Crashed (New South Romance) by M.K. Chester

Author:M.K. Chester
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, contemporary romance, corporate romance
Publisher: LBD Media Co
Published: 2018-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Ella sat on her balcony with a glass of white wine, watching the sun set behind a bank of layered clouds. A chill stole into the evening breeze, the kind that usually made her sleep like a rock when she left the window cracked. All in all, a lovely end to a very long, hopeful day.

Made even longer by the call from Storage Kings. Did she know her father had a storage locker there? Would she mind swinging by to pay the balance? Sure, no problem, she had time to get sidetracked by one more distraction not connected to bringing Sling back to life.

Thankfully, he had only two boxes in storage, so she paid the clerk and took them home at once.

She gave the pair of boxes the side-eye, sitting inside the bedroom, taunting her with their ragged, old secrets. The thought of opening them exhausted her, yet her fingers itched to tear into the cardboard and see what her father found valuable enough to keep separate from his other belongings.

Things he never hoped she’d see.

Finding courage at the bottom of her wine glass, she pulled the first box between her feet and tore the packing tape from the seam. Crumpled newspaper filled a few inches at the top of the box. She tossed the filler aside.

“Oh, no,” she gasped, reaching inside the box. Framed family photos, some of which she remembered, sat stacked one atop the next. “I thought these were gone forever.”

Loose glass jangled as she sorted through them, coming upon a few photos she’d never seen before. A formal wedding photo of her father and mother. A picture of that stranger cradling a small child, a tired smile on her face.

Her father had boxed these up before Ella could remember ever seeing them. He said once he found them too painful to keep in plain sight on a daily basis.

“I couldn’t have been more than a couple months old,” she whispered, touching her own image in the dust-covered frame. Her heart turned over in her chest. There had been times in her life when she’d missed having a mother, which was not to say she missed her mother, the woman, who she’d never known.

Now, looking into the face of the person who’d given her life, she felt a great void and allowed herself to swim in the nothingness. Tears threatened to overwhelm her. She didn’t even know if this woman was dead or alive.

From all she knew about Blanca Moscarro, she was likely not the best mother material. Rarely, during the course of her life, had Ella yearned for that motherly figure. Special days, like birthdays and holidays, shopping for a prom dress, gave her pause on a semi-regular basis. But she’d pushed the need away, buried the loss, much as her father had, and those blank moments became almost normal.

Looking at these missing memories, she truly ached in her bones for what she’d never had for the first time in forever.

Other photos followed, until she reached about age two.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.