Page 116 of Lady Luck

She shuffled off my lap, keeping hold of her towel as she stood up, then reached over and grabbed a pair of leggings from her bag. I got up and offered her one of my shirts, which she took with a grateful smile.

I followed her to the bathroom doorway. “Bree?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you really tell AJ to shove the contract up his ass?”

Her smile was a small but welcome sight. “I did.”

“Bold move. You know what they say?”

She looked at me curiously. “What?”

“Fortune favors the bold.”

She threw her towel at me and shut the door.

I returned to the main cabin to search the fridge for something to make for Bree to eat. Figuring I couldn’t go wrong with breakfast food, I put on a pot of coffee and got out my new waffle maker. I’d left Ari’s early, around 10:30 a.m., wanting to be available whenever Bree was done at Fortuna.

I sat at the booth and opened my laptop to check on some emails for work, but I couldn’t focus, too busy worrying about Bree as the sound of her sobs rang in my memory.

She eventually joined me, sliding quietly into the booth beside me. She rested her head on my shoulder, a waft of her orange-and-vanilla-scented soap reaching my nose as I finished typing a message for work—the same one I’d been working on since I opened the laptop twenty minutes ago.

“You can keep working if you want. I don’t mind. It’s kind of soothing to watch you type.”

I closed my laptop and maneuvered my arm around her shoulders, smiling when she put her head right back on my shoulder. “Nothing was pressing. How’re you feeling?”

She took a deep breath. “Better. It’s almost like I just went through a series of bad breakups?” She phrased it like a question. “Logically, I know it’s all for the best. I just wish I could fast-forward several days so I could get some distance from it. It’s strange that so much happened in the span of like, an hour, but I still have to fill my time for the rest of the day. And….” She swallowed thickly. “I have a bad feeling it isn’t over.”

“With Fortuna or your grandmother?”

Her hands fidgeted in her lap. “Mr. Dez didn’t seem to think they’ll try to enforce the contract, but how can we know for sure? Do I just keep living my life in the same zip code as Fortuna and hope they don’t bother me? Will I always feel like I’m out on parole? And my grandmother…. She was the only family I had, but it’s the same for her. I’m her only family, and I left her. How must she be feeling right now?”

I dropped a kiss to the top of her head, in awe of her capacity for kindness and love. “What’s the biggest question weighing on you right now?”

“If she lied about anything else.”

I tapped my fingers on the countertop. “Your dad?”

“She paid off AJ to leave me. What if that wasn’t the first time that she did something like that?”

“You think she might have paid your dad to leave?”

She didn’t answer for several moments. “In my darkest of doomsday thoughts… yeah, I do. But that’s even worse than him leaving on his own, isn’t it?”

I paused, giving such a heavy question the proper consideration. “Probably not. But it might inform future decisions regarding your grandmother.”

“That was precise language.”

I shrugged. “Therapy.”

Bree situated her body so she was facing me and threw one of her legs over mine. “How long have you done therapy?”

“On and off for ten years. It was recommended after the fire. At first, I blew it off after a few sessions. I wasn’t really dealing at all with what happened, just compartmentalizing. I still do, to a degree. I was mostly struggling with the pressure of my family’s worrying and wanted to learn ways to cope better. It’s a big part of the reason I took a tech job in another city within the first year of the accident. I needed space from it all.”

I only hesitated a moment before sharing the next part.

“I got back in touch with my therapist recently. With you possibly working at Ari’s more, I thought it was time for me to find a way to deal with that. Preferably without panic attacks.”

---