The house was a mess.
I'd walked in the door and immediately had to kick Jake's winter boots out from the middle of the kitchen floor. Why they were out in the middle of the summer, I didn't want to guess. I set my bag down on the counter, wincing at the tenderness in my ribs, and was about to start surveying the rest of the damage when my phone buzzed inside of it.
I reached for it, winced again, and then turned and grabbed it with my good hand. God, being in a cast was a pain in the ass. "Hey," I answered, bracing myself.
"Where the hell are you?" Claire sounded even more worked up than usual. "I called your room because I wanted to hear your reaction when you saw the video I sent you, and you're not there? Did you get moved?"
"No. I'm back home." Claire went silent. It stretched out long enough to make me uncomfortable. "It's better for me," I told her quickly. "Lying there bored out of my mind wasn't exactly a healing experience."
"So you're home now." I couldn't gauge her tone of voice. It was completely flat.
"Pat, you know the lady with the medical taxi service? She just dropped me off."
"You called a taxi? Willa, I'm right here." Claire worked for Cooper's cousin Cole Granger, the big-shot developer guy in Reckless Falls. "My office is like, two miles away from the hospital."
"But you're at work."
"It's not like these copies I have to make are more important to me than you are."
It was my turn to fall silent. I was surprised by how hurt she sounded. "It really isn't a big deal, honey," I tried to soothe her. "Plus Pat's a nice lady and I get the feeling she could use the money."
"You could use the money too, Willa."
I licked my lips. The looming medical bills were one reason why I'd requested an early discharge. Not the main reason, but a pretty close second. Unless they found the driver of the car soon, all those bills were going to fall on me.
I pushed that from my head and tried to switch gears. "Pat has all these bobbleheads on her dash." Claire had a visceral hatred for bobbleheads, which meant that she received at least three of them from us every year for her birthday. "You would have died."
Claire didn't take the bait. "I don't like this, Willa. You should have stayed in the hospital. You were hit by a fucking car."
But I wasn't listening because I'd spotted something on the kitchen table. "Oh my God, is that his homework?"
"What?"
"Jake's homework. It's still here on the table. Oh my God." I gritted my teeth. "My mom didn't put it in his bag last night."
"Shouldn't he be the one doing that?"
"He kept getting marked off for not having it, so I started double checking that it was in his bag every night before bed. But since I wasn't here..." I trailed off as little alarm bells started dinging in my head. "Claire, I have to go, there's like a stack of papers here on the table that he needed for school. Oh my God, she never signed his permission slip for his field trip!"
"Willa? What are you..."
I cut her off with a quick, "Loveyoubye," and hung up so I could set my phone down and use my good hand to rifle through the teetering stack of papers. All the notes, flyers, and permissions slips were still sitting there, some from last week. Had my mom not been going through his folder with him every day after school? Was she even checking his homework every night? Making sure he had his sneakers on gym day?
I ran my tongue over the top of my teeth. This was it. Right here. Why I couldn't waste one more minute rotting in that hospital bed. Lying there and fretting about how bad things were getting screwed up without me wasn't restful at all. And one look around our trailer - at the bills left unopened, at the dishes left piled in the sink - just confirmed what I'd told them when they made me sign the papers saying I was leaving against medical advice. "I'm going to keep getting better no matter what, so I'd rather do it at home with my family."
Rolling up my sleeves wasn't an option with only one good hand, so instead, I just took as deep a breath as I could handle.
Then I got to work.
Chapter