Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 91461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91461 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 457(@200wpm)___ 366(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
“No. That’s too much,” Sam passed judgment.
“They’re in love, Dad, knock it off.”
“I’m missing what she sees in him,” he said flatly.
“Financial stability, kindness, someone to take care of her––”
“Who she will have to take care of when she’s still young,” Sam argued.
“Moving on,” Hannah declared.
“Fast-forward through Grady throwing up off the side of the porch when he finds out he and his uncle are sleeping with the same woman,” Jake told Hannah.
“Doing that…now.”
Sam huffed out a breath. “I want pie.”
“Wait,” Hannah told her father. “There’s Lucy first.”
“Who?” Sam whined.
Jake was cackling now.
“Lucy, who makes her entrance in three…two…one…now.”
The enormous F-150 came down the street, stopped beside a silver Lexus, and the girl who got out was carrying a golf club. I was guessing a driver with how big the head was.
In very systematic fashion, Lucy first broke all the mirrors, the windshield, and all the lights. The club was really well made, because it held up almost to the end before breaking in half. But Lucy, willowy with long jet-black curly hair, had another club ready to go. She used that one to finish off the glass window in the back of the car, and used the broken shaft from the first one to carve her name on the hood.
Once she was done, she got back in her truck, took out a bag of golf clubs—I had been wondering how many she had—and threw them all into the road. She then drove over them, stopped, reversed, and then honked until Caden, who, if I remembered correctly was Finn’s middle brother, finally came out onto the porch and roared.
“He calls her a stupid bitch where Hannah is fast-forwarding,” Jake explained to us. “Which, I get that he’s mad and all, but he could have called her anything, it didn’t have to be bitch. Asshole, jerkface, I mean really, the options are unlimited. I just don’t like the word used pejoratively here because, as a person, she lost her mind, but it’s not because she’s a bitch. It’s in direct relation to what he did.”
Hannah nodded. “We find out later that she loved him, but he cheated with three of her friends. Now, let’s be honest, first off, she needs new friends, but more importantly, Anne really liked her, but now it’s over because Caden is a dog.”
“Please let that be it,” I begged her.
“Not quite,” Hannah told us. “At some point, right before the police came, because some neighbor called in about all the screaming, Anne finally returned to the kitchen to find that Conor’s friends ended up having a food fight with everything she made. Apparently, there had been lots of drinking going on, and it was at about this time that both Conor and Lucas decided separately, and then together, that Kola recording the whole time was bad.”
“It’s actually very helpful for the police,” Sam chimed in.
“Did the little girl, or boy, that Kola was talking to get their cinnamon rolls?”
“Kola said she—her name is Desi—did get three before the rest were thrown around the kitchen like footballs.”
“Back to Kola,” Sam insisted.
“Well, then Conor and Lucas demanded that Kola delete everything off his phone, which Kola declined to do, and then they decided to take his phone from him, and Kola defended himself, which, we know, he can do.”
“They didn’t hurt him,” I said with a catch of breath.
Hannah looking at me like I was nuts made me feel instantly better.
Apparently, Conor came at Kola then, with Lucas backing him up, and Finn was in the house commiserating with his mother, so he didn’t see the attempt.”
“Did Kola put them both down?”
“No,” Hannah said, and her voice got low and utterly rippled with evil.
Both Sam and I turned to her.
Hannah moved the phone so we could see, and I saw Conor lunge at Kola before he suddenly dropped like a ton of bricks. Like standing in the lens frame one moment and gone the next. It was actually a bit scary.
“What the hell?” Sam breathed out.
And then there, in all his glory, scowling darkly, was George Hunt.
“Oh look who it is,” I sighed.
George had been on his way back from doing something with Kurt, his husband, remembered that he had Finn’s new laptop to give him, pinged his location, saw where he was, and simply made the decision to drop by. Upon arrival, he saw Kola on the front porch alone, with two men approaching him in a less than friendly manner. Because of that, he jogged over to check on the sibling of one of his favorite people in the world.
“And then did what?”
“Since it read like danger to George,” Hannah explained, “he put them on the ground.”
“That’s it?”
She shrugged. “It’s the military. He’s used to making split-second decisions while the rest of us are thinking, huh, this situation might be a bad one.”