Page 24 of Fragile Love (Fragile 3)
“Not really.” The words came out before she could stop them. “Cayden was really thinking hard about something all night last night.”
“He was kind of out of it today, too.”
“I know. He hasn’t talked about it yet. I do know his clients are bugging him a lot. I’m pretty sure they all want him to find replacements. Their standards seem to be pretty high.”
“You’re an expert on Cayden’s line of work, aren’t you?” Andrew winked.
Lillian flexed her arm. “Totally.”
“Speaking from experience, it isn’t fun to move around for work so often. I used to commute an hour twice a week to another factory.” Putting the book back in its place, he leaned back in the chair. “Did that for about six months. It was brutal. I can’t imagine having to fly back and forth every few days.”
She nodded. “That’s largely why I haven’t officially accepted any more work over there. I don’t know how I feel about going so much.”
“Could you go, do your job, and then come back, or would it be more of a Cayden situation where you go help a client on and off for a while?”
“I think I would make it where I would get the work done all in one go.” Lillian hummed, thinking. “I don’t really know. This whole Los Angeles thing was awesome, and I’m glad I went, but I don’t know about the future.”
“Well, it’ll happen how it’s supposed to happen.”
Quietly, Lillian asked with a sad smile, “What would Amelia do?”
“Wear that horribly awful trench coat and make sure she scared away any more clients.”
Lillian let out another laugh, but quickly choked on it. A tear squeezed out of the corner of her eye. “I kind of wish I had that coat.”
“I will never apologize for burning it.”
“Why in the heck did you decide to burn it, Andrew? I mean, would donating it have been better?”
He shook his head. “Nope. No human should have worn that.”
“But for real, why did you burn it? That’s so dramatic.”
Andrew looked at the floor for a few moments. “I think it was a grief thing.”
“How so?” Please don’t shut down now, Andrew, she begged in her mind. Please let me into your feelings. We both need this.
“Because I remember how ridiculously happy she was when she put it on. Even when she wore it once to the grocery store—in broad daylight, of course—” He rolled his eyes. “She wore it around the house a couple of times and took photos of herself. You were there, you remember.”
“I still have the photos somewhere.”
“We should dig those up someday.” He took a breath. “Yeah, it was a grief thing. The amount of joy that butt-ugly trench coat gave her just stuck on it, I guess. I touched it and literally felt her there. It was too much.”
Lillian stayed quiet and watched him.
“I burned that pair of rope sandals she had, too. They smelled like—I don’t even want to revisit the smell right now. They needed to be burned.” He chuckled. “It probably released toxic gas into the air.”
“I don’t think Amelia owned much that would be detrimental to the environment.”
“I wouldn’t know, really. I only cleared out some of her stuff. There was too much.”
Lillian nodded, knowing exactly what he meant. Sure, Amelia had a lot of stuff spread between their apartment and her parents’ house—but that wasn’t the type of ‘too much’ Andrew was talking about.
“You know I just left, right?” she asked softly.
“Left?”
“I couldn’t go back to our place.”
