Finding Awesome by Edie Ramer

Author:Edie Ramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edie Ramer
Published: 2014-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

“Was that your boyfriend?” He watched her steadily. The comment about her dad being proud of the person pointed to a relative, but he liked to be sure of things.

“My sister.” She looked back at him as steadily as he looked at her.

“Your foster sister,” he said.

“The sister of my heart.”

He nodded. That was the kind of thing she said that he never would.

“Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes. You lived together for years with your two foster sisters and formed a sisterly bond.”

“Close enough.” She remained standing on the other side of the doorway, not inviting him in.

“Hailey’s in bed.” When she didn’t reply, her expression unchanging, he swallowed. “I talked to her tonight. She… I…” He frowned and looked down. Tonight, she wore blue slippers decorated with sparkling beads.

“What did Hailey say?” she asked.

He brought his gaze up again. Maybe he could talk more smoothly if he turned his back to her. But he could see that would be bizarre.

“I’m afraid I failed her.” He heard the way the words came out of his mouth. Stiff and matter-of-fact. That didn’t match the way he felt inside, as if his gut was being squeezed by a giant, clenched fist. “I’m afraid I’ve lost her affection.”

“Why do you think that?”

His throat was dry, and he swallowed. “I understand that we mimic our parents. Both of mine were university professors in college. They were…intellectual. As a child, I was partially raised by a series of nannies. Almost all of them were college students who spent most of the time on their schoolwork or talking to their friends on the phone. My parents treated me like a small adult. Though they didn’t show affection, there was never anger or dislike. It was just…”

“Dispassionate?” she asked. “Unemotional?”

He nodded, relieved that he didn’t need to say more.

“Should we discuss this somewhere else?” she asked.

Yes, he wanted to say. In your bedroom.

But he was here for Hailey. Bronte, with her empathy and her ability to understand emotions, would be able to advise him.

“The hallway is fine.”

She raised one eyebrow. It took seconds to dawn on him that he needed to say more. That she hadn’t read his mind.

“As I got older,” he continued, hearing the stiffness of his voice, “I realized that I lacked the capacity of emotion. However, I thought that I could still live a satisfactory life without it. I met Alexis at the university. Her father was the chief surgeon at the Eagleton hospital. She was accustomed to him working long hours, and her mother was one of the social leaders of the city.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Social leaders?”

“That’s what Alexis called her. Her mother did a lot of charity work and helped to arrange balls.”

“Interesting. Go on.”

“Alexis seemed to be set on recreating her mother’s life, which was the reason I moved here.”

“Where are her parents now?”

“Her father retired, and they travel a lot. They live in the Palm Springs area, on a golf course.”

She nodded.

“When she was dying, they only came back to visit a few times, and they never stayed long.

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.