Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 97525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 97525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 488(@200wpm)___ 390(@250wpm)___ 325(@300wpm)
His mouth tightens but there in his eyes… there is a hint of softness, of love. He lowers his head and touches his forehead against mine, his eyes closing as we connect. I press my hands to his chest, feeling through the soft fabric of his shirt, and inhale the clean, strong scent of him.
"It's inconceivable, Layana,” he says softly, his breath ghosting over my lips. “What would you do if I told you that you had another person living inside of you?"
"But I don’t." I pull back my head, hating to break the connection, but needing to see into his face. His handsome features are in the shade, and I want to suggest that we go inside, to sit down at the dining room table, but I don’t want to disrupt the progress we’ve made. If I have to stand in the doorway all night, we can.
He snorts. “Yeah, well. That's how I feel. I'm in my head all day long. Have been for almost forty years. Trust me, there's no one else up there."
With that, he pulls away from me and strides toward the kitchen. I wait to see what he is going to do, but then he’s shrugging into a brown canvas jacket and heading out of the double front doors. Less than a minute later, I hear the roar of his car.
I let him leave and wonder who will return.
Chapter 64 - Brant
It's not possible, yet she's not lying. She can't be. Everything about that interaction screamed truth.
I need Jillian. I need to look in her face and find out the truth. I press my hand to my fist, and the stress is sitting there, like a giant steel anvil, pinning my breath in place.
It’s time for a pill. A blackout is coming, pushing on the edge of my sanity with greedy feelings, and my mind's source of relief is simple in its black oblivion.
But maybe I shouldn’t. After a decade of the medication, I’m suddenly suspicious of the pale pill that calms my world, refocuses my anxiety, and lets me sleep. A pill a day keeps my normal life in play. That’s what Jillian always said.
Is everything I've known a lie? How deep does this level of deception go?
Two decades ago, on December twelfth, I blacked out. When I came to, half of Jillian's face was beaten in, her eyes puffy slits, two teeth missing from her smile, her lip split. They said I had gone crazy. Jill had tried to pacify me and I had turned on her, windmilling punches and kicks until I knocked her onto the ground and climbed on top of her. Continued the beating until I ran out of steam, then apparently stood, took the stairs up to the living room, and watched Judge Judy until my parents got home. I don’t remember that part. I woke up in a children's psych ward with no memory of the exchange.
That was back when I used to have blackouts. It was explained that they were my brain's way of coping with the pressures that my intellect forced on it. Spots in time where I would act in a manner that made no sense. The longest lasted five hours. Two decades ago Jillian found a doctor who solved my problem and provided a cocktail of meds that calmed my dark demons. The blackouts stopped, my only moments of dark occurring when the drowsiness side effect knocked me out. I've lived without a relapse for decades.
Blackouts. That is what I’ve been told, what I believe.
I push harder on the gas, my hands trembling against the steering wheel. I need to see Jillian. She is at the root of all of this. She will have the answers.
She always does.
Chapter 65 - Brant
Jillian is standing on her home’s front entrance when I pull in. In a city filled with modern monstrosities, she found the scariest and ugliest of them all—a giant grey stone box, with thin strips of glass that dissected the surface in hard right angles that cut diagonally across each room. Layana had taken one look at the house and declared that it would be impossible to find curtains for it—such a strange observation but a hypothesis that was proven true when I first walked in. The interior wasn’t any warmer than the exterior—all white furnishings, gold hardware and black marble accents. Voices echoed in the house, and if you left without running into a sharp edge, you were more coordinated than me.
I park in one of the empty spots off her circular drive, beside a wall of tall thin cacti that resemble twelve feet tall cucumbers. I step out of the Aston Martin and swing the door shut, then lock it with my fob.
As I take the pebbled path toward the front door, I lock eyes with my aunt. Wind buffers the long black coat around her, her hands tucked in its pockets, a resolute look on the face of a woman I love as much as my mother. As I climb the deep front steps, we hold the long look. There’s fear on her face and I try to understand it, but I've never been so confused.