Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68583 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68583 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
The fierceness in his tone had me looking away from my son for the first time and up at Copper.
He looked like an avenging angel on the warpath.
“I-I won’t,” I stuttered out. “I swear. For the first time, I think I’m seeing how bad it’d gotten.”
The medication I was on…it was a miracle.
The doctor said it would take up to fourteen days to see the full effects of the medication, but it’d been six, and I was already thinking so much more clearly.
Hell, I wasn’t freaking the fuck out about having to feed my child—one that I’d wanted.
God, how far I’d fallen.
Copper’s eyes studied me for so long that I had to switch Holt to the opposite side, but his gaze never left my own.
Some decision was made, I saw the switch happen, and he nodded once.
Before I could ask him what he was thinking, my phone rang again, reminding me I still had work to do.
This time it was Fermin.
I sighed and answered the phone.
Ten
You’re either a smart fella or a fart smella.
—Text from Keely to Copper
COPPER
The routine continued for four more days before Shad finally got back to Dallas.
It was a good routine, too.
One that worked out well, and I found that I quite liked.
I’d never thought that I would be able to experience this kind of domestic life, but I found that it was a lot more intriguing than I’d thought it would be.
So intriguing, in fact, that when Shad finally came through the doors of my office around noon nine days after I picked his daughter up, I found that I wasn’t wanting to give it up quite yet.
Though, I wouldn’t admit to that.
I did, however, have a power move up my sleeve that I knew would be enough to get him to let her stay.
“Where’s my girl?” he asked.
“On the second floor feeding Holt,” I answered. “Thought you weren’t getting back until tonight?”
“Rushed home, might’ve broken the law a little bit and driven when I was supposed to be ‘resting.’” He shrugged. “How is she?”
“Good,” I answered honestly. “In the nine days that she’s been with me, she’s like a completely different person. Though, now, instead of wanting nothing to do with Holt, she has everything to do with him and hates herself for how she acted the first couple of months of his life. It’s an uphill battle for sure.”
Shad’s shoulders slumped. “I should’ve seen it.”
Yeah, he should have.
“Don’t think that she let you,” I admitted.
He shrugged. “Do you think you would’ve let it stop you had this been your kid?”
The thought of having a kid had truly never crossed my mind.
But as I thought about what I would’ve done had I been in Shad’s situation, my mind immediately went to “hell no.”
I wouldn’t have let her be.
Then again, that was seeing it from an outside perspective.
“You had a wife, sons, and two girls at home telling you that you needed to leave her alone,” I pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said. “But this gut instinct inside of me told me that I was letting it go on too long.”
He almost did.
He had no clue how close he was to losing her, but that was something that I wasn’t ready to share with him.
Maybe one day Baker would tell him what she’d told me four days ago and he’d feel it rip up his chest like I felt it rip up mine, and she wasn’t even my kid.
Wasn’t my anything.
Even though every instinct inside of me screamed to pull her in close to my chest and never let her go.
Laughter from outside the office had me glancing that way to see Keely and Baker in the middle of the hallway outside my office door, talking animatedly.
A wheezing sound left Shad’s lips.
“What?”
Shad looked from his daughter to me, a look of shock on his face.
“She’s skin and bones,” he murmured.
She was.
She looked like a completely different person than the woman I saw in the hospital all those weeks ago.
She was skinny.
Way too skinny.
But she’d been eating a lot this week. I’d seen her put away more than my brothers had at Thanksgiving dinner last year for every single meal she’d eaten.
“I had Apollo look into her medical records,” I said softly so she wouldn’t hear. “She was pumping milk in the living room the second day that she was here. Her shirt was lifted, and I saw all of her ribs. Man, those clothes only make her seem skinny. But I seriously counted every rib she had on her left side. Sorry for the invasion of privacy, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking Apollo to look.”
Shad waved the apology off.
“Anyway, what I was getting at was, the antidepressants she’s on take two weeks to completely see the effects,” I explained. “She’ll need to stay on the meds for six months after she sees her symptoms reduce.”