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Lee waited for Charli to extend an invitation to one of the family gatherings they had, but surprisingly, she didn’t. Since he’d been living at Charli’s, they’d had regular get-togethers on Friday nights, and often on Sunday afternoons, if the weather was nice, they went to the park for a picnic and volleyball.

He was actually kind of disappointed that Charli didn’t issue the invitation. Something told him that Rori hadn’t made a lot of friends in Serenity yet.

Unfortunately, he didn’t think the invitation should come from him. Much better if it came from one of the ladies in the family. Alys seemed to like Rori and was closer to her in age than Charli, so perhaps she’d include her in some of her social events.

“Well, I’m going to go check on the girls,” Charli said. “It was nice to meet you, Rori.”

“It was nice to meet you too.” Rori waited until Charli had gone through the door to the shelter, then sank down on her seat. She glanced up at Lee. “Your sister seems sweet.”

“She is,” Lee agreed.

“And you live with her?”

“Years ago, she and Janessa, one of our other sisters, bought a house together. I think it must have been a bed-and-breakfast at one point because it’s big and has a lot of bedrooms. Charli invited me to live there with them until I found a place of my own. So far, I’m in no rush to move since it’s been great staying with all of them.”

“How many people live there?” Rori asked.

“At the moment, it’s Charli, her husband, Blake, and their three kids, as well as my other sister, Janessa, and her husband, Will. So eight of us in total.”

Rori’s eyes widened. “That’s a lot of people in one house.”

“I grew up with twelve of us in the home, so I’m used to it.”

For a moment, his thoughts turned to his biological family, and he wondered if he had brothers and sisters.

“I may have a lot of siblings, but I’ve never lived with all of them at the same time.”

Lee wanted to ask her for more information about her life, but during their workday probably wasn’t the best place to do that.

When the clinic phone rang, he said, “I’m going to see how Charli and the girls are doing.”

Rori gave him a nod, then turned her attention to the phone. Lee watched her for a moment, then headed for the shelter, torn between hoping his sister wouldn’t try to match him and Rori, and hoping she would.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Rori pressed down on the lid of the container, making sure it had sealed, then stacked it with the others. Turning, she opened the freezer and carefully put all but two of the containers into the basically empty space.

She’d learned awhile ago that as a single person who lived on her own, it was often easier to spend time on the weekend cooking her meals for the week rather than cooking each day. It also gave her something to do on the weekends when her two days off stretched long and lonely in front of her.

Why the loneliness was hitting her so hard since her move, Rori didn’t know.

It wasn’t like she’d had a busy life in Denver. She’d done almost no socializing outside of work, except for joining her co-workers for dinner every couple of months. Otherwise, she’d kept to herself, filling her days with walks, where she greeted the few people she was acquainted with her in her neighborhood, photography, and reading.

It was basically the same in Serenity, minus the neighborhood acquaintances, so she shouldn’t be struggling like she was.

Putting the two remaining containers in the fridge for that night and the next night’s dinners, Rori turned her attention to cleaning up the small kitchen.

The obvious answer to her struggle was to stay busy, but there was only so much to do in her apartment, since cleaning and laundry took hardly any time at all. She’d already gone for a walk earlier.

She still didn’t have any furniture aside from the air mattress she was using to sleep on, since she was trying to replenish her savings after the expenses of being unemployed and the move.

Everything over the past couple of months had shown her how precarious her life was financially. When these big changes came, she was on her own to weather the impact of them. It was only because of her previous bosses’ generosity with the severance pay they’d given her that she’d been able to make the move to Serenity.

If this job didn’t last, she doubted she’d get any sort of severance pay from the clinic. Because of that, she needed to keep her expenditures minimal while she bulked up her savings account.

Thankfully, she had no problem with her minimalist lifestyle. She had the most important things paid for already. Her car. Her laptop. Her camera and lenses. Everything else was just gravy.

But still… something was weighing her heart down and leaving her emotions way too close to the surface.

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