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“You know I will be,” Katrina said with a contented smile as Lorenzo’s hand went to the small of her back, his fingers burning into her skin.
“You’ll be cooking the books for me,” Lorenzo replied.
“Cooking them? No, they’ll be legal.”
“You know what I mean.”
“And I can bartend! Me and Lorenzo, just like Cocktail.” Justin grinned over his cocoa.
“We’ll definitely be there, all of us.” Lorenzo’s hand moved from Katrina’s back to the edge of his rough sketch. “It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
***
“Hey.” Justin was infront of Katrina now, his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” She let out a short laugh as she swiped angrily at the teardrops on her face. “What’s wrong is this guy hurt me in...in the worst way, and here my brother wants us to play nice like it never happened. Like he never hurt us, because he hurt you, too.”
“And we hurt him.”
This time Katrina’s laugh was bitter. “And exactly how the hell did we do that?”
“We didn’t look for him. Not after you’d asked us to stop, after you’d given up. After you’d said you couldn’t take the hurt anymore. We never went back, revisited the notion that maybe he was out there, maybe he needed to be found. And with social media the way it is, we could have found him. Easily.”
“The way he found Emily?”
“The way that Emily found him.”
“But she said, in that post—”
“Emily found him. Trust me. Now come here.” He pulled her into a warm embrace, one that she welcomed as she let her tears fall. “We’ll get through this together, okay? Together.”
Katrina sniffled and held her brother a little tighter. “Together.”
CHAPTER 13
The last person Katrinaexpected to see as she walked up to the hospital entrance was Timothy, who waited for her, his arms crossed. She squared her shoulders and held her head high. She had every right to be there, despite Timothy’s claims that she shouldn’t be.
“When you weren’t at work again, I figured I’d find you here,” he said as she neared.
“Yes, well, I’m visiting a friend.”
“The same friend you were mourning when I first met you.”
It was Katrina’s turn to cross her arms. She had no reply; Timothy was right. She had been in mourning of a love lost for years, unable to date another man. But Timothy had been patient, and safe.
