Page 108 of Rook

“She’s been blaming the guy who beat her husband for bringing his dirty laundry out into the light instead of blaming her husband for getting them all stained in the first place.”

“Do you really think she will tell the assistant?”

“I don’t know. But it got her off our asses about the ‘accident’ and me visiting your mom. So this was a win-win, regardless of whether she does anything about it.”

“True,” I agreed, reaching for her hips and pulling her close. “I think we should celebrate. Naked. For about two hours.”

“Why two hours?”

“Because that’s when Detroit should be done making dinner.”

Her smile was huge.

“Two hours it is, then,” she said, taking my hand and pulling me to the bed.

Tessa - 4 months

“I wish Rook were here,” Lorna said from the passenger side of my new car.

I mean, it wasn’t mine on paper. Yet. Since we didn’t want to give Nancy any reason to think money was coming in that didn’t come to us in a legitimate way.

To be fair, she wasn’t as awful as usual.

As much as I’d like to think that there was some correlation to telling her that her ex was screwing around again, I was pretty sure it was simply because Rook was coming to the last six months of his parole. And she’d never been able to pin anything on him. Not even some small infraction.

She was probably focusing on newer releases whom she could really dig her heels in with and terrorize.

I felt bad for those men, but I was glad for us that we weren’t constantly subjected to endless searches and scrutiny.

I often comforted myself when she was being her usual nasty self with the fact that—despite her tyrannical ways—she truly had the wool over her eyes.

Because not only was Rook using a computer whenever he wanted, but he was a damn outlaw gun-running biker.

And now, so long as we continued to be careful, Rook would be completely free in the new year.

But today, it was about his mother’s freedom.

The doctors had been fiddling with her meds little by little for the past few months until, finally, she was not only out of psychosis and mania, and no longer rapid-cycling, but up, participating in therapy and classes, keeping up her appearance, and asking when she would be able to leave.

While she had some gaps in her memory from the periods when she was in psychosis or delusion, and even some fuzzy bits when she was horribly overmedicated, she was aware of the passing of time, about how her life as she knew it before was gone. She was going to need to rebuild.

She was excited, if a bit nervous, about it.

I think the same could be said about Rook and me.

We wanted Lorna free and rebuilding her life. But we were a bit scared of there not being someone to keep an eye on her all the time.

We, and the club, would be doing everything we could to be there daily, checking in, making sure she was taking her meds—that would be distributed via a handy machine we’d found online—eating, drinking, bathing, and participating in a little socializing.

Temporarily, we had her in a rental duplex next to an older lady who said she would be happy to report back to us if she saw anything strange going on.

We figured you couldn’t get better intel than that from a nosy neighbor. And a duplex meant Lorna would get her own little backyard to decorate, work on a garden, and feed the birds.

The hope was to eventually be able to get our own house that either had a little in-law quarters or maybe even a small guest house.

This was a stepping stone in that direction.

“I know you do,” I said, giving Lorna a small smile. It was killing me not to tell her that she was about to see her son for the first time in years.

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