blood rolling through my ears. I blink the sting from my eyes. Like the first brush of food poisoning, my face gets unbelievably hot, then nauseatingly cold.
Get your shit together.
“Want one?”
I lift my head so fast, it hits the brick behind me. “Ow, fuck.”
There’s a hand stretched out in front of my face. It grasps a tin of mints. Shakes it at me, like I’m a dog in need of a treat.
“They’re rescue candies,” the girl tells me. Doesn’t ask if I’m hurt, even as I rub the back of my head and wince. “For panic attacks. Want one?”
I’m about to tell her this isn’t a panic attack—not that I would know—but she’s already grabbed my hand. I watch dumbly while she shakes two into my palm.
“Suck on them, don’t bite,” she orders, when I crush the first one between my molars.
“Sorry. Um...thanks.” I shrink against the wall; she’s taken a seat beside me, leaving barely two inches between us.
“Fair warning, I don’t know if these actually work.” The tin glints as she turns it, reading the ingredients. “Like, maybe it’s just a placebo effect? Something to distract you, until you calm down.”
I do feel distracted, and therefore calmer, but I can’t tell if it’s the candy or her.
“So.” She stretches her legs out in front of her. They’re tanned and smooth, save for a nick on her thigh. “You got my cousin’s kidneys.”
“Uh....” I pull my arm against my body when it brushes hers. “Yeah.”
“Take care of ’em.”
I should be relieved when she walks her feet back towards herself, using them for leverage to push up from the ground. Instead, with the rescue candies cramping my mouth, I feel this weird urge to say something. Anything, just to make her stay.
“Hey, wait a sec.” She turns and watches me stumble to my feet. “Thank you.”
“No worries.” She shakes the mints one last time, before dropping them into a pocket in her dress.
“No, I meant...thank you.” I brush the mulch chips off my dress pants. Not the smartest place to sit in formal clothes. “For....”
She furrows her brow. “For…?”
“I don’t know.” I spread my hands, rattled. Shouldn’t she know what I mean? What else would I thank her for? “That’s why I’m here, to thank the donor’s family. And you’re family. Right?”
“I didn’t give you her kidneys.” She gives me a long look, top to bottom. I know that face: she’s judging me. “I mean, even my cousin didn’t give you her kidneys, really. It was coincidence. So you don’t have to thank anyone.”
It’s then that I recognize her. Something about her snark is familiar, the way her smile doesn’t quite fit with what she’s saying. She sounds nice, but her words are almost too brutal.
“I know you,” I say, which stops her in her tracks. Her
hand drops from the door to the event hall.
“What?”
“I know you,” I repeat. My foot catches on a shrub as I step over it. When I regain my balance, stumbling back on the sidewalk, she’s turned to face me.
I take a breath. “You’re the girl who gave me shit for wanting to replace my cat, if it died.”
She tilts her head and laughs. I watch her tongue wet her lips as she searches her memory and, finally, comes up with me.
“That’s right,” she says slowly. In a single step, she closes the gap between us. “I remember now.”
Colby
“Please...do whatever you can.”
The pairs of eyes in front of me were both wide and pleading, but only one was staring at me: the little blonde girl on her tiptoes across the desk. Her fingers turned white on the edge.
The other stare belonged to the guy who brought her here. He watched her with that look—when you knew a kid would find out the truth, soon enough, but didn’t dare break it to them.
“Dr. Aurora is going to do her best, I promise,” I told them gently.
The girl’s grip loosened. “Aurora? Like the princess?”
“Exactly like the princess.”
She let go of the desk and stepped back, biting the bottom of her smile. While she turned her attention to the toys in our waiting room, I reached for the guy’s arm.
He was in a baggy dress shirt, smattered in blood. Combined with the pale, gangly look of his body, he looked pretty horrific. This was exactly the kind of thing we tried to keep behind closed doors, here.
“Sir,” I asked, “would you like one of our house shirts?”
For the first time since the two barreled into the clinic—the girl wailing at the top of her lungs, while he hugged the blood-soaked blanket to his chest—he looked at me. “Huh?”
“A clean shirt.” I nodded at the blood. “We don’t want other patients to see, and it’s a biohazard...” In the waiting area, the girl cracked a coloring book open to the spine and dug through the can of crayon stubs. “...and I’m sure your sister would feel calmer, too.”
“Daughter,” he corrected, focused on undoing his buttons. “Yeah, a clean shirt would be great, actually.”
I handed him a shopping bag for his shirt, then a clean cotton tee from the bin I kept behind the desk. All we had left were Larges. In the extra fabric, his limbs swam and vanished. His hands, I noticed, were puffy. His face was, too.
“So,” I said, hooking the office chair behind me with my foot, “how old is your daughter?”
He grabbed a napkin from the counter, one I’d left there during my lunch break. “Seven.” Every swipe at the dried blood on his jeans proved useless.
“Here.” I slid him a laundry pen and mini bottle of club soda.
“Wow. You’re prepared.” His hand came in contact with mine as he took them. “But I guess you’d have to be, working in a vet’s office.”
“I am very familiar with bloodstains.”
“You’d be a good person to have at a crime scene.”
I looked at him. Both of us flashed understated smiles. Inappropriately timed jokes were actually a specialty of mine, even if nobody else agreed, but it was rare to meet someone else who knew humor was a good tool for hard times.
“How did the cat sustain the injury?” The chair whined as I scooted to the computer. “And do you have any records, from a previous vet? We can get those faxed over.”
The guy lifted his head, still dabbing at his pants with the pen. “No records. It’s a stray who kept showing up on our patio, so we kind of took it in, I guess? And I’m not sure how it got hurt. Our neighbors have dogs, but they’re totally fenced in.”
“Where was it, when you found it today?”
“Under the house.”
CLAIMED STRAY, I typed. FOUND INJURED UNDER HOUSE, CAUSE UNKNOWN.
“Hey, uh...listen.” The guy spoke so quietly, I didn’t realize he was talking to me, at first. He leaned across the desk. “If the cat doesn’t...you know, make it,” he whispered, “can you guys just, like, pass me a note or something?”
“A note?”
“Yeah, you know, instead of telling me in front of my kid?”
Slowly, I looked from him to his daughter, still filling in a page with incredible concentration.
It clicked: he wanted to replace the cat with a lookalike, if it died, so his daughter wouldn’t know.
“If that’s what you want.”
“Thank you.” He passed back the laundry supplies, turned, and paused. I made eye contact as he turned again.
“Why did you say it like that?”
“Well....” Backpedal, I commanded myself. This was the kind of shit Dr. Aurora didn’t like: how straightforward I was with clients. I considered it a courtesy. She called it savage. I’d been on front-desk duty for the last week, ever since I told a family their poodle definitely wasn’t deaf; they were just inconsistent with its training.
The guy waited. He didn’t look mad, just frazzled. And exhausted, but I attributed that to the emergency he just went through, and the sunken set of his eyes and cheekbones. What a shame: he was good-looking, but the emaciated, run-down thing made me think drug addict.
Briefly, I wondered if I should add “POI” to the cat’s system file, Dr. Aurora’s personal shorthand for “possibly owner-induced.” We got a lot of people in there who lied about how an animal was injured. Most were innocent, like accidentally striking a dog in traffic and being too scared to admit it. But a few had serious issues with drugs, alcohol, or anger, and didn’t want to get caught.
It was especially hard for me to keep my mouth shut around those ones, even though Dr. Aurora believed those people deserved some credit. They brought the animal in anyway, lies or not; they wanted it to get help.
I just saw it as them covering their tracks.
“Well?” he asked, reclaiming my attention.
I decided not to backpedal. After all, he’d asked.
“The whole ‘replace the pet before the kid finds out’ thing? It doesn’t do them any favors. In my opinion.”
He blinked at me. “You don’t have children, I’m guessing.”
My shrug made my hands bounce on the keys, assembling a string of gibberish. “No. But I said it was my opinion. Feel free to ignore it.”
“I will.” Across the room, his daughter held up her picture: a pony with flowers in its mane, leaping over a crescent moon. From what I could tell, most of the picture was green.
All right: back to the monitor. “Name?”
“Buttons.”
I hid my laugh with a sip of my frappe, long melted. “I meant yours.”
“Oh. Walker.”
I typed it in. “And first name?”
“Orion.”
“Ryan. Got it.”
“No,” he sighed, pointedly annoyed. “O-rion. Like the constellation.”
My eyes narrowed on his as I backspaced, four determined stabs. “Orion.”
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About the Author
Piper Lennox is the author of the Love in Kona series, All Mine, and more. Her favorite heroes are broken; her favorite heroines are feisty (and, usually, also broken). Nothing fascinates her more than all the incredible ways two people can learn to save themselves...and each other.
Piper lives in Virginia with her husband, their three children, and a Siberian Husky too smart for his own good. Before she spent her days writing about life and love, she wrote copy for insurance companies. She will never, ever go back.
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