Love In Secrets (Love Distilled #3) - Scarlett Cole Page 0,8
hours earlier.
Jake reached for her hand, linking their fingers, and squeezed tight. They’d always been close, and there would be no other way to get through this, whatever it was, without each other.
Donna Levin, a nurse who lived two houses down the street from her father, walked through the door opposite them.
“Cassie,” she said, reaching from her hands. “I’m so sorry about your Dad. Officially, the doctor can’t speak to you. Next of kin rules and all that. But I know your dad would want you informed.” She looked around and then stepped a little closer. “I could lose my job for this, but unofficially, here’s what I know.”
Cassie nodded, and the two of them stood to hear what Donna had to say.
Cassie was quiet in the truck, on the way back home and Jake left her to her thoughts.
While Donna had been willing to spend time talking with her and filling in the blanks she had about her father’s condition, she’d been unable to let her see him or stay in the ICU. Instead, she’d encouraged her to go home and get some rest. There would be no change in her father’s condition overnight.
It was nearly two in the morning when he pulled into the driveway of his single-story home in Morrison, twenty minutes west of Denver. When he’d bought it, it had been a run-down mess, inhabited by the same man from his birth to his death. Ugly green bathroom, sticky lino tiles in the kitchen, and mold on at least five interior walls complete with peeling wallpaper had greeted him.
But he’d seen what it could become. And being a man handy with power tools, he’d relished the idea of having a place with so much raw potential.
He’d torn the place back to its bones to treat every structural problem it had. And he’d moved in as soon as the place was safe, even though the interior walls hadn’t yet been reconstructed.
Gently, he shook Cassie. “Cass, sweetheart. We’re here.”
She jumped slightly, as if confused for a second. He could imagine how disorientating the whole day had been.
Cassie rubbed her hand over her face. “Sorry for falling asleep.”
“Not a big deal. It’s like four in the morning for you. Time for bed.”
Jake opened the door to his truck and busied himself getting her suitcase and bag out of the back while Cassie pulled herself together.
“Wow, your home looks beautiful. So different from when you bought it.”
He looked at the pale gray and white exterior. “New siding, new door, and new windows can do that to a place. Dad and Emerson did all the landscaping. My thumbs are black, not green. Emerson still comes over to help me prune and keep everything alive.”
Cassie smiled. “Your dad was always such a great gardener, wasn’t he? I remember roses climbed all over the front wall of your house. Every color you could imagine.”
Warmth rushed through Jake, and he couldn’t decide if it was the memory of his father or the way Cassie smiled at him. He’d always thought the combination of her glacial blue eyes and hair so black it was almost blue when the light caught it right were her best features. But her smile was doing something to him right now that he didn’t want to think about.
He shook the thoughts from his head, putting it down to a painfully long day and emotional upheaval.
“Yeah, he loved roses. Well, Mom did. He planted most of them the year before she was diagnosed. And then when she was sick, he planted even more because she wanted to be able to see them from her bedroom window.”
His gut clenched at the thought of his mom. She’d been the one person who understood his frustration with traditional education. She understood how he was intelligent enough to comprehend every concept teachers threw at him but wasn’t able to thrive in a school environment. When teachers tried to write him off as stupid, she’d stood by him, encouraging test after test until they’d fully understood that he simply needed to be taught in a different way. That he didn’t learn by sitting patiently at a desk, but by doing. By creating. By taking something apart and rebuilding it until he understood the role and purpose of every moving component.
Repetition, tests, and homework worked in complete opposition to what he’d needed. And he wondered how many kids like him struggled because they had parents who would rather allow an outdated, standardized education system to throw labels