“Ew!” Vee turned away from Amelia like morning sickness could be catchy.
“Be quiet, you guys. Oakley got her heart broken,” Izzy stated quietly, looking at me with such firm commiseration, I knew talking to my sisters was the very thing I needed to heal.
And so I did. I told them everything. Every little detail between us. All the sweet things, all the moments of confusion and doubt. And then I ended with telling them who he really was and how I’d found out from a stranger.
“Dolby?” Vee shouted, knocking over her empty coffee mug as she leapt to her feet. “They’re fucking—oh, sorry, Mom—farking rich!”
Esme swung to her. “Who cares? He’s a jackass who lied to her the whole time they were dating. All the money in the world isn’t worth that.”
Vee frowned. “Well, yeah. Of course. But it’s still kinda cool you dated a Dolby.”
“I worry about this next generation,” Mom said absently, sipping her coffee and staring at the wall.
“Well, I don’t care how much money he has. If he broke your heart, then he’s enemy number one to me.” Izzy stood and clapped her hands. “And this makes me doubly glad I brought my stash with me.”
“What stash?” I asked, feeling better just having told my family everything.
She hooked a finger over her shoulder. “In the kitchen I have three bottles of wine, four ice cream flavors, a box of tissues—the real expensive kind with lotion embedded in it which I never truly understood—and Sleepless in Seattle.”
My heart still felt split in two, but it was pumping again with the support of my sisters. “Thank you. This means the world to me.”
Amelia stood abruptly and left the room without saying a word.
“She okay?” I asked, frowning.
Vee shrugged. “Probably has to pee. She does that, like, every fifteen minutes. I’m warning you…never drive somewhere with her.” Her eyes went wide and Esme snickered.
Izzy and Mom went to the kitchen to make waffles while Esme cued up the movie.
“I can’t believe you still have a DVD player.” Esme shook her head in disgust.
“Sorry. We can’t all be mega bucks like you with state-of-the-art everything.” I struggled to take off the boot, wanting to take a peek at my wound before wrapping fresh gauze on it. “What do you do to make all your stacks of cash, anyway?”
“I make miracles happen, sister of mine.”
I snorted. “Do you always have to talk in riddles?”
“Only when the riddle is more accurate than the straight answer.”
“Okay. Forget we even had this conversation. Just help me get this gauze taped up.” God bless her, I loved Esme, but she was a handful I just didn’t have the patience for today.
Vee popped back in the room, wagging her eyebrows. “I just googled him.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be making waffles?” Esme reminded her, securing my gauze and helping me back into the boot.
She tossed her hand, looking exactly like Mom. “Nah, Mom’s handling it. So get this. Wyatt’s dad died two years ago from a sudden heart attack. Wouldn’t that be right around the time Wyatt became a deputy?”
I bit my lip as my eyes burned again just hearing his name. “He told me about his dad dying, but what does that have to do with anything?”
Vee and Esme looked at each other. I felt like I was missing something.
“Maybe he changed his name to avoid the spotlight,” Vee said softly.
“Maybe he moved here to start a new life,” Esme whispered back.
“Maybe he came here under false pretenses and couldn’t even trust me enough to tell me the truth,” I said loudly.
Both of their heads swung toward me, looking guilty.
“Oh, Oakley!” Amelia’s singsong voice hit our ears right before she sashayed back into the bedroom, not looking even a tiny bit sick.
She smiled, and I shivered, envisioning devil horns on top of her head.
“Come see my artwork.”
We all filed out of my room, the girls having to slow down to accommodate my awkward limping. Amelia waited until I’d joined her in the living room, swinging the curtain away from the window dramatically. My gaze zeroed in on Wyatt’s black truck parked in the driveway next door.
In pink block letters on the side were the words Big Truck, Little Willy.
I gasped. “Oh, my.”
“Oh, yes,” Amelia echoed back.
“Please tell me that’s not spray paint,” Mom said, her voice carrying the weight of thirty years of dealing with Amelia’s high jinks. Her question was valid. Amelia had been known to tag things around town before.
Amelia shrugged, the smug smile tugging a matching smile on my own face. “Nah, I promised Titus I wouldn’t do that anymore. It’s just chalk paint. Pretty sure some soap and water will take care of it.”
“Pretty sure?” Mom asked.
Amelia shrugged. “Who’s ready for waffles?”
26
Wyatt
“What the hell happened yesterday?” Emmeline kicked the bedroom door open with her foot, waking me abruptly from the worst night of sleep I’d ever had. I kept dreaming about being in the middle of a barn, bullets flying left and right while Oakley screamed for help. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to get to her.
I shot up in bed, just barely keeping myself covered when my first instinct was to grab my gun and deal with an intruder. Em stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips, her gaze flickering over me. I instantly regretted giving her a key to my house.
“Are you hurt?”
I shook my head and blinked the sleep from my eyes. “What? No. I’m fine.”
I almost snorted at the irony. Fine was definitely not how I was doing. More like “gutted” or “drowning in despair” if I wanted to be
