Page 1 of Family Bonds- Garrett & Justine

PROLOGUE

“Justine, when you get a minute, can you come to my office?”

Justine Keller turned to her boss, Joyce Conroy, who had walked behind the counter. “Sure,” Justine said. “I’ve got a backlog here.” She looked at her computer. “Maybe an hour.”

“I’ll be in my office,” Joyce said, nodding minus a smile, and walked away without another word.

Justine let out a sigh. She’d been working in the hospital pharmacy in Boston for three months after she relocated from Indiana.

A life change was what she needed to get away from the mess happening back home.

She thought she was strong enough to handle it all, but in order to do that, she needed her father.

He was gone.

Without him, her escape plan had been to run and hide.

Avoidance was something she excelled at.

And by the tone of her boss’s voice, she was formulating where she could seek shelter.

Not that she thought she’d done anything wrong or made a mistake, but she’d love nothing more than to do her job, be left alone to grieve in silence, and try to coexist.

Didn’t look like that might happen today.

As much as she wanted to drag her feet filling these orders, she also knew it was best to get this over with.

Forty-five minutes later, she said to another pharmacist at the other end of the room, “I’m going to see what Joyce wants. I hope to be back in about five minutes.”

Tim laughed. “Good luck.”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

She hadn’t been here long enough to catch onto anyone’s jokes or serious banter. She’d never been that great at picking out the difference either.

“Nothing,” Tim said. “Could be five minutes, could be fifty minutes. Depends on Joyce’s agenda is all. That’s why I said good luck. The no smile on her face could mean anything. I picture you as a get-in-and-get-out type of person.”

Just great. Nothing like making her more nervous.

“That’s me,” she said, leaving the pharmacy and making her way through the hospital and down the hall to where her boss’s office was.

She knocked on the open door.

“Come in, Justine,” Joyce said, stone-faced yet again. “Close the door.”

Crap. She was just getting settled here and, though money wasn’t an issue and she knew she could find another job easily, she didn’t want to have to eventhinkof those things.

“You wanted to see me,” she said as pleasantly as she could.

“Have a seat,” Joyce said, her hand gesturing toward the chair that looked decades old.

She forced her tiny size six feet to move across the cheap carpet in her boss’s office to the black fake leather chair in front of the desk and placed her butt down to the crinkling noise of the material and held back the gulp over the news she was going to hear.

She’d never been much of a nervous person, but with everything that had happened in the past three months of her life, she felt as if every phone call, every conversation, and even every look was going to drop piles of stinky poop on her head.

“Lay it on me,” she said, trying to force some bravado. Her father would be proud to see it. If he were even around to do that.

Don’t cry,she internally told herself.Suck it up!

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