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Still, she missed their arguments.
A tear trickled from the corner of her eye to dampen her pillow. Her life had changed so much.
Automatically, she strained to hear any noises coming from the closet. Those nights when Rain would break down in tears and Dove had to set aside her own needs to comfort her were far too embedded in her DNA, to change the habit.
When she heard nothing, she rolled onto one side to stare at the window. The curtains were drawn shut, but they were sheer enough to provide a glimmer of moonlight streaming through. Another tear wet her pillow, followed by a third.
It was hard to imagine that if circumstances were different—if she and Rain weren’t fighting the world alone—then this never would have happened.
Everything flooded back. Things she stuffed down deep and never talked about. Her mom cheating on her father, and that terrible night when he went crazy and wiped them both off the face of the earth.
Her bottom lip quivered with a cry she held inside.Theywere supposed to raise Rain. Instead, Dove had finished doing the job. She never resented working two jobs to put herself through community college while Rain finished high school.
But she’d obviously done a poor job if her sister had been so naïve as to let herself get entangled with a guy who asked her to launder his drug money.
Maybe she’d sheltered Rain too much. She should have been teaching her life skills, but after all the horrific crap in their past, she didn’t want to scare Rain further by warning her about such things.
Then the minute she started living her own life—and spending so much time with Quaide—Rain ran out and got herself a thug boyfriend.
More tears flowed out. This wasn’t her. She didn’t look like herself and wasn’t acting like herself. She was the woman who picked up the pieces and found a way to put them back together without sweating it.
Because after what she and Rain had lived through,everythingwas small. Even getting involved in money laundering with a bad boyfriend.
This was a whole new level of experience, though. For a small time, she was only in charge of herself, not Rain too. She had a life, pleasure in her work…pleasure with Quaide.
Since her guard was already down, she just let them flow. She was tired and more than a little depressed. Stressed didn’t begin to explain it, and it was taking a toll on her health and appearance.
Between her lank hair and the dark hollows under each eye, she looked haggard. Rain complained about not having had a manicure in six weeks. Meanwhile, Dove looked like she’d been in the grave for six years.
Add in a new forehead crease and she had to ask herself if Quaide would still want her.
Of course he’d tell her she was being silly, that she was gorgeous no matter what, even when she was nothing but wrinkles.
Oh, she’d ruined everything.
Unable to think about him anymore, she swiped her phone to bring it to life. It wasn’t exactly fodder for sweet dreams to scroll through the local news site, but knowing that nothing had popped up about Rain’s involvement in a local money laundering case was a small comfort to sleep by.
A news video showed a few local break-ins and a car accident that shut down the interstate for two hours while it was cleared up.
Next was a body found by a fisherman. The man was too young to have died from natural causes. They believed foul play was involved.
The camera panned over the riverbank and some weeds that had been crushed down. The camera then zoomed in close to the back of the coroner’s van. Dove stared at the guy’s legs and a pair of worn cowboy boots.
In large letters on the bottom of one was a word that jerked her head right off the pillow.
RAIN
She rewound the footage and paused the screen on that boot.
An odd thing to write on the bottom of a boot.
Unless there was a matching name on another boot that was right now residing in her closet half a foot from where her sister slept.
Rain’s cowboy boot had a similar marking, only a different name.
DOM
No…
