“It was Ellie’s first movie.” Grabbing the phone out of my hand, he tells Carly, “Look, if we absolutely must compare this situation to a kid’s movie, I’m not the calculating dickhead she fucked up with, I’m the one with the reindeer who talked some sense into her. This is not a sham. I am in love with your sister. And Laurel is an adult, so she doesn’t need your permission; she can make her own decisions. Now, I’ve had a long day and I don’t have the patience for this tonight. Goodbye, Carly.”
Then he ends the call.
I gape at the phone in horror. “What have you done?”
“I fixed it,” he tells me, handing Rafe back his
phone.
“You just hung up on my sister,” I say, still staring at the phone, expecting her to burst through it and punch Sin in the face.
“She was being a pain in the ass,” he reasons.
“Oh, my God,” I mutter, drawing my own phone out of my back pocket so I can text her with further explanations. “Do you think I can convince her the call dropped?”
“Definitely not,” Rafe says, barely holding back laughter. “I’m gonna go grab this asshole a shirt.”
50
Sin
By the time we get home, I’m beat. Then we walk up to my front door and all my worst fears attack at the sight of my door. The wood is busted open. Looks like someone took an axe to it, trying to get inside. I have bulletproof windows and metal bars on some of them, too, in the rooms I wanted to work as panic rooms. Upon realizing that, someone must have figured the door would be easier to get through.
Would be, except I already accounted for that and I ordered a steel reinforced front door. So while the wood is split open and the steel exposed, the door is still standing and my house is still secure.
That’s good to know. Never tested it out before. It was too little too late anyway. After Paula and Ellie were killed, I didn’t have anything worth protecting, but it became an obsession. I needed to make sure it couldn’t happen again, even though making the house safe a few months too late did nothing to save them. It was better than drinking myself stupid every night and praying to a God I don’t believe in not to make me wake up the next day.
I drop the folded up bassinet and diaper bag I carried to the front door, take the car seat out of Laurel’s hand, and just grab her, pulling her close. She wraps her arms around me, hugging me back as tightly as I’m hugging her.
“Someone tried to break into the house,” she says, sounding a little stunned.
I can’t fucking believe Gio actually stooped that low. I wish I could kill the bastard all over again—I’d do it slower this time.
“Yeah, but they couldn’t get in,” I point out. “I’m still glad you left. That would have been terrifying.”
“Holy shit,” she mutters, still looking at the door, even as she hugs me. “They came to kill me?”
“I would never let that happen,” I assure her.
“But… they tried.”
She’s stunned. I guess this is the first time she knows anyone has ever tried to kill her, so that’s bound to be a little upsetting. I release her, digging the key out of my pocket. “Let’s get inside.”
She nods, looking around warily. It must scare her right now, all the shadows and darkness, spots in the yards where people could be hiding. Now that I know my house is as secure as I hoped it was, I feel a lot better, but I doubt she does.
Once we’re inside, I lock up and set the alarm. I hit the lights since Laurel is still skittish. I glance down at Skylar to see if the sudden brightness caused her to stir, but she’s out. After Laurel fed her and burped her, Skylar fell asleep in the car on the way home. It felt like the ride was a million hours long. When I left Gio’s, I only grabbed the diaper bag, the blanket out of her crib so she’d have something familiar to sleep with, and this rectangular bassinet contraption he brought the night Laurel babysat. There wasn’t enough formula to last tomorrow in the diaper bag, so I stopped at a drug store on the way home for that and diapers. Been a long damn time since I’ve had to go down that aisle.
I’m drained, but Laurel turns and smiles at me, and I feel a little better.
“Do you need help setting that thing up?” she whispers, pointing at the portable baby furniture I’m lugging with me.
“Nope, I’ve done it before.”
Laurel puts Skylar’s carrier down in the living room and kneels on the ground beside her, rooting through the diaper bag to see what we actually have for this baby. I put down the bag from the drug store and proceed upstairs to the bedroom next to mine—Ellie’s old bedroom. I always kept the door closed and I told Laurel not to snoop the day I left her home uncuffed. Maybe she listened, or maybe Rafe just got here before she got around to it. If she had seen it, she probably would have had questions. When I bought the house, the walls were white like all the rest, but Paula fell in love with elephants when she was pregnant. I painted the walls in this room a pale pink and gray, and in the corner where Ellie’s toy box used to be, there’s a cartoon elephant decal on the wall. I packed up all her stuff, but I never took that down. Occasionally I would drink a lot, lie down on the floor in this room, and just stare at that elephant to make myself hurt.
A ball of grief remains nestled in my gut as I stand in this empty room, but I shake it off and get to work assembling the playpen so we can put Skylar to bed.
I hear noise and glance back just as Laurel steps inside the room. She’s carrying the pink blanket I brought with Skylar, her eyes drifting around. She takes in the color on the walls, the elephant decal in the corner.