Page 4 of Until Tomorrow (Love Doesn’t Cure All: The Ashwood Duet #1)

Eva

When I was four, my mom was killed after walking into a gas station robbery.

My dad worked long hours between two jobs and did his best, but he didn’t understand me.

He didn’t know how to help me feel better or understand what was happening.

The first time he lost his temper and yelled at me—asking me how the hell he was supposed to help his angry four-year-old—I told him I wanted Fruit Loops.

That a box of cereal would help me feel better.

My mom had been on her way to get my favorite cereal the morning she died.

My dad deflated and took me shopping. He bought me five boxes of cereal and a new stuffed dog. We sat on the couch with bowls of cereal and my favorite movie, The Fox and the Hound. Whenever the feelings were too much or the day was too hard, he sat and ate cereal with me.

I was nine when he died in an accident at the plant he worked at.

I had no one to take me in. When a social worker came to take me into foster care, I packed that stuffed dog and a box of cereal.

She made me go back for clothes—those were more important.

I’d lost my shit when she tried to take the cereal.

My first set of foster parents were horrible, and my second seemed to forget I existed.

By the time I was eleven, I was on my fifth home with a penchant for running away.

They weren’t bad people, but I couldn’t have cared less about them.

The family that took me in had an old treehouse at the back of their yard.

It pressed up to the woods, and several of the neighborhood families shared it.

It became my hiding place. I’d lie there for hours, hugging my stuffed dog to my chest, as I desperately clung to what memories I did have of my parents.

I met Logan there. His family lived two houses down, and he hid in the treehouse to avoid his older brothers.

The first day I met him, I punched him. Oops.

The second day, he asked me why I was so angry.

I hit him again. Not my best moment. On the third day, he asked me how he could help. I didn’t hit him that time.

On the fourth day, he showed up with Fruit Loops in a giant Ziplock bag.

My foster family didn’t believe in sugar.

Logan, thankfully, did. We sat in the treehouse for hours without saying a word until I fell asleep on his shoulder.

It was the first real sleep I’d had in a long time, and we both got in trouble with our families for going missing for almost nine hours because he refused to wake me.

As we got older, he kept little baggies of cereal around for me.

Maybe it was stupid—being so attached to a cereal—but it was all I had left after one of my foster brothers set my stuffed dog on fire.

The cereal was a constant—a source of comfort.

Logan leaned into it with me because he understood its importance.

Which was why it broke me that my husband bought me six boxes.

Because he knew I wouldn’t know how to handle this. The only person I had left… was leaving me.

That was exactly how I ended up in front of our bathroom mirror, naked and eating a mixing bowl of cereal.

I scrutinized every aspect of my body, trying to figure out what part of me led to Logan wanting men instead of me.

I was curvy—I’d always been curvy. My hips would always be a size ten at their smallest no matter what I did.

If I was lucky. Size twelve or fourteen was more like it.

My thighs touched, my stomach was flat but soft, the weight of my boobs meant they weren’t perky as hell like other women.

But I took care of my body. I ate right, I worked out a few times a week to stay healthy, and I used skin care products.

I was curvy, but I looked damn good this way.

I loved my body. No one had been able to make me feel otherwise in over a decade. Until now.

My husband was the opposite of me. He was fit with miles of lean muscle.

Where I was fair-skinned, he was tanned.

His golden blond hair contrasted my nearly black hair, while his pale blue eyes were a stark difference from my dark ones.

He was a walking dream with his suits and wire glasses.

I was reminded of it constantly wherever we went, but never once had I doubted that he could love me as fully as he did, despite what others thought.

Until now…

I shoved another giant spoonful of cereal in my mouth as silent tears rolled down my cheeks. Leaving the half-eaten bowl in the bathroom, I scrounged through Logan’s closet until I found one of the few dress shirts he’d left behind. The sight of so many empty hangers made me cry harder.

What was I supposed to do without him? I didn’t know what my life looked like without his closet of designer suits and the little random things around our home. All his little things were just… gone. Like him.

Except for his pillow. His pillow still sat in its usual place in our bed.

He slept on the left, I slept on the right.

Somehow, we never crossed over the middle.

He kept an extra blanket folded up at the end of the bed because he always got cold in the middle of the night and needed something extra.

I curled around his pillow and buried my face in it, inhaling deeply. The complex notes of his cologne filled my lungs. It broke through whatever little control I had left until I was a sobbing mess.