Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 71843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 359(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
DECEMBER 2020
Hello, all, welcome to He Said, he said, December 2020. Since there was leftover excitement from November, I’m going to tell you that and save all our holiday shenanigans for January.
So, for starters, Aaron got his days messed up. He thought Hannah’s birthday, on the 28th, fell on a Monday this year, but in fact, it fell on a Saturday. I didn’t correct him at the time, I must have been zoning, but he got it all worked out and ended up renting a bowling alley for the right day. But then there were new stay-at-home orders, so plans changed, and Hannah decided to have a birthday caravan instead.
What she did was she filled up her father’s monster SUV with ten of her favorite people, including five of her best friends; her cousins, Dane’s kids, Robert and Gentry; her brother, who drove; and, of course, Jake and Harper. The eleven of them, on a schedule, drove from one end of Chicago to the other, stopping at different houses so that everyone got to see Hannah on her special day. It started at one in the afternoon, and was supposed to go until nine, when Hannah would return home to have dinner, cake, and hang out with her grandparents, other cousins, friends, and basically anyone else who wanted to drop by and see her until midnight. It was a birthday open house, except in the backyard instead.
After the traditional birthday morning chocolate chip pancakes and our annual going through her baby book, I waved goodbye to her from the porch. She was wearing a neon-purple ballgown, because why not, and a rainbow-colored rhinestone tiara. Kola was careful, as always, backing Sam’s monster SUV out of the driveway, and they were gone. Since Hannah was out all day, Sam went with Dane, and Duncan and Aaron, to a gun club to shoot, and Aja came over to help me bake for later in the evening. When the doorbell rang, Aja hopped off the counter, where she was sitting, and went to answer it before I threw something.
“No more!” I yelled after her.
“I know,” she snapped back at me but then, in the open doorway, gasped seconds later.
I didn’t respond because things had been arriving all morning, and I was at the end of my rope. Pausing the filling of the muffin pan, I did a slow turn to look at her.
“Uhm,” she murmured, smiling at me with lots of teeth. “Where would you like them to set up the ice freezer, darling?”
“No,” I said.
She cleared her throat. “Love, there’s an ice sculpture in an ice freezer that needs to be dealt with.”
I growled at her.
Leaning sideways, grabbing her mask from her purse hanging on one of the hooks near the door, she slipped outside, closing the door gently behind her.
Minutes later, she came back inside, stuffing her mask in the side pocket of her bag, and darted over to me.
I growled at her again for good measure.
“It’s really not that bad,” she assured me, defending Satan, otherwise known as Aaron Sutter. “Yes, there’s an ice sculpture, or, I should say, ice sculptures, plural, for each of the tables, but there’s only four of them.”
“Long or short.”
“Long,” she told me, “but the good part of this is that you’ll have no cleanup. They brought tablecloths and napkins, plates and silverware, and chairs, of course, and they’re putting up fairy lights now.”
I glared at her.
“The tent’s coming in half an hour.”
“The tent?” I whimpered.
She put her hands up. “They have portable heaters too, and really, it’s going to be lovely.”
“Not with all the blood splattered around after I murder him.”
“Listen, the menu sounds great; there’s a meat and vegan option, and they have twelve different kinds of sparkling soda.”
“Of course they do.”
“And there’s gelato to complement your cupcakes and birthday cake, and homemade whipped cream, and what looks like a pumpkin cheesecake.”
I massaged the bridge of my nose.
“She’s only turning sixteen once.”
My gaze met hers.
“She’s a very lucky girl to have a godfather that––”
“You and Dane are her godparents,” I reminded her. “Sam and I die, you get her until she’s eighteen.”
“And I would watch over her like a hawk for the rest of her life, you know this,” she soothed me. “But like it or not, she adores that man, and he dotes on her because she is the absolute apple of his eye, so you really can’t blame him for how upset he got.”
Wait. “Back up. What?”
Her eyes widened. “What?” she asked, her normally deep, sultry voice suddenly high and tinny.
I turned to face her. “No, no, no, spill now.”
She bit her bottom lip. “He told me he told you.”
“He lies,” I stressed to her. “I bet he didn’t make eye contact the whole time he was talking.”
“Let me think.”
“No,” I ordered. “Tell me now.”