Page 72 of Forced Proximity
He fed her dessert. He used to do that with me!
Daniella:
I left early so I could slip into their hotel room and put in a camera. The lady at the front desk didn’t even question me when I said that I’d lost my key. Thank God for shift change.
Daniella:
I’m watching them right now. They’re talking about what they’re going to do. I think they might be breaking up.
“Okay, so here’s your options.” The funeral director turned the pages around to show us. “You can have a basic funeral. This is all that’s included. Cremation is this, and burial is this.”
I tucked my phone away, silencing it and shoving it under my thigh.
I couldn’t deal with her and her baggage right now.
The next several hours, as Silver and I planned two funerals, I was one hundred percent focused on what I was doing. We talked about how a military funeral would go. We talked about the special people that came to take care of the flag, and watch over the casket. We talked about so much stuff that my head felt stuffy.
One thing we did know, however, was that we would be cremating both of them.
The damage to both of their bodies was too great.
I hoped that was the right decision.
“I don’t think they’d be able to help themselves,” Silver admitted after the guy left to go make copies of the paperwork. “They’d have to look. Just one more time. And no one needs to see that.”
She was right.
I wished I could take back what I’d seen.
To see someone so vibrant and sparkling with life dead on a slab missing that vital piece of them that made them, them? It wasn’t something I enjoyed. Especially when they were closely connected to a man that I was quickly spiraling deeper and deeper in something with.
I wouldn’t call it love yet, but it was close.
Or maybe I just didn’t know what love was like to know that it was love.
Whatever these feelings were, they were all-consuming, and I felt like my heart was literally bursting with it.
“Elaine was really bad,” I admitted, haunted by the sight of a once beautiful woman so full of life dead on a cold slab in the morgue, literally torn in half.
Fifteen weeks pregnant.
“I don’t think I’ve said thank you yet, but thank you,” she murmured.
My eyes came up to meet hers, and I smiled, though it didn’t reach my eyes. “Anyone would do it.”
“No, not anyone,” she disagreed. “You’ve been sort of thrust into our lives at the worst possible time, and I’m thankful it was you.”
“Well, maybe the better answer would’ve been ‘anyone should.’”
“You might be right,” she murmured, her eyes studying me. “He likes you. A lot.”
I huffed out a small laugh. “Nothing like a little bit of forced proximity to make the heart grow fonder.”
She shook her head. “That’s not it. Finnian’s a different breed of person. Always on the go. Never happy with settling. If he doesn’t like something, he changes it. It doesn’t matter how. He does it. No matter what it takes. And I’ve seen him with no women since I came into Webber’s life. Zero. None. Not at a club party. Not at an event—and he went to a lot of those when he was campaigning. Not a single woman has ever been on his arm since I arrived. No one but you.”
That made me feel all warm and tingly inside.
But just because she hadn’t seen them, didn’t mean there were none.
