Rush_Hector & Millie by Marianne Knightly

Author:Marianne Knightly
Language: eng
Format: epub

A hand brushed Millie’s battered cheek.

“Almost there, baby. Time to wake up.”

Hector’s low voice filtered through her senses, pulling her from a restful sleep. She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep in the car, what with her ribs hurting and her head hurting, and, well, everything basically one giant ache.

Yet, the lull of the road and Hector’s calm, steady presence meant she’d just done just that.

Her eyes blinked open. She’d never sat as a passenger in her own car, and it was weird to find herself in it. A good weird, but weird nonetheless. She watched Hector in the driver’s seat, completely in control in the cramped space. He’d arranged to have the Captain’s car picked up and returned, so that he could drive them back in her car. The Captain’s car was probably much nicer, but she was glad to have her car with her.

“How are your legs?”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “Good. How are you doing?”

She tried adjusting in the seat but winced and gave up. “Okay.”

He glanced at her, then back at the road. His lips thinned. “You’re not okay. Are you sure you want to see your mother right now?”

She nodded and plucked at the slightly stiff and new, but comfortable, scrubs she was wearing. The rest of her clothes—the nice clothes she’d saved for and kept for jewelry shows—were destroyed in the attack, and her best pair of jeans had been cut open by the hospital staff when she’d arrived.

If her mother knew who she was, she might’ve gone home first to change. Clothes would never make her mother remember her. Her own face never made her mother remember her. They’d tried a number of things over the years, but nothing jogged her memory.

It was just…gone.

And so was she, except for her body.

“I’d rather see her now. I’ll be okay.”

“You deserve more than just ‘okay’, Amelia.”

She had that warm, fuzzy feeling inside her again at his words.

“How long’s she been in there?”

She cleared her throat and stared at the scenery around them, the city looming closer in the distance, the gray skies growing darker and more restless for a storm. “Several years now.”

He gave her a puzzled glance, then went back to the road. “She came by after that graduation scene?”

“Sort of. She was in a car accident, and I was apparently listed as next of kin.” Even now she had a hard time believing that the mother who didn’t want her had still claimed Millie as her child, even for emergency purposes.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Anyway, the hospital called me when she was admitted. Apparently, her dementia had progressed a lot by then, but she lived alone, didn’t work, lived off some kind of government benefits she’d managed to get, and didn’t interact with a lot of people on a regular basis, so no one noticed. I knew I couldn’t take care of her, so we had to place her in a nursing home.”

As if timed perfectly to their conversation, they pulled up to the large, white, stone house on the edge of Masillia.

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.