Lucky Girl by Jamie Pacton (novels for beginners txt) 📕

of my mom. It’s like all this junk on the lawn is her heart and her illness, just poured out for all the world to see. And I don’t want Holden seeing that.

“I hate you,” I mutter.

“But you need me.” He stands up. “Think about it. I’ll give you two days before I tell the police you bought a lotto ticket as a minor.”

“You can’t prove anything. I destroyed the tape.”

Holden shakes his head and holds up his phone. “I still have this.”

It’s a picture of me, holding a lotto ticket. You can’t make out the numbers, but it’s clearly something I could get in trouble for. Or at the very least something that would make the police investigate and cast doubts on anyone else who cashes the ticket for me.

“So you’re blackmailing me? That’s your evil plan?”

“Think of it as I’m giving you a deadline to help you do the right thing.”

“Fuck you, Holden,” I say, standing up.

He cringes. And then his eyes harden. It’s like watching him turn from the boy who might do the right thing with the money into someone else.

“Love you too, Jane. Let me know by Sunday at midnight.” Holden walks back to his car. I somehow manage to not throw a broken dump truck at him as he pulls out of my driveway.

Hot tears stream down my face as Bran gets out of his car and walks over to me.

“You okay?” Bran asks. “What did he say?”

In a halting voice, I fill Bran in on Holden’s proposal.

“Don’t decide tonight,” Bran says. “Maybe we can come up with something. You want to stay over at my house?”

I shake my head. I’m exhausted and just want to curl up in my own bed. “I’m going to take a shower and sleep. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Bran gives me a hug and then drives away. Once he’s gone, I try to make sense of things.

So, my ex-boyfriend is my best option for cashing the lotto ticket.

But he’s also blackmailing me, so naturally I don’t want to give him anything.

But what other choice do I have?

My heart is still in pieces. When does this hurt get easier? Why let anyone close if it’s just going to end badly?

This is so much worse than I thought.

I do need Holden to cash this ticket, but I deeply don’t want him to have any of this money.

What am I going to do?

“Go take a shower,” I say out loud to myself. “You can figure out everything else from there.”

Heeding my own advice, I head into my house.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, I SLEEP IN WAY LATER THAN I MEAN TO because I was up half the night, worrying about the lotto ticket. I stumble out of bed and make my way down the hallway. A bunch of shoes fall as I squeeze past Mom’s door. She’s nowhere in sight, but her door is cracked.

“Mom?” I call, pushing open the door ever so slightly.

My breath catches in my throat as I flick on the light. I haven’t been in this room in years. When we moved back after Dad died, Mom and I retreated to our own corners of the house. Grandma’s room was in between ours, and we somehow staked out our own territories. I didn’t disturb Mom’s space. She didn’t disturb mine.

But oh my God. I should have looked in on Mom a little sooner. If the rest of the house is any indication of how grief has shaken her, her room is an intimate portrait of just how lonely and heartbroken she is.

I step inside the room, and it’s like stepping backward in time.

Everything looks exactly the same as it did in Mom and Dad’s old bedroom from our house in Nashville. She’s painted the walls the same shade of turquoise, the bedspread is the same gray one, all the same photos—including ones of me from the time I was a baby until I was twelve—hang on the wall. Mom’s dresser is crowded with a jewelry box, photos, and books. Dad’s dresser, which I didn’t even know she still had, is sitting in the same way it used to, below a window, and on top of it is a half-empty bottle of his cologne and a pile of his books that still have bookmarks in them. Stacks of newspaper cover the floor, and there are boxes all over the room. Carefully, so I don’t knock anything over, I walk to the dresser and pick up the cologne, spraying a small bit in the air.

Instantly, my dad is in the room with me. Putting his arm around me after a tough day at school. Taking a walk with me outside and lending me his sweater because it was chilly.

I inhale deeply, wanting to savor this moment with my dad’s ghost. Which is, of course, what Mom must do. Putting down the bottle of cologne, I walk toward the bed. It’s not made up, and one side has clearly not been slept on. Somehow, there’s a space that’s exactly Dad-shaped there. Mom must fix the pillows in such a way to keep it.

It’s both incredibly sad and a bit creepy.

Moving away from the bed, I open the closet doors. Half the clothes are Mom’s and half are Dad’s. I didn’t even know she’d kept all his things. Why keep a dead man’s clothes in a closet?

Because he’s gone, that’s why. And this is how she can have some small part of him still here.

Even so, this sanctuary Mom has built to him can’t be helping her heal. I run my hand along one of Dad’s old sweaters. It’s dark blue and has patches at the elbow. Surely Mom won’t miss it among the other three dozen or so shirts in the closet.

I pull it from the hanger and slip it over my T-shirt. It feels a little bit like I’m wrapping myself in armor. Or in the strength of my firefighter father, who would march into a burning