Page 50 of Live for Me

“Again? I didn’t ask you outthistime.”

He laughed and kissed the top of my head. “Good night, angel.”

Even once I was alone for the night, there was no peace to be had from it.

The memories were like demons, forever waiting in the darkness to pounce on a broken soul at its weakest moment. Tonight, my heart was the host for several of them.

Checking the house in Tupelo and the banking information only made it worse, but tonight more than ever, I needed to be sure that she was still safe.

Every time I managed to fall asleep for even a little while, I woke up sweating shortly after. So many of the things that I’d put an effort into ignoring until I forgot them seemed to resurface on nights like this one. By the time the sunlight was coming in through the curtains, I’d decided I was done ignoring and done trying to forget. It was time to take the details that haunted my lowest moments and use them to uncover what really happened. That would be the only way to help anyone else who might’ve ended up in the same position that my sister and I had been. If I was going to carry these demons with me anyway, I might as well put them to good use.

I spent the next morning very absentmindedly taking all my books from the totes to organize them into little stacks along the back wall of my room. This was never actually my house or my room, so there weren’t bookshelves readily available for me anywhere in it. I definitely felt more at home having them here with me, though.

My thoughts were focused hard on the kinds of questions that I had for Tennessee while I stacked the books along the wall. Until I was able to experience the demise of the last bit of my sanity as my hands reached for the last item in the tote I was unpacking. If my regular existence hadn’t already been marked with the palest skin to ever grace a human, all the color would’ve drained right from my body at the sight of the little black box that remained in that tote.

“He didn’t open it. He didn’t open it. He didn’t open it,” I repeated to myself while my hands shook as I reached for the damn thing. It wasn’t locked. I’d spent all of my adult years living alone. There was no need to put a lock on the very wide range of toys that I kept in this box.

I dropped that bitch so fast when someone knocked on the door to my room. I should’ve screamed at him to leave the second that Utah opened the door. Instead, I stood there while my whole body caught on fire in embarrassment.

“You didn’t come out, so I brought you—” he started to say but paused to look down at the box that now sat right in the middle of the floor. “Breakfast,” he finished and smiled.

He opened it.

Of course, he fucking opened it.

That’s why he brought it back to Indiana for me.

Because he knew what was inside it.

“Did you open this?” I forced myself to ask and nodded toward the box.

“Nope.”

“You answered that way too fast.”

“Nooope?” he tried again in a very frustrating drawn out fashion.

“Utah.”

“Memphis.”

“I know you opened it.”

“No, you don’t. Because I didn’t.”

“I don’t think I like you very much right now.”

“Sounds like a pretty average day around here then,” he laughed before he held a plate of food out toward me. “Come out here when you’re done. Indy and I are going over things for Tennessee and Akron. And I have some demands this time.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

utah

“Iknowyou opened it,” Memphis hissed as soon as she set foot in the kitchen with us, and I spit my coffee right across the countertop.

“I didn’t,” I choked out and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth.

“What’d you open?” Indy asked.

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