Page 151 of By A Thread

I shook my head. “No. It’s the situation, the disease, that are hard to…” Talk about. Deal with. Face.

“I can’t begin to imagine,” he said quietly. He tucked me back into him, those hands stroking paths up and down my back. Comforting. Soothing. Turning me the eff on.

“He was the one person who never let me down,” I told him. “The one person whose love for me I was always absolutely certain of. To have that taken away? To have the man still here but to lose everything that made him Dad? It’s a devastation I didn’t know could exist.”

Dom held me, and Brownie decided to get in on the action too. The dog danced on his hind legs to give my knee a slobbery lick.

“How did you end up being responsible for him?” Dom asked. His lips brushed their way down my neck.

“I lived in Boulder for a few years and didn’t notice the early signs for a while. He’d always been absentminded, forgetful. But things were getting worse. Dad’s neighbors kept an eye on him for me. None of us realized just how quickly things were deteriorating until he went missing last summer.”

Dom stiffened, but his hands stayed gentle.

“I was on a plane home when the cops found him in a park ten blocks from his house. He couldn’t remember where he lived. They dumped him in this horrible state-run facility.” A shudder rolled through me just remembering the dirty linens, the stench, the windowless rooms. “Every day there was a special kind of torture, knowing that your loved one is suffering and ignored. I moved him out of it as soon as I could get him in a spot in a nicer place. But it was so expensive.”

“Doesn’t he have insurance? Retirement savings?” he asked.

I stroked a hand over Brownie’s soft fur and sighed. “Normal health insurance doesn’t cover nursing homes. He’s got a pension and Social Security, which go directly to the home. Which, did I mention, is astronomically expensive? Medicaid’s skilled nursing coverage is tricky and limited. And, as it turns out, my parents are still married. Something I didn’t know until I started digging through the paperwork.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“Her finances, if she would bother responding to my emails, count against my father, and I can’t complete the paperwork without them. Plus, here’s the kicker, about a year before all of this happened, my mother—and I use that term in the loosest possible definition—realized she still had access to all of Dad’s accounts.”

Dom’s fingers flexed into my back.

“She helped herself to everything he’d saved. She took it all,” I said.

“What the hell kind of monster is she?”

My laugh was humorless. “That’s just it. On paper, she’s a saint. She’s been gallivanting the world, building wells, raising money for vaccines, giving speeches. I haven’t talked to her since the day she left when I was eleven. But every once in a while, usually when tequila is involved, I’ll Google her.”

“She abandoned you,” he said.

“She did. She left me and my father, saying the world had a bigger calling for her than wife and mother.”

“Fuck her.”

His unwillingness to cut the woman who gave birth to me any slack was sweet and satisfying. “The irony is she’s doing good things.”

“Probably because she gets off on the attention,” he guessed.

I rewarded him with a smile. “She got an honorary doctorate for her fundraising work for Sudan. She goes by Dr. Morales now. She gave a TEDx Talk about worldwide empathy. Nonprofits pay her as a consultant so she can tell them how to make people care.”

“Why did she take the money?” Dom asked.

I shrugged. “She’s a virtual stranger to me. But I did some sober sleuthing and discovered she founded her consulting business right around the same time she helped herself to Dad’s accounts. Oh, and I also found out her boyfriend won the United Nations Public Service Award.”

“While her husband is on the verge of being kicked out of a nursing home for nonpayment. What are you going to do about her?”

“I can’t afford to do anything about her. Not yet. First order of business is to get Dad’s house ready to be put on the market. Once it sells, the money will be enough to keep him in the home for years. He’ll be safe. If there’s enough money left, I’ll hire a lawyer. I don’t care to see her or speak to her or listen to an impassioned speech about how she deserved the money more. I just want every dime of my father’s savings back.”

“How bad is the house?” he asked.

I winced. “Not terrible,” I said, feeling the heat flare up on my neck. “I mean, it’s nowhere near ready for sale. There was a little plumbing mishap. I’m doing as much of the work as I can myself.”

“Ally,” he said. And I knew that Caretaker Charming was dying to be let off his leash to fix everything.

“It’s fine. This job saved me, saved my dad. The salary helps a lot, and your stupid no outside employment clause is giving me the time to actually do more than half an hour of sanding floors and mudding drywall at a time. Everything is going to be fine.”