Staying Broken by Hazel Lane

Author:Hazel Lane [Lane, Hazel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

AVERY

I rolled my eyes at my sister's fourteenth text message to me that morning. I had sent her another thank you text message, only to be bombarded by ridiculous gifs of everything from strange-looking men winking at me to animals with heart eyes. I knew that I was going to get that kind of flack for telling my sister I was going on a date, but I thought that the best avenue for asking her to watch Chris was honesty in that situation. Had I been in front of her, I wouldn't have been able to finish the sentence without her saying yes.

She didn't care whether I was married or not. But it was incredibly important to my sister that I was happy. She was really happy with her husband, so that was the area of life that she focused on. She was dead set on making sure that I had a partner in life, and it didn't matter what it disrupted for her in the meantime.

I put the phone on the table and continued scrolling on the computer in my office. I was putting far too much thought into what restaurant we should go to. There were a thousand restaurants in Chicago, and I was pretty sure whether I took Kendra to a fine dining restaurant or a diner, we would have a good time. But there was this urge in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to spoil her. I didn't want to overdo it and drive her away, but I wanted to give her things. It wasn't about impressing her. It was about seeing the look on her face like I saw the day before when I showed up at her school with the picnic. A little bit of distraction from the stress of our lives, and the happiness that I enjoyed seeing on her face.

It wasn't a foreign feeling to me; it just wasn't one that I had felt since I met my ex-wife many years before. It was a feeling I never thought that I would have for anyone else. I didn't know what that meant. I fought it, don't get me wrong, but it was still there.

Finally, I settled on a really nice Italian bistro that I had been to several times with the chief of medicine and some of the other people in the upper echelons of the hospital. I knew that all the tables were spread pretty far apart, with lit candles, and it was fancy enough to feel intimate and nice, but not so fancy that we would need tuxedos and ball gowns. As I texted Kendra the name of the restaurant and pasted the link into the text so that she could see where we were going, and what kind of clothes she needed to wear, there was a knock on my open door.

I looked up to find Brodie standing there, which was a surprise considering he didn't work in the hospital. I finished the text really quickly and put down my phone, walking around the desk to give him a hug.

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