Damaged: The Dillon Sisters Layla Frost (ebook reader with highlighter .txt) 📖

“You know what.”

She was right, I did.

Even though talking was the last thing I wanted to do, my exhaustion and medication worked together to loosen my tongue. “A while.”

“Why?”

I rolled my head to look at my sister. My beautiful, brilliant sister. I used my floppy, weak arm to gesture down my floppy, weak body. “Why not?”

Like it just struck her as strange, her angry glare shot around the room. “Where the fuck are they?”

I didn’t think I’d ever heard her swear. The crass word seemed bizarre coming from her, which made me smile. At least, I tried to smile. I wasn’t sure if my lips cooperated. “You missed their bi-weekly visit.”

“They only come twice a week?” she hissed, outrage shaking her voice.

“Is that what bi-weekly means? Damn, I’ve been making a fool of myself. No, I mean every two weeks.”

“What?” Lowering her volume and softening her tone, she went full-on shrink. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

I didn’t have a dream job for my future. I was pretty sure I didn’t even have a future. But in that moment, I knew down to my faulty bones that she’d be as good at her dream career as she was at everything else. There was something about her that made people feel safe to open up.

Which was why I blurted, “I’m going to die.”

I had to hand it to my sister, she didn’t light a pair of rose-colored glasses on fire to blow smoke up my ass. She gave it to me straight. Or at least as straight as she could, given my uncertain future. “Maybe. But not if the doctors can help it.”

“I hope they can’t. I’m ready. I want this to be over.”

I was sure Aria had something beautifully inspirational and insightful to say, but I didn’t hear as I drifted off to sleep.

I wonder if this will be the time I don’t wake up.

_______________

Three years later

I WAS SUPPOSED to be sad.

It was a funeral. Funerals called for sadness, right? Mourning. Shed tears. The whole nine.

Except I didn’t feel sad.

I didn’t feel anything.

Thankfully, my hazy, medicated fog came across as somber as I sat at the funeral home. Based on the sympathetic glances everyone had been shooting my way, I must’ve played the part of the grieving daughter well.

But one person wasn’t buying it.

“You okay?” Aria whispered, not for the first time.

“Mmhmm,” I murmured, discreetly checking the time to see if I could take my next dose of meds yet. Usually I loathed the stupor I lived in. Well, I loathed it for the bits I was able to feel something before my next dose kicked in. But that day, I welcomed the escape.

Since it was way too soon, I zoned back out and didn’t hear a word anyone said during the overblown service. I was vaguely aware of Dad’s voice booming from the podium, but it was gibberish in my ears. Wah-wah-wah-wah, like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.

I hadn’t realized the service had finished until Aria took my hand and stood, keeping hold of me. Ever the dutiful daughter, she took her place next to Dad, dragging me along for the ride.

There’d be no morbid parade to the cemetery since Mom had been cremated. We were having a reception at the house, but it wasn’t going to be a loving remembrance with potluck casseroles and togetherness. The exclusive, catered affair would be a cold and socially calculating opportunity to see and be seen.

It was the perfect tribute to a cold and socially calculating woman.

We stood together to receive condolences, playing our roles.

The picture-perfect family in our picture-perfect grief.

For a while, at least.

Then Dad took off to wherever to talk to whomever, leaving Aria and me to receive fake sympathy from Mom’s equally fake friends. It was a big fake-fest.

Each offered some variation of the same generic platitudes, daintily dabbing at their eyes despite the fact they weren’t crying. After all, they couldn’t risk ruining their makeup.

Or showing normal human emotion.

That was until one woman reached us. Splotchy faced and openly weeping, it took me a moment to recognize the member of Mom’s country club circle—well, the outer edge of her circle.

“Girls,” Sharon Anderson cried before breaking down into more tears as she threw herself into our arms.

My gaze darted to Aria, who just shrugged and patted the back of the hysterical woman.

“Your mom was a goddess,” Sharon whimpered wetly into Aria’s hair.

Yeah, if there’s a goddess of booze and Botox.

Pulling away, Sharon wiped at her face, smearing her mascara further. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. It was so sudden and now my best friend is gone. Your mother is gone. She loved you girls so much.”

There it was.

The first hint of feeling I’d had all day.

Unfortunately—and inappropriately—the emotion that broke through was amusement.

I choked back a sudden burst of laughter, the sound coming out like a sob.

“I know,” Sharon tutted, squeezing my upper arm. “We’re all going to miss her and her beautiful, selfless spirit.”

The only spirit Mom had was the vodka in her ever-present drink.

That time, there was no choking back the laugh that forced its way out. Disguising it as more sobs, my shoulders shook as I buried my face in my hands and fought to get control. But once I started laughing, I could not stop.

“Sorry,” Aria said, wrapping an arm around me. “She’s, uh, super upset.”

“Of course she is, the poor thing,” Sharon sniffled, cluing me in that her own tears were starting again, which only made my laughter increase until actual tears flowed.

“Excuse us,” Aria said, pulling me away from the group and not stopping until we were alone in a small, dimly lit room filled with extra chairs. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Sorry,” I wheezed, “but that was funny.”

“What was?”

“All of it.” I gestured toward the door. “Sharon is out there blubbering and calling Mom her best friend. Mom talked so much shit about her. She’s the one who told everyone except Sharon about