Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 69807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“She’s going to get there,” Aella said. “She’s too fast not to.”
“She’s really fast,” I agreed. “Does she run?”
“She did in high school, but something happened with her coach when she was qualifying for state, and she quit.” She paused. “She’s never told me what happened, though.”
“That only makes me want to know all the more,” I admitted. “Come on, let’s go home.”
Twenty-Two
I just wanna get rich the way y’all got pregnant. Unplanned and fast.
—Aella’s secret thoughts
AELLA
I wasn’t fond of funerals.
Especially funerals for children.
Though, I hadn’t really been to any funerals to know if a child’s funeral was worse.
I did know that there was no way it couldn’t be worse, though.
Seeing that tiny little casket made my heart ache.
Caskets shouldn’t come in sizes that small, and a child shouldn’t die before their parent.
“I know that some of you are going to question the music choice today,” Apollo said as he stood off to the side of the room, his hand on the back of his neck as he stared off into the distance. “But I thought I’d play some of Tavi’s favorite songs. They’re ones that we used to sing at the top of our lungs when he was smaller.”
Sniffling.
There was so much sniffling throughout the room that my own sniffles were barely noticed.
At least by everyone that wasn’t the man at my side.
I was sitting sandwiched in between Cutter and Chevy. Cutter’s wife, Milena, was on Cutter’s other side already balling her eyes out.
Cutter’s other brother, Copper, was in the row behind us, and Reign was with him, both of them quietly sitting behind us.
Though when I’d looked back, Reign was silently crying, her tears unchecked.
Something in the way she was being so quiet, though, made horror run through me.
How did anyone cry so silently?
She was unmoving, unblinking, staring ahead at the small coffin like the rest of us were.
It was eerie.
A loud nose being blown had all of us turning toward the sound.
Tavi’s father.
He was unapologetically devastated and didn’t care who saw.
Cakes—my dad—was sitting next to him, patting him on the back.
A feeling of warmth spread through me.
The more I got to see my father, the more I realized that he was a really good man.
It sucked that I’d spent so much time growing up without him.
I had a feeling he’d have been a great dad to have in my formative years.
I turned back to the grieving dad in the room and saw him take his seat and nod to the preacher in the front of the room.
Yet another man wearing a Truth Tellers MC cut.
The Truth Tellers was a big club.
Though this one I’d been introduced to multiple times.
His road name was Hagrid.
He’d been introduced to me as a part-time A/C repairman and part-time preacher.
At the time I’d thought it a weird combination, but as I saw him officiate the ceremony for a little boy, I realized that he truly had a gift.
Everyone in the room was enraptured as he told stories, talked about Tavi, and ultimately ensured that there wasn’t a single dry eye in the house.
When the song from Moana came on, I had to laugh through my tears.
It was a perfect song.
So was the song from Lion King, and the action songs from Transformers.
When the ceremony ended, all of us went from one room to the next, where we sat through the funeral of Laney Ingram, the wife of Audric ‘Detroit’ Ingram.
Audric had walked from Tavi’s funeral to the one for his wife, his young infant daughter in his arms, completely asleep and unaware of how her tiny little world had just become much bleaker.
Audric sat down in the front of the room and shifted his daughter up to his shoulder, patting her little bottom as he stared straight ahead.
Hagrid came into the room and walked up to the stage, his eyes going around the room as he took everything in.
“The first time I met Laney, it was on the side of the road while this guy.” Hagrid jerked his chin toward Audric. “All but melted into a puddle of goo. I’d never seen love at first sight before, but Detroit—Audric—here…it was quite embarrassing…”
Audric made a sound in the back of his throat that had me closing my eyes as the tears continued to fall.
To say that I wasn’t in the best of moods when Chevy and I walked into that diner later that day would be an understatement.
My dad—even though I still couldn’t call him that out loud—had come with us, along with Cutter, his wife Milena, Keely, and her husband, Dima.
Copper had declined the invite and had left with Reign, which had pissed off the two brothers and sister.
They weren’t happy that their brother hadn’t joined them. Neither were they happy that their brother was with ‘that woman.’
“…can’t believe that he just left without talking to us first. This is all so messed up.” Keely shook her head.