Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF Page A

her life away from him. She thought it meant she could be normal.
    She didn’t love him though. She cared about him. It was easy to be his girlfriend, but the truth is she’s thought more about Pete since they broke up than she ever did when they were together. Even when they were getting ready to move in together, she never lost time dreaming about the planes of his body or the sound of his laugh—a stare-out-the-window-while-you’re-washing-the-dishes, distracting-as-hell kind of think. Maybe Pete wasn’t wrong when he said she was cold.
    She thinks about Kanelos that way sometimes—the smell of the soap he uses, the sharp cliff of his jaw. She isn’t sure what that means.
      “We should go inside,” she tells her sister now, snuggling closer. The streets have quieted down for the night. Caitlin’s body feels like a furnace beside her, this prepubescent fire Taryn needs to protect and keep lit. “It’s late.”
    “And freezing,” Caitlin points out, sniffling. “Your hair is an icicle.”
    Taryn reaches up and runs a hand through her damp ponytail, still wet and so cold it’s nearly solid. “Fair point,” she murmurs. Caitlin tugs her back inside the house.

Chapter Three
    A week passes. Nick works. He rides with Lynette his next couple of shifts, meets Jerry for a beer at Old Court. He walks the dog. He keeps his head down. He goes for Italian food with an exceedingly chatty friend of his sister Ioanna’s, a single mom with two little boys. Ioanna started trying to set him up once Maddie had been gone for a year, women from book clubs and the playground and her husband’s office; eventually Nick figured out he needed a date about every three months or so to keep her off his back. Path of least resistance, he guesses. Anyway, she means well.
    (She’s nice, the single mom. Nick buys her pasta primavera and a bottle of wine, then goes home and walks Atlas and knows the fault is his alone.)
    Thursday’s his day off, so he heads to Home Depot to get tile for the downstairs bathroom. The house needed to be gutted when he and Maddie first bought it, ancient wiring and water damage. The floors were rotted through the entire downstairs. It’s not like Nick has got anything but time now though, so he’s ripping it all out real slow—taking it apart room by room and putting it back together how he wants it. He’s not sure what he’ll do when he’s done. It’s not a problem he’s likely to encounter anytime soon; the whole upstairs is still a time warp to the seventies, cabbage roses on the wallpaper and pink carpet in all the bedrooms.
    “It’s hideous,” Maddie declared the first time he brought her up. “You can’t be serious.” She’d needed the wheelchair by then, was deliberately sitting on her hands so they wouldn’t twitch. But her smile, her eye roll and her laugh—all of those still worked just fine. “God, really, Nick? Look at the floor.” But her grin was delighted, both of them wheeling her from room to room so she could run a thumb along the avocado-green molding. Before they’d known the Huntington’s would progress so fast, they’d been planning on buying a fixer-upper and flipping it. Still, “I think I had that same wallpaper when I was three,” was Maddie’s final verdict. Her final-final verdict was even firmer—she absolutely didn’t want to put in an offer.
    Two hours later she was screaming at him.
    Nick had tried. He’d sat her down in their own tiny apartment and explained the whole sorry plan, how he wanted it, how this was something they could do together. But all she could say was, “And after I’m gone, what? What happens then, Nick?” She hadn’t liked the idea of him living alone any better than his sisters.
    She wasn’t wrong. In the end, the only room they had time to renovate together was the entryway, stupid and inconsequential. To this day, Nick wishes they’d picked something else. Now it’s just him and Atlas and too much square footage, no