My Boyfriend and Friends Stole My Heart Surgery Fund for Their Trip novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: The Woman from Tampa

By the time I turned back to the tent, Bree was gone.

Her green dress had crossed the lot while everyone was looking at me, and a small white car was pulling out onto the road.

Nobody had stopped her.

The veteran in the cap was shaking Dillon's hand, and then letting go of it, and then standing there not knowing what to do with his own.

I took the woman from Tampa to a quiet corner by the service bay and sat her down on an upturned tire crate.

Lorcan stayed three steps away with the dog, and I was grateful.

"I'm sorry I'm late," she said.

"You drove all night."

"I've been driving for four years." She smiled, and it broke in the middle. "Your text was the first time anyone said she did it to them too. Everyone else said I must have misunderstood."

"Who's everyone?"

"My mother. My lawyer. The detective." She put the binder on her knees. "I signed every slip. I'd lost my father that spring. I couldn't read a form."

"Bree walked you through them."

"She held my hand and a pen."

"What happened to him? Your boyfriend."

"He lives in Georgia. He sends me a card at Christmas with no return address." She opened the binder. "He didn't plan it. He's not smart enough. He was lonely and he owed money, and she told him how."

I looked at the pages.

She had kept everything.

Withdrawal slips, bank letters, a printed text thread that went on and on, Bree writing, I just want you to be okay, I'm always here.

In the margin of one slip, in careful purple ink, was a tiny drawing of a heart.

"She does that," the woman said. "She draws a heart on everything she touches."

I thought of the heart on the phone's contact for her, and the card in the lilies.

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