Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,63
us a snack,” he announced. “You still a Snickers girl, or have we moved on to Twix?”
Fuck the candy. I was a Camden Cole girl, any and every way he came.
Or at least I wanted to be.
Camden stayed with me that night, wedged in the bed beside me, holding me close and prattling on about anything and everything that had happened to him over the last few years. He missed his prom because of his appendix, which was an awful story but got me a great shot of his abs when he showed me the scar. He laughed through the entire story of how he used Stewart and Cole Worm Farm as the basis for his accounting class project. Camden was valedictorian of his senior class and had been granted so many scholarships that his full first year at college was practically paid for. I smiled more in that time than I had in all the years he’d been gone combined.
Joe worked his magic and found a two-week inpatient program for me that was going to cost him a small fortune, but he’d just smiled and told me it was a small price to pay to get his second daughter happy and healthy.
Have I mentioned that Joe Hull was the absolute best? I didn't deserve him, either.
But I was hell-bent on getting there.
When it came time for Camden to leave the next day, it felt like I was losing an integral part of myself. He made me swear to call if I ever needed anything, but with renewed hope and a second chance at life, I prayed I wouldn’t have to. I wanted to be able to call him when I wasn’t a burden.
It was the first time we’d ever been together and didn’t exchange the ten-dollar bill, but if I was going to get through the next few months and years, I needed as many reminders of what I was fighting for as I could get.
I couldn’t expect, nor would I ever ask, Camden to wait on me. We’d shared one kiss and immeasurable love in the seven years we’d known each other; however, he had a life to live too. I wanted the world for Camden Cole even if I wasn’t the one who could give it to him.
I needed to find the real Nora Stewart again, and while leaning on him for support would have been easy to do, it wouldn’t have been fair or healthy for either one of us. We agreed that if he ever passed through Clovert, he was bound by pinky promise law to find me immediately. And if I ever found myself in New York—yeah, right—I was required to do the same.
Letting him go was bittersweet but necessary. And it only made it that much more satisfying when, three years later, I finally got the chance to repay him for being there on the day that ultimately saved my life.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, hugging a random old lady for the billionth time that day. My mom stood beside me, looking every bit the part of the devastated widow despite the fact that my parents hadn’t shared a bedroom in almost five years.
“He was such a good man,” old lady number twelve hundred and seventy-eight said, giving my hand a squeeze.
I nodded and forced a tight smile.
A few days earlier, my dad had dropped dead of a heart attack in my parents’ driveway while climbing in his truck to go to work. It was truly shocking. I hadn’t known that my dad had a heart until that day.
It was weird thinking how I’d never be the butt of one of his jokes again—a relief but still weird.
Old lady number twelve hundred and seventy-nine stepped up. “He’d be so proud of you.”
Yeah, right. When I was a kid, I’d always assumed when I got older and bigger—maybe more coordinated—he’d be proud of me. In my twenty-two years, that day never came.
My cousin Jonathan scoffed. “He probably died to avoid being embarrassed anymore.”
Now, it should be noted that Jonathan wasn’t a prepubescent kid who had spent the last decade trapped in time. In fact, he’d grown up quite a bit. Jonathan Caskey was a twenty-six-year-old police officer in Clovert now. In a true show of how fucked up that side of my family was, he’d carried a framed picture of Josh with him the day he’d graduated from the police academy. At least that was what I had been told.
There was no fucking