Billionaire's Second Chance (Billionaires #16) - Jennifer Hartley Page 0,30

was their bedroom, it was more private and less likely for me to walk into while they were shooting up. Eventually, though, I would always come in.

I would go for hours, sometimes the better part of days, taking care of myself. I would get myself ready for school, make myself breakfast, and pack a lunch, and then put myself on the bus. After school, I would come home and do my homework while I made a snack and stayed on the lower level of the house so that I didn’t have to hear them. Sometimes they would fight, and that was the part that I always tried to avoid. At night, I would make myself dinner, take a bath, and then depending on how long it had been since I had heard anything coming out of their bedroom, sometimes I would go check on them.

Sometimes I would get yelled at or told to go get them more bottles of whiskey from the unlocked liquor cabinet in the kitchen. Other times I would just get screamed at to get out of the room and leave them alone. I always tried to go for as long as possible without going near them at all. But eventually, if the better part of a day had gone by, I would start to wonder if they had overdosed and died, or if my father had finally lost his temper and beat the shit out of my mother. Unfortunately for me, though, they were always still alive.

After those unpleasant occurrences, I would creep back to my room and hide under my blankets with my stuffed dog—Pepper, that was his name. It took me a few minutes to remember it, but then I remembered how I used to talk to him until I fell asleep. That dog helped me more than any living thing ever could. He may have been made of fabric and stuffing and had a button eye that was still hanging on by a thread, but he was the one thing that I had that kept me getting up every morning. He was the only thing—aside from Scott and Clara and the hope of sneaking out to their farm as often as I could—that kept me somewhat okay until I turned eighteen and got out of the house.

“I like him,” Clara said as she smiled at the fact that I was still holding onto Pepper.

“Me too.” I smiled back at her. Pepper was definitely coming with me this time.

Sitting here and rehashing all of those terrible memories in my mind made me angry, but Clara had this uncanny way of being able to calm me down. She didn’t even have to say or do much; all she had to do was simply be there with me. There was nothing else in this house that I wanted except for my stuffed dog, and I was about ready to tell her that it was time to leave.

“Hey, since you’re going to be getting rid of most of this stuff anyway,” she said.

“All of this stuff,” I corrected. “Except for the dog.”

“Right, so since you aren’t keeping any of it, would it be okay if I took a few things?”

“Sure,” I said, although I wasn’t sure why she would want any of it. “Take whatever you want.”

I figured that maybe she had seen a piece of my mother’s jewelry that had caught her eye or one of the rare vintage books on the bookcase that she was interested in. But when Clara started rummaging through my father’s clothes, it suddenly dawned on me.

All of a sudden, everything pieced together in my head. The broken farm equipment that hadn’t been even attempted at being fixed since I had gotten into town, the joking comments about not having any money, and the layer of stress that seemed to be always hanging over Scott and Clara as if they were sitting on a sinking ship—they weren’t just broke; they were destitute.

I felt awful for not having seen the signs of this before and realized what they had meant. I had no idea how bad their money situation truly was. To me, I came and saw a thriving farm full of crops ready to be harvested, and my eyes glossed right over all the broken machinery that was necessary to run the farm but impossible to fix without an income. I was so consumed with seeing how beautiful Clara was that my eyes totally missed the fact that she had worn