A Time for Us - By Amy Knupp Page 0,76
out of the house before her mom could try to straighten her out anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SLEEPING MORE THAN two hours was apparently not in the cards for Rachel the next day. On the bright side, her mom was at work and would be for a few more hours. Rachel wasn’t in a hurry to run into her after last night’s let’s-talk-about-how-screwed-up-Rachel-is session.
After twisting in her sheets for close to an hour, she climbed out of bed, irritated. The cause of her insomnia wasn’t tough to figure out. Every second, she was still affected by the profound rawness of the emotions the past few days had brought to the surface. Even when she’d been working last night, when she’d been occupied by a patient or an emergency situation, the underlying heaviness was always there, weighing her down.
The thing was, she admitted to herself as she threw her hair into a ponytail, her mom was right. Sawyer was right. Everyone who suspected she’d avoided grieving for her sister was 100 percent correct. She’d had to, to protect herself, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure she’d ever made a conscious decision to forego it. She’d just instinctively fought it. Every day for the past nineteen months plus.
So the question was, what the hell was she supposed to do about it? Feel like slow-moving, depressed crap for the rest of eternity? So holding it all in had been a mistake. Was she supposed to walk around blubbering now? For all her education—in the medical field, no less—she didn’t have a clue how to get through this.
Frankly, it pissed her off. She wasn’t accustomed to not being able to puzzle through a problem.
Her mother’s accusations echoing rampantly through her mind, Rachel stomped across the hall to her and Noelle’s bedroom, determined to put a real dent in it. Show it who was boss and who was no longer going to be accused of hiding from the tough stuff.
As soon as she walked in, Noelle’s diary caught her attention as if it had flashing neon lights where she’d left it on the rumpled bed.
“Nope, not going there today,” she said out loud. “Not hiding. Need to make some visible progress so people quit accusing me of avoiding.”
It sounded perfectly logical to her, even if there was an underlying nagging in her gut.
As she worked her way through Noelle’s side of the closet, her back facing the bed, she felt it, though. Felt the diary sitting there on the bed as if it were a living, breathing being. Accusing. Taunting. Just like the door used to do.
She continued her sorting, making her pace deliberate and slow, as if to signal to the universe and that stupid book that she wasn’t being intimidated, wasn’t going to rush through the job just to get out of that room.
When she finished the closet, she stood and stretched, feeling stiff and about eighty years old from the lack of sleep and the overdose of emotions. Again, the book caught her eye.
Opening it would be brutal. Seeing her sister in every word, in every scrawled letter, would knock her on her newly grieving butt quicker than she could say privacy issues. Just reading the note in the front that Noelle had directed at her had sent her mind plummeting into momentary confusion. The warning was ages old, timeless. Familiar. The ongoing threat between sisters—particularly twin sisters. Give me my space. Leave my innermost thoughts alone. Respect my boundaries.
It said so much about the connection they’d had and made Rachel believe, if only for a second and only on some distant subconscious level, that her sister was still here. The next second was ruined with the yet-again realization that it was an illusion.
Traumatizing, to be sure.
And yet the diary begged to be opened. Rachel longed for that nanosecond of connection with her sister, in spite of understanding that it would, indeed, turn out to be false in the end.
No. She was still paying the price from her last run-in with the diary. Maybe in a few days she would be better able to handle it.
Swearing, she snatched up the book and slammed it down on the empty top shelf of the bookcase. The resounding smack wasn’t satisfying, but she stopped herself from picking it up again and winging it against the wall. That would be uncivilized. And more importantly, it would reek of weakness.
Rachel bit her lip, burrowed both hands in her hair and pulled till her scalp burned. Catching her reflection in the