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“Nah, you know what. I’m good.”
Why did she have to go pointing out that she was flawed?
Like they wouldn’t have noticed?
You shouldn’t eat too many sweet things, Effie. It’s not good to be so . . . rounded.
“Urgh, shut up, Nan.”
The silence in the room and the way both of them stared at her clued her in to the fact that she’d just said that out loud.
“I’m not nuts! Honestly!”
“No one said you were, baby girl,” Steele said. He tilted his head to the side. “You were talking to your nan?”
She puffed out a breath. “I know it sounds nuts, but my nan, well, she raised me from when I was young. My mom didn’t know who my dad was. At school, she was bullied pretty badly and I think that affected Nan as well as her. My nan could be pretty strict. She wanted my mom to act a certain way, so Mom left as soon as she could and I think she went a bit wild. Anyway, she got pregnant with me and then moved home for a while. Nan said that one day she woke up and Mom was gone, leaving Nan with me to raise.”
“Fuck. How old were you?” Grady asked, coming closer.
“I was three. I don’t really remember my mom. Just photos I saw of her.”
“She never came back?” Steele asked.
“No. When I was ten, a policeman came to the house to tell Nan that she’d died in a house fire in Utah. She, uh, she died along with her husband and child.”
“That bitch.”
She jumped at Steele’s words. “It . . . she died, Steele.”
“So? That doesn’t make her a bitch? She can still be a bitch. She went off and made another family and left you with your nan, who didn’t seem that great of a person to be left with.”
“Nan really wasn’t that bad. I mean, she was strict and had a lot of advice. Some of it . . . wasn’t that great. I think she was trying to stop me from becoming like my mom. And she . . . I don’t know, I think she believed that she was helping me.”
“How was she helping you?” Grady asked. “What kind of advice did she give you?”
She tugged at her earring.
“No,” Steele said firmly, pulling her hand away and giving it a light slap. She stared down at him.
“I’m going to need to come up with another way of stopping you from doing that.”
“If her hands were tied, she couldn’t do that,” Grady said.
“Good point. Next time you tug on your earring like that, you don’t get to use your hands for an hour.”
She huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, right.”
They gave her serious looks back.
Holy. Heck.
“What sort of advice, Effie?” Steele asked. “What did you hear her say just before?”
“Um, it’s just stuff about how I shouldn’t eat too much or I might get too round and then I won’t be attractive. Or, you know, how I should be agreeable and happy so that people like me. Stuff like that,” she whispered as she saw the way Steele’s face filled with thunder.
She turned to Grady and saw him standing still as a statue.
“That . . . you hear that sort of poison in your head?” Grady whispered.
