My So Called Life (Love Not Included Series Book 3) Read Free Page A

only to provide disturbing lies to strangers,” I bark at him. To my relief I don’t know any people by the names of Amy and John Bishop.
    Then he gives me the chilling news that sets me in my place. Maiden name Amy Daniels, now married to John Bishop.
    Officer Belmont explains that yesterday afternoon a truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and drove his semi into oncoming traffic. My sister and her husband were killed instantly.
    Amy.
    My sister.
    I haven’t seen her in six years. I didn’t even know she was married.
    I wasn’t always this stuck up and prestigious. Once upon a time, I was born in a small town in Oregon called Ashford. I grew up there with my older sister by six years and a drunk of a mother who drank her life away because our father decided we were not in his life plan. We lived in a rundown house, surviving on food stamps and whatever we could get our hands on before our mother could blow our money on booze.
    My childhood was far from the fairy tale I live now. While most kids were playing with dolls and having sleepovers, I was hiding with my sister in closets, trying to avoid the next beat down from our drunken, hysterical mother. The abuse wasn’t always physical, at least not for me. Amy always blocked most swings and took the pain for her own. Mine were mostly mental. The yelling and hatred that poured from our mother’s lips about how we took away her happiness. “You made him leave me” was her favorite saying. “If you were born boys, my husband would still be here.”
    My childhood and well into my teenage years were definitely what you would call unhealthy. Having the one who was supposed to love me the most use hatred to wound my young mind made my childhood a struggle. Amy constantly reassured me that her sour words were not true. That our mother loved us and she was just sick. Things were going to get better. She spent just as much time protecting me as she did defending our mother.
    This went on for years until I just couldn’t take it anymore. Just after I hit nineteen, I left on the first bus I could afford out to California. I was done taking care of a woman who didn’t lift a finger to take care of us. I was a daughter too. I was the child who needed to be taken care of. Instead, I spent my adolescence cleaning up vomit and dodging child protective services so they wouldn’t take us away.
    Amy, of course, fought me over leaving. She begged me to stay. But I couldn’t. I had dreams. And as much as there were some things urging me to stay, I couldn’t stick around one minute longer to watch our mother suck us both dry of those aspirations. We fought the day I left. I told her she was letting our mother ruin her life. To just let her die. We owed her nothing. Her simple one-sentence rebuttal was: she is our mother.
    Well, she wasn’t mine. She was no mother to me, and I was done.
    The last time I had a real conversation with my sister was two years later when she called to tell me that our mother was dead. She asked me to come home for the funeral. I, of course, said no. Like a bitch.
    At that point in my life I just started at St. Markey and I had a showing that seemed more important to me than sending my mother into the grave. She never loved us, so why should I interrupt a life that was becoming successful for someone who never cared about me? I chose not to go home, and my sister and I fought. She told me I was being selfish and didn’t care about anyone but myself. She may have been right but I was doing something for once in my life and that was looking out for me. She accused me of not caring about the life she’d made for herself, and I never even bothered to ask what that life was. That was the last time I spoke to her. I never reached out after that day to inquire about her life. I let our silly fight blow up into something bigger than what it should have been, and I refused to make contact with her. That was almost four years ago.
    And now she’s