St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets by Annie England Noblin

Author:Annie England Noblin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-10-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

SHERBET WAS ON THE PORCH WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE house. He was lying in front of the door, cleaning himself, as I stuck my key in the lock. When I opened the door, he shot inside.

When I hesitated at the threshold, the cat looked at me as if to say, “Well?”

I stepped inside, and he jumped up onto the couch and resumed his cleaning.

It had been an interesting day in Timber Creek, that was for sure. I supposed sitting on a ragged couch with a strange cat was the least of it, so, after taking a quick shower, I changed into my old, ratty sweatpants and a city-league softball shirt I’d stolen from Eli and plopped down onto the couch, but I couldn’t get my mind off Abel, which annoyed me.

To keep myself from overanalyzing everything, I scrolled through my phone, logging into various social media networks to see what I’d missed, to keep myself from dwelling on a man other women told me to stay away from and of whom my own heart told me to be wary.

Besides my family, the only people I’d really been close with were Holly and Christine. I’d always kept to myself, preferring to stay in rather than go out, a piece of my personality that my mother was forever lamenting. Judging from the worn spot on the couch where I sat, Annabelle had been like that too.

As I scrolled past the posts of people I didn’t really care to interact with, I stopped on a picture of Eli’s on Instagram. It was of his new bookshelf, which took up an entire wall of his study. He’d had it built-in, and he had one of those ladders that I’d seen only in the Beast’s library in Beauty and the Beast. He and Kate stood next to it, grinning proudly. “Finally finished!” the caption read. I enlarged the picture to get a better look at the books just behind them on the top shelf. All of my brother’s books were in alphabetical order, which meant that Abel Abbott wrote the very first books on the bookshelf. I’d never read them, but I knew the titles well. They were Eli’s favorites.

It occurred to me that I should probably have told Eli about Abel the last time we talked. He probably would have been more excited about packing up my clothes and bringing them to me. As it was, he was less than thrilled about the eight-hour round-trip, and he’d told me as much. He didn’t get many days off, because he often volunteered at the low-cost clinic downtown. I made a mental note to tell him the next time we talked.

He’d agreed only because he was worried about me, and I felt bad for taking advantage of that fact. I was fine, I guessed, for the most part. Still, he knew what it was like to lose a birth mother. Eli encouraged me, the summer I was sixteen, to reach out to Annabelle, and I don’t think he’d ever quite forgiven himself.

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