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)
With that, the doctor walked out of the room, leaving me and my crying baby behind.
I did what she said.
I went to the pharmacy and filled my prescription.
I also went to a diner and spilled my beans all over again to the waitress that took my order. When she saw how frazzled and distraught I was with Holt, she’d snatched him up and started walking around with him, calming him down better than I ever had.
Any normal mother would’ve likely been hesitant to give her baby to some stranger to walk around with, but I was past that point in my life.
I would take any help that I could get at this point.
That included the woman from the closest diner in town who looked like she was a good person.
While she was walking with Holt, I tried, and failed, to come up with a solution to this shit storm that was swirling around me that would have me keeping the life that I’d thought I once had.
Only, the more that I thought about it, the less that I could see an outcome where I stayed where I was and became happy.
There was no happy ending here.
There was only an ending, and there was nothing happy about it.
Three
And this is why I wanted to stay home. All this shit right here.
—Text from Baker to her dad
BAKER
I was doing it.
I was finally doing it.
I listened to the phone ring and I knew that this was about to turn into the biggest shit storm of the century.
I just hoped that my family didn’t make this harder on me than they had to.
“Hey, baby girl,” my dad said. “How are you doing? I was hoping to hear from you this week.”
I felt my heart give a pitiful beat at the sound of his voice.
“Daddy?” I sniffled, unable to get the words out.
The sound of my watery voice had him on instant high alert.
Shad Ray Ritter was my closest confidant growing up.
My mother, who was the sweetest person alive, just didn’t have the same personality as my dad and I did.
We were thick as thieves and had been that way since before I could remember.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, all seriousness.
I swallowed past my tears and finally said, “I’m leaving him. For good. I can’t do it anymore.”
My dad breathed out a slow sigh of relief. “About fuckin’ time.”
Four
Off to commit Tom Foolery.
—Text from Baker to Copper
COPPER
“Hey,” I answered my longtime friend. “What’s up?”
“I need some help.”
My brows rose. “What kind of help?”
The kind that would have me seeing the inside of a jail cell soon?
Because, for Shad, I’d probably do it.
See, fifteen years ago, I’d met Shad Ritter on the inside of a prison.
A scared, eighteen-year-old kid, I’d been terrified of what I would encounter behind those prison walls.
Shad had taken one look at me and had taken me under his proverbial wing.
The only reason that I’d survived in that hellhole in the beginning was due to Shad.
As luck would have it, we’d bonded over our love for the Dallas Cowboys, and a friendship had formed to the point where I’d do just about anything for him short of giving him my own life.
If I had to see the inside of a prison cell again, so be it.
“My baby girl just called me, and she needs help. She’s leaving her shit bag of an ex, and I’m out of town running a load to Montana. Fermin, Roosevelt and Kenny are all out running loads, too. The girls are visiting a school in New Mexico that she’s thinking about going to for college, and my other girl needs help now. I’m scared what’ll happen if I leave her there alone. She’s breaking.”
I knew a lot about Shad’s family.
There’d been nothing but time when we were behind those prison walls.
He’d shared all about his kids, his wife, and his life.
He’d been out five years longer than me, and though he’d come for a visit or two since then, and we’d kept up via snail mail while I’d been inside, then text and phone calls after I’d gotten out, I didn’t know every aspect of his life any longer.
I did know that his middle girl, Baker, was with a shit bag of a human being, and Shad had hated the kid since he’d first showed up in Baker’s life.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Listen to this,” he said, and then went on to describe everything that had gone down in Baker’s life in the last two years.
He ended it with, “She went back to him after he did her dirty at the hospital. He apologized, claimed it was a crazy lapse in judgment that would never happen again, and he was just scared. But we’d kicked up a big stink about everything, and Baker kind of backed off from us. We had no clue that it’d gotten this bad. And that’s us being selfish, thinking that she would talk to us when clearly she wasn’t going to. She’s been suffering bad from postpartum depression, and she needs someone lookin’ in on her, helping.”