Page 155

And I would never forget what Donna did.

I felt a chasm split between me and that family. A divide that I would never close. My friends and their people were all I had left, but I would not tolerate anyone mistreating Larissa. It was an offense to myself.

And what an underhanded fucked up way to do it too.

What had Mike said that led to this? Because I couldn’t imagine that if he’d told the truth about getting shit-faced drunk and almost killing his ex-girlfriend that Larissa would be the bad guy here.

It actually made me madder at Mike than I already was.

“Come home,” I said again. “Let me take care of you.”

There was a long moment before she replied. “Okay.”

44

LARISSA

I pulled down the visor and wiped my cheeks. I was puffy, splotchy, and I had dark circles under my eyes. Chris had seen me worse. I closed the mirror and drove back to his house.

He was waiting just inside the door when I got there.

He helped me out of my jacket and hung it on the hook while Woofarine bounced at my feet. I got my snow boots off, turned around, took one look at Chris’s gentle expression, and burst into tears.

He held me right there in the entry while I sobbed into his shoulder.

I couldn’t catch my breath.

I still wasn’t feeling good from the epinephrine and allergic reaction yesterday, and I hadn’t slept well. I was swinging from one crisis to the next with no end in sight. I was tired down to my core.

I never got a break.

I started every day forced to reassemble the shattered pieces of the day before. I never got to feel truly safe and secure and stable because the bad things never stopped happening. And the scariest thing of all was that for the first time in my life, I felt like giving up. Like the inner drive that propelled me forward, the only thing that kept me alive, and housed and fed, was finally exhausted.

“Hey, shhhhhh…” He smoothed my hair.

“What am I going to do?” I hiccupped.

“You’re not going to do anything. You just be still for a few days.”

“I can’t. I can’t ever stay still, I can’t ever stop moving.”

“Hey, look at me.” He pulled away and tipped my chin up. “You’re going to be okay,” he said softly. “We’re going to rest. Read, watch TV. That’s it. That’s all we’re doing for the next twenty-four hours.”

“And then what?” I sniffed.

“And then we’ll talk about it. Figure it out. Maybe we can make soup. I’ll chop whatever horrible painful vegetable you want.”

He got a laugh-cry out of me.

“I’m making you lunch,” he said. “Go get into something warm.”

I gazed at him. His steady expression, those warm brown eyes. The look he was giving me felt closer than a hug. Like some boundary that had been firmly in place since the day I met him had disintegrated overnight.

My brain was glitching. I was sad and reeling and panicked. But Chris was right: I didn’t need to figure it out today. So I nodded reluctantly and he let me go.

When I came out ten minutes later, I sat on the sofa and he gave me a blanket and handed me a coffee. He made it the way I liked it. It had my creamer in it. Chris drank black coffee. He must have gotten it while I was gone.

I wondered how many considerate little things over the last ten months had really been Chris’s doing when I thought it was Mike. Things I maybe didn’t even notice at all but that left me more comfortable, or safer, or less upset because of them.