Love Him Free (On the Market #1) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,3

her stand over the crib and stroke her fingers through Levi’s baby-soft curls.

“Do you love him, Ema?” he’d ask her.

She wouldn’t look over, but she would pull her hand away and curl it against her heart. “He looks just like your abba.” That’s all she’d ever say. He looks just like your abba.

Simon thought Levi looked like a baby—chubby cheeks and wide dark eyes and drool on his chin. Simon thought he’d like his mother to be there in the mornings to feed him his oatmeal, or at dinner to make sure he ate his smashed vegetables.

But she never was.

Six days after his twelfth birthday—one year before his bar mitzvah—his mom was taking him and Levi to Colorado Springs when everything changed again. Hashem—or the Universe, he wasn’t even sure anymore—decided to rip everything apart again.

He didn’t remember the crash, he just remembered his mother yelling at him because he’d mouthed off. He remembered her crying—and she was always, always crying. He remembered her saying she wished he was more like his father, braver, kinder, able to make everyone smile.

He didn’t remember the way she swerved into oncoming traffic because she’d turned around to yell instead of paying attention. At least, not until much later. All he knew was fear—and exhaustion. Then, tires squealed on the pavement and there was a horn blaring. And then he knew pain. And then darkness.

Simon woke in a hospital bed—aching from every inch of his body. Bubbe was there when he first opened his eyes. She brushed back hair from his forehead and he could tell she’d been crying. He knew that look. He knew that expression of grief and loss. She had never gotten along with her daughter, not after Elisha died, but she had loved her, and Simon knew in that instant she was gone.

“Where’s Levi? Where’s…” He tried to sit up, but his body wouldn’t obey, every inch of him screaming with an unrelenting pain.

Her warm hand on his forehead soothed him, but only just. “He’s fine. He was in his car seat and he was fine. Not a scratch.”

Simon swallowed, his throat painfully raw. “Ema?” he croaked.

“I’m sorry. She never woke up,” was all his Bubbe told him. “It’s just us now, ahva shelli.”

Simon closed his eyes again and hoped the pain wouldn’t last as long as it had when his father hadn’t come home. He wasn’t sure he’d miss her, though.

Levi asked for their mom a couple of times after Bubbe brought Simon home, but he was more fascinated by the cast on Simon’s leg, and the places along his arm, jaw, and his eyebrow that had been stitched together with ugly black thread.

Simon was on crutches during the funeral, the ringing in his ears from trying to manage the pain in his leg and his heart overwhelming him. He barely heard the rabbi speaking over the din, barely understood what was going on—only that it was almost over. Strangers from the temple kissed him on the cheek and hugged Bubbe and promised to be there if they ever needed anything, but Simon didn’t really believe them. He was young, but not so young he couldn’t hear the polite lies in their tone.

It was easier to just go home. To sleep above the bakery and wake to the smells of fresh things baking and know that this was his life. He’d sit at his window at night and work on his Hebrew because his bar mitzvah was coming the same time as the anniversary of her death, and he’d tried not to think about how small it would be. None of his friends wanted to come—and he didn’t blame them, not that he had many he could have blamed. But the affair would be quiet and somber and a little cruel because it wasn’t just the ritual that was making him the man of the house, but that God was slowly but surely whittling away at his family until there was nothing left.

A small tug on his pant leg roused him, and he let Levi clamber into his lap. His soft curls tickled the underside of Simon’s chin as his chubby fingers curled into the front of Simon’s shirt.

“Are you sad?”

Simon almost laughed. He felt too old for such young bones. “I’m just tired, Levi.”

“Wanna sleep in my bed?”

Simon clung a little tighter and a part of him did. A part of him fought back waves upon waves of crashing anxiety that if he let Levi or Bubbe out