by Debra Doxer
My father was always on time. As fastidious as he was about his car and his house, he was the same way about punctuality. As I stood inside the main door of the school waiting for him to pick me up, the time on my phone indicated he was ten minutes late.
Worrying my lip between my teeth, I texted him. When his response wasn’t immediate, I called too. His voice mail picked up, and my text sat there all alone with no responding bubble beneath it.
I waited almost ten more minutes before sending him another text to let him know I was walking home.
Before I went outside, I stared at the heated gloves sitting at the bottom of my bag, reluctant to put them on. I had yet to really try them because I’d hardly been outside, running from the car to the house or into the school from the nearby drop-off area. Now that I needed the gloves, I didn’t want to wear them, to use anything Jonah had given me. What had once been the best gift I’d ever received now felt tainted and ugly.
Rationally, I knew it would be worse for me if I didn’t wear them. It would be like cutting off my nose to spite my face, an expression I’d always hated, but it applied perfectly, except it wasn’t my nose that could be cut off.
After another moment of internal debate, feeling as though I had no choice, I finally pressed the button to turn the gloves on, watching the red lights glow, and pulled them over my hands. Not wanting to waste any more time, I braced myself for the cold and pushed through the doors, walking swiftly across the parking lot.
Once I was off school grounds, I grudgingly acknowledged how warm my hands were as puffs of breath floated around my face. It was the perfect gift, just like The Butterfly Place was the perfect outing that day. They were thoughtful gestures done by someone who knew just what I needed when I needed it. Now I couldn’t even think about them without bile rising in my throat.
I moved faster, arriving home only fifteen minutes later. All appeared quiet, and when I unlocked the front door, the warning beep from the alarm sounded, indicating my father wasn’t home.
I punched in the long numerical code and the beeping stopped. Then I tried calling him once more, and when he didn’t pick up, I left a message to let him know I was home before resetting the alarm again.
Restlessly, I waited, making a futile attempt to start my homework before looking in the refrigerator to see what we had for dinner. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that my father would never forget to pick me up at school. But today he had.
Standing by the window, watching for his car, I wondered what I would do if he didn’t come home tonight or tomorrow or the day after that. The reality was, I had no idea. If something happened to my father, there was no one to call, no one to turn to. Except maybe for Theo, but I still hadn’t heard from him or his parents.
If I wasn’t already dealing with so much, I’d buy a bus ticket and go straight to his house, ready to rip into him for disappearing, even though I knew he would never disappear on me, not purposely and not for long. Something was wrong, and I was a terrible friend for ignoring that fact. The truth was, I didn’t want to know, not yet. It was too much to feel all at once, and I knew I couldn’t handle it.
I dropped down onto the couch and sat there as dusk fell, casting long shadows across the living room walls. Dinnertime came and went, and I still hadn’t moved off the couch. Pumpkin walked in and jumped up beside me, snuggling against the side of my leg. Stroking him softly, I closed my eyes just as the warning beep of the alarm sounded.
With a start, I sat up, blinking into the darkness. Relief filled me when I recognized the tall silhouette walking up the steps from the garage.
I stood and met my father in the hallway. “Where have you been?”
He shot me a stiff smile as he reached for the switch on the wall, casting the room in warm light. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at school to pick you up.”
He removed his heavy overcoat and hung it neatly in the closet. Then he reset the alarm, and when he turned around I could see what looked like blood on his upper lip.
“What happened?” I asked, staring wide-eyed at him.
He looked at me, his gaze traveling over my face. The longer he stood there, not saying anything, the more my dread grew.
“It’s time to leave, Candy,” he finally said.
My heart stopped. “You’re sending me away?”
His lips turned up and he shook his head. “No. We’re going together.”
Relief sent my blood racing again.
His hand came up and rested on my shoulder. “I told you I wanted you with me, even though it’s not the best place for you. I never wanted you mixed up in any of this, and I’d like us to go and make a fresh start somewhere, if that’s okay with you.”
A fresh start. There was nothing here for me now, only him. A fresh start was exactly what I needed. “That sounds okay.”
He laughed at my answer as though he was expecting something else. “Pack some things. Keep it to one bag, though. Enough clothes for a few days.” He studied me for a moment. “Aren’t you going to ask me where we’re going?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I trust you.”
His dark blue gaze gentled as it roamed over my face. I swallowed hard when I saw what looked like regret in his eyes.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said, putting my arms around him at the same time his encircled me. But when I went to pull away, he held on tighter, and it broke my heart because it was so unlike him.
“When you’re done packing, eat something. Then go to bed,” he said, finally releasing me.
“I didn’t make any dinner.”
“Go ahead and order something. I’ll be in my room. I have arrangements to make. Don’t worry about getting anything for me.”
“Can Pumpkin come with us?”
With a half smile, he nodded. Then he turned and walked down the hallway and went into his bedroom.
For a moment I stood there, staring after him. Then I looked around the house feeling lost, not sure what to do. Because of the knot sitting in my stomach, I knew dinner wasn’t my priority, which left me with packing, even though it felt as though I’d just arrived.
My father said to take enough for only a few days, but I knew we weren’t coming back. Going into my room, I pulled my rolling suitcase out of the closet. The first item I packed was my mother’s recipe book. Then I put in some jeans and sweaters.
As I folded it all neatly into my suitcase, I wondered if it was Jonah who had bloodied my father’s lip. When I texted my father earlier today about Jonah being in school, had he gone over to his house and confronted him? It made sense, especially in light of what we knew about Jonah now.
Holding my hands out, I took in the Band-Aids on my fingertips and the purple tinge of my skin, and I hoped my father had gone to Jonah’s house. I hoped Jonah looked a lot worse than he did.
After finishing packing, I halfheartedly poked around the kitchen but found that I still had no appetite. So I went into the living room, turned on the television, and stayed there until close to midnight before I finally crawled into bed and tried to fall asleep.
I already feel like you’re mine. All I want to do is take care of you.
In the silence, Jonah’s words played over and over again in my head. It felt like they were haunting me, twisting through my thoughts, torturing me with their impossible promise. Unforgettable words spoken by a boy—scratch that, a man—who I would never see again, a man who claimed to care for me despite the lies he told.
Had he really cared about me? Not that it mattered, but I wondered if it could be true. His eyes said it was true. They said he was hurting just like I was. When I accused him of locking me in that freezer, Jonah looked wounded, as if I’d ripped his heart right out of his chest. I was surprised by how much I wanted him to have an honest emotion for me, one that made him feel my loss half as much as I felt his.
Grabbing my phone, I found a mellow playlist to fill the silence and to drown out Jonah’s voice. As it played, I
went into my pictures, swiping through them until I came to the one of Jonah with the monarch butterfly sitting on his shoulder. It was the selfie he took. He was grinning in the photo, and the look in his eyes was achingly familiar.
The image blurred as tears threatened, and I moved my thumb over the delete icon, wanting the image gone. I stared at his face one last time, recalling each dip and curve as my thumb hovered over the phone, only millimeters away from making it disappear. Closing my eyes, I put the phone down, unwilling to erase the picture and not wanting to think about why. I just couldn’t do it.
My chest heaved as I sprang up in bed, looking around frantically. The sound of the house alarm jolted me awake, its shrill tone deafening in the quiet night. My father’s heavy footfalls in the hallway had me pushing off the covers and heading for my closed door.
“Stay in your room, Candy!” he bellowed, banging on my door from the other side.
I froze, standing stock-still in the middle of the room. Looking around in the dark, I strained to hear what was happening in the hallway, but the alarm made it impossible. Wringing my hands, wearing only my pink flannel pajamas, I felt panicked.
Had someone broken in? Was my father confronting the intruder right now? How could I just stand here? For a moment, I glanced at my phone beside my bed, but I knew better. Calling the police wasn’t what my father would want.
I moved to the closed door, trying to listen, just as something slammed against the wall on the other side of my bedroom, hard enough to make my dresser rattle. I reared back, my heart jumping into my throat.
Tension coiled inside me as I bounced nervously on my bare feet. The wall shook again, and then I heard a grunt as something hard and metallic hit the floor just outside my door.
My father was struggling with whoever was out there. I could tell by the noises I heard, and I couldn’t just stand here and do nothing.
Looking down, I saw Pumpkin crouching beneath the bed, his eyes wide and alert.
“Sorry,” I whispered, pulling him out so I could lock him inside my closet. I didn’t want him getting out of the room. Then I went back to the door and cautiously turned the knob.
Gradually, I pulled my bedroom door open. The shriek of the alarm was more piercing in the hallway as I poked my head out. From this vantage point, I could see down into the empty living room. But I knew they weren’t there. They were in the entryway by the front door on the other side of my bedroom wall.
While my heart hammered, I took a tentative step into the hallway. There, on the hardwood floor, I saw a handgun lying just beyond my reach. That must have been what I’d heard hit the floor.
The noise of the struggle was clearer now and when another deep grunt sounded, I was sure it was my father.
I stared at the gun for one beat and then another. My pulse skipped violently and a voice inside my head screamed for me to pick it up. But if I stepped out far enough to grab it, whoever was in the entryway would see me. That didn’t matter, though. My father was in trouble. Hiding wasn’t an option.
I hesitated one moment more, gathering my courage before rushing across the floor silently in my bare feet and bending to wrap my fingers around the cold black metal.
As I lifted the gun, I whirled around to find my father pinned to the wall by two huge hands wrapped around his neck. He was pushing against the thick, muscled arms that held him there, but they were immovable, like a stone statue. The owner of those hands had his back to me, and once my gaze broke away from my father, I realized who he was.
It was him, the giant who’d knocked me over as he ran out of our house. His impossibly wide shoulders and long salt-and-pepper hair were unmistakable. Neither of them saw me as I stood there, aiming the barrel of the gun at the man’s back. I’d never fired a gun before, but he was a huge target and I wasn’t far away.
An icy wind blew across my face and I noticed the front door was wide open. Anyone could look inside and see us all here.
It was then that my father’s eyes shifted and found me. They widened as he struggled, pushing on the man’s unyielding arms. When I nodded at him, letting him know what I intended to do, he stared at me for a heartbeat before his eyes tightened with a strange mix of disappointment and resignation.
In that split second, our conversation about my wanting to be like him came back to me. I told him I could kill for the right reasons, but he’d disagreed.
You could never do what I do. You’re not a killer, Candy.
I was about to prove him wrong.
My index finger curled around the trigger as I pointed the barrel of the gun at a spot between the man’s shoulder blades. My hands didn’t shake and my conscience didn’t flinch. There was no doubt in my mind. I was going to do this.
It was then that the front door slammed closed, startling me, and I was shocked to find Jonah standing there. His arrival was also noticed by the man, who only glanced at him as his grip on my father’s throat tightened.
The man didn’t seem surprised to find Jonah here, certainly not as surprised as I was.
Jonah’s eyes were wild as he held his hand out toward me. “Put the gun down!” he yelled over the sounding alarm.
He was here, but he wasn’t on my side.
When he took a step closer, I straightened my arms and braced my legs.
Seeing my determination, Jonah ran at me. “Candy, no! That’s my father.”
The shock of his words nearly stopped me. But it was too late. I was already squeezing the trigger.
The story continues in Sweet Liar, Book 2 in the Candy Series.
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Connect with Me
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Other Titles
Keep You from Harm (Remedy Book 1)
To Have and to Harm (Remedy Book 2)
Play of Light
Wintertide: A Novel
Sometime Soon
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I make up a lot of stuff for my books, but I didn’t make up CREST syndrome. It’s rare but it’s real, and I happen to have it. Living near Boston, going through one of the most brutal winters in this city’s history, it was on my mind more than usual as I was writing. Giving Candy CREST (or limited scleroderma, as it’s also called) wasn’t part of the initial plan. But my purple fingers had a mind of their own as I was typing, afflicting my character with this condition and then making it a major plot point. I have to say, I liked their initiative. I also liked having the opportunity to explain, at least a little bit, about CREST through Candy because it’s often misdiagnosed and misunderstood.
If you would like to read more about this autoimmune disease, the following websites are a good place to start. There’s no cure for CREST, but they’re doing great research every day.
http://www.sclero.org/medical/about-sd/types/systemic/limited/crest/a-to-z.html
http://www.hopkinsscleroderma.org/scleroderma/types-scleroderma/
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Every time I release a new book, I have the pleasure of meeting new readers and bloggers. I also have the opportunity to connect in a different way with those of you I already know. That’s truly the best part of what I do, and the thing that blows my mind about it, is it all happens virtually.
Sometimes it feels like I live in two different worlds. A very real one where I’m a busy mom who drops off her daughter at school every morning and then sits in traffic on her way to work, and another, an often more vibrant one, based solely on imagination and the written word. I’m grateful to have both worlds, each of which are filled with people to whom I owe my thanks. It’s my absolute pleasure to virtually know Pam Berehulke, Bianca Smith, Chyna Ngie, and Rachel Blaufeld. You all are the best! I wouldn’t want to do this without you. Thank you for your support an
d for everything you do to encourage me.
Thank you to the bloggers out there who read my books and then make it their mission to spread the word. I’m so grateful to you all.
Thank you to my family and friends for not holding it against me when you call and I say “I can’t talk right now” for months at a time because I’m spending all my free time writing.
And thank you to Jillian, for inspiring me every day and saying the darnedest things like:
“Mom, I painted you a beautiful picture. I’ll show it to you for a dollar.”
“Can we walk to Antarctica?”
“Is dinner ready yet? I haven’t eaten in like fifty-seven hours.”
Love ya, kiddo.
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