Page 45 of The Sweetest Obsession

I always say everything wrong.

When we were young, sometimes it felt like all Ophelia ever asked for was that I speak. And I never could, not clearly, not the way she needs.

That’s me.

That’s my dumb ass to a tongue-tied tee around her.

Even when she was little and I wasn’t that much bigger, before she turned into someone so beautiful she could twist my tongue in knots with a single glance from beneath her long lashes.

When we were kids I didn’t know how to tell her how much she and Ethan meant to me.

How they eased that loneliness an only child knows when he’s the quiet kid in a gossipy little town.

So I showed her by picking on her, pulling her pigtails, like any kind of attention was good attention—and that pattern just stuck, even as we grew up.

I pull her hair, and she sucker punches me and tells me how much of a colossal dick I am.

I’m not completely sure how long I’ve wanted to hear something else.

But what I hear now, as I watch Ros and Aleksander disappear into the Sanderson family shop, Nobody’s Bees-Ness, is my dash radio coming to life with a gritty crackle.

I’m expecting Mallory to tell me there’s been another silly incident, kids tagging the trees out in the logging areas or another punk caught shoplifting.

“Unit four-oh-two? Call came in from the Sanderson house, GPS shows you’re closest—some kind of trouble with an intruder, possible assault. What’s your ETA?”

My heart stalls.

Intruder?

Possible assault?

Ophelia.

Clammy sweat sweeps down my brow as I wrench the handset to my lips.

“Less than three minutes,” I say, twisting the key violently in the ignition. “Tell her to sit tight, Mallory. I’m on my way.”

6

ONE MEAN GRIP (OPHELIA)

Ishouldn’t feel as guilty as I do for leaving the medical center.

I tell myself it’s only because I’d get in the way.

Yes, I may be a trained nurse, but without being on staff at the Redhaven MC I’d just be a liability if someone needed to get in there to provide my mother with emergency care.

She’s thereasonI became a hospice nurse, but when it’s your own mother...

Sometimes, there’s not much you can do.

Thankfully, it only took a few minutes to sort out an incorrect date on her DNR. Several more minutes for me to process the fact that my mothersigneda flipping DNR without telling me.

Then there was nothing else to do but sit back at her bedside with her thin hand in mine and silently beg her to wake up, to come back to life, to be the same vibrant woman I still see in my mind, clear as day.

She wouldn’t want this for me.

Stuck here in limbo, pining for her health, waiting for death like it’s my own life ending too.

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