Page 6 of Creatures in the Night

“It seems like a waste of time since it’s not a celebration,” I stated. “Plus, you didn’t have one.”

“Keavy has no family,” he reminded me. “It didn’t make sense to have a big wedding or to wait.” Declan shrugged. “She’s also not a girly-girl or cares about that kind of crap.”

I thought about it some, then said, “When I finally meet her, I’ll ask her what she wants to do, then go from there.”

“Just remember, once she’s yours, no more blondes,” he replied, testing me.

“Yeah, thanks fer da reminder, arsehole,” I returned.

Chapter 4

Shea~

Though I loved my parents, they knew that the day before my three-day stretch was a very important day for me. It was the one day a week that I took for myself, no chores, no bills, no errands, no anything. With working twelve-hour shifts, there was very rarely time to do anything more than just go home, eat, shower, then go to bed. My parents knew this, so they usually respected that I used this day to prepare myself for the chaos that would ensue during the next three days, but they had still insisted that I come over this afternoon, which a part of me understood since the shop was only closed on Sundays.

Still…

Having grown up in this house, I knocked once before letting myself in, trusting that my parents were too old to be getting it on in the living room. They were in their sixties, and while I was very aware that people in their sixties still had sex, I just couldn’t imagine it happening anywhere outside their bedroom as was respectable.

“Mom? Dad?” I called out as I walked in, not seeing either of them in the living room.

Since my parents’ house was a modest one, there were only a few places that they could be. The kitchen was my next guess because the temperatures had been dropping lately, so I couldn’t see them out in the back. Winters in Maryland were no joke, and brisk was a relative term in the northeast.

“Shea,” Mom called back. “In here, honey.”

I walked into the kitchen to see my mom and dad sitting at the table, and whoever didn’t believe in vibes was wrong. Anxiousness was rolling off my parents in waves, and my stomach immediately dipped with what this could be. I should have read between the lines when they had insisted on me coming over, but I’d been too wrapped up in my own life that I hadn’t even bothered to consider that something serious might be going on.

I sat down, not interested in pussyfooting around. “What is it?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

Confirming my suspicions, my parents shared a look before my father said, “We’ve gotten ourselves in a bit of a…bind,” he answered.

“What kind of bind?” I asked, my hands clasping together on the table.

“A financial one,” he confessed.

Okay, that wasn’t so bad. Between my job, my parents’ shop, our combined good credit, there was no reason that we couldn’t secure a loan to help get them back on their feet. While I had a few distant aunts and uncles on my dad’s side, we wouldn’t bother them until and unless we had to. My mother was an only child, and even though my grandparents were still alive and well, they were living off social security, so they weren’t an option.

I shook my head, knowing that I was getting ahead of myself. “Okay,” I said. “That’s okay…it happens to lots of people.” I looked between my parents. “How much are we talking about?”

“Almost two-million dollars,” my dad answered evenly, making my heart drop to my knees.

“Wha…what?” I looked over at my mother, and she looked like she was about to burst into tears at any moment. “Two…two-million dollars?”

My dad nodded. “I…I thought I…”

“Oh, no,” I said ungraciously. “You don’t get to tell me that you’re in debt for that kind of money and not tell me why, Dad.”

“I got scammed, alright?” he finally admitted. “I got approached by a long-time church acquaintance, and he sold me on an investment scheme that turned out to be a scam.”

I quickly started doing all the math in my head, and even if you took the shop and everything that we all owned, it still wouldn’t come out to that amount of money free and clear. While my parents owned their shop, they didn’t own the building. It was leased, and there were still six more years left on the lease that I knew of.

I let out a shaky breath. “Okay, we…we can make an appointment with the bank and-”

“It’s too late for that,” Mom sobbed quietly.

“What?”

“We already went to the bank last year-”

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