AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not really,” he answered, and I nodded, a bit relieved.
Sure, we’d connected through sex, but this was something else, something way deeper. Something that required a relationship capacity we hadn’t arrived at yet.
When a chime started up, signaling a phone call, he answered immediately, with an apprehensive quality I’d never heard before in his voice.
“She’s stable,” were the first words out of Shiloh’s mouth. “And she’s resting now. Ares was able to talk to her for a few minutes. She swore she was fine and wanted to go home.”
“But she’snothome,” Orion countered. “So… what was it? What happened?”
For a moment, she didn’t answer, clearly not wanting to say it, but then she pushed out a breath. “They’re confirming a stroke.”
Orion’s eyes closed for a moment before he glued them back to the road, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tight I could see the strain in his knuckles. “So… when she got dizzy the morning before the wedding and fell, but let everybody think she’d just slipped…?”
“They think it may have been a ministroke. Which could’ve led to this full blown one. Ri… if she’d been honest with the doctor initially…”
“Yeah.” Orion nodded. “I know. We’ll be there in about an hour,” he said.
“Okay. Nobody is leaving her side.”
“Thank you, Shi.”
“Of course. Calli is family.”
When the call ended, it was very,veryquiet.
And then — “Calli raised us, basically,” Orion started, unprompted. “Our mother was ill, for a long time, so Calli retired from the business and moved in. She took care of Mama and took care of us. There was a period where she seemed to get better, and it was hopeful, but then… I was just about to graduate college when she passed.”
“That’s… still practically a baby,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“I appreciate that. You’re right though; that was young as hell to lose her like that, to cancer. I know you’re familiar with what that looks like.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“So… after that, it was just my father and Grandma Calli, and eventually… we were okay. We missed her like hell, but we were okay. My father remarried and things were cool. Thenhehad a heart attack and didn’t get medical attention soon enough. The heart attack itself didn’t take him, but the sickness after… you know the rest. But that damn Calli… outliving everybody.”
And now there was a chance she might be lost soon too.
He didn’t have to say it.
I could tell exactly what was on his mind without another word.
My father was still bouncing around healthy as ever, but losing my mother was still vivid in my head.
Without thinking about it, I reached across the console, putting a hand on his leg.
It wasn’t much, but… it was something.
One of his hands loosened on the steering wheel and, a moment later, covered mine.
SIXTEEN
ORION
The fearof losing something that mattered was at the root of everything that enraged me. Not a conclusion I’d arrived at passively, or without evidence, it justwas.
When I peeled back the layers, especially on the things that made me act “irrationally” so I could get to the core of it, and do something about it, there it was.
Sometimes, though, I couldn’t do anything about it.
