Lethal Wedding (Wedlocked Trilogy Book 2) - Charlotte Byrd Page 0,38

her room. But she is too tired to eat them. She opens her eyes briefly but then asks for me to leave her alone.

I end up eating her breakfast alone, sitting at the dining room table and staring at the pile of bills that I have collected on the nearby dresser.

I’m not sure how I could have missed them before. Usually my mother keeps a very tidy house, but recently it has been nothing but a mess.

I find all of her bills in a pile right underneath a framed picture of me from ninth grade. I stare at the boy with braces and pimples and hair that's a little bit too short and a face that's a little bit too chubby and I remember how much I wanted to be a grown-up back then, and how now I wish I could just go back to being a kid again.

I take a deep breath and start going through her bills. Though she hasn't been going through the experimental treatment, she has been incurring a lot of bills for her medications.

By a lot, I mean, in the thousands. I look up the amount of the ambulance bill on my phone.

It's almost four grand. At the bottom of the stack, I find the foreclosure notices.

She has missed the mortgage payment for the last three months, and those are just the payments that I find.

I make myself another cup of coffee as I try to figure out what to do. I finally have a steady job with prospects for the future, but my salary is nowhere near the amount that I would need to cover these payments.

Moreover, it's clear to me now that my mother will need a lot more help than I had realized.

I need to go to North Dakota because I need to do the story, grow my podcast, and hopefully my salary, but I also need to stay here and take care of her.

I can't afford a full-time nurse. She probably makes as much as I do a month.

What the fuck do I do?

I take a deep breath and force myself not to dwell on it for too long.

I need to reach out to Franklin.

I pick up my phone and click on his name.

After a few rings, Aurora answers.

“Shit,” I say into the phone, without realizing it.

“Henry?" she asks.

I sigh loudly and shake my head. The only reason why she would be answering his phone is because she spent the night with him. I feel so stupid.

Of course, she had spent the night with him, they are engaged to be married.

She is his fucking fiancée.

“Franklin is sleeping right now,” Aurora says.

“Okay, whatever, just let him know that I called,” I mumble.

"I'm sorry that I answered his phone,” she says quietly. “I thought it was mine.”

“No, of course, it doesn't matter.”

I can hear that she's about to say something else, but I hang up.

I can't stand to listen to this much longer. I want her back in my life more than I could ever explain or say and now I'm certain that it's never going to happen.

Franklin calls me back later that afternoon.

I get right to the point.

“I can't take that job in North Dakota,” I say that as firmly as possible.

"Why not?”

I’m tempted to lie because I don’t want to talk about this out loud, but he won’t go for it unless I tell him the truth.

“My mom is really sick,” I say, keenly aware of the fact that my voice cracks in the middle of the sentence. I had no idea. “She was keeping it all from me but she has cancer.”

My head starts to pound as I tell him all of the details. He asks questions and listens carefully and then agrees to let me work from home.

“What are you doing tomorrow night?” Franklin asks.

“I don't know, I was supposed to be on the afternoon flight out to Fargo.”

"Well, good, you're free then.”

“Yes, I guess,” I say.

“I'm hosting a dinner party and I'd like for you to come.”

“No, I don't think-”

“Please come,” Franklin says.

The tone of his voice makes it sound like it's not something that I can say no to.

Not wanting to seem ungrateful for him being so understanding of my predicament, I reluctantly agree.

24

Henry

I get to Franklin's building right around 6 o’clock. It's a brand new glass development with luxurious, oversized condos. The lower end ones are around 2000 ft., which may not seem like much but is quite enormous in New York City.

There's a doorman who