Forbidden Read Online Free PDF Page B

The uniformed cop had been assigned to watch over Docia, since technically this had been anattempted murder. The detectives thought it was some kind of sick prank, but just in case it was otherwise, and because Docia was like a sister to half the SPD, they were keeping a careful eye on her.
    “I’m going to leave in a few,” Jackson said.
    “Don’t worry. She’ll never leave my sight.”
    “You better take a whiz now if you need to,” Jackson said sternly, eyeing the coffee in the man’s hand.
    Tolly gave him a patient smile, but he put his cup down and headed for the bathroom.
    Docia took a breath of the cold, crisp air. A winter storm was moving in, and she could feel it all around her. It had been only three days since she’d awoken in intensive care; Jackson had barely let her out of his sight for all three days, and when he had, he’d sicced Officer Tolliver on her ass like some kind of rabid pit bull. The man would sit in the hallway and she could swear he never blinked. He didn’t so much as flip through a magazine to pass the time. He’d just sit there on high alert, eyeballing everyone who came down the hallway.
    It was a little creepy.
    Yet comforting.
    Earlier today, much to everyone’s surprise, she was discharged and Jackson had brought her home. Tolliver was back at his regular beat and Jackson was trying his best to babysit her. But she didn’t want sitting. It had taken a thirty-minute argument to get him to leave her long enough to get some groceries for her neglected fridge. She welcomed the time alone, seeking normalcy. And fresh air. And walking. Even though her car sat happily repaired in the driveway, she wanted to walk. Even though it was nighttime and the storm was obscuring the clean black sky and all of its sparkly little stars, she wanted to be out in the midst of it. She stood on the sidewalk, staring back at her porch … her saferporch … and made a good show of turning up her nose at it. Safer schmafer. She wasn’t going to let a couple of deviant sadists destroy her love of the town she had grown up in.
    But she couldn’t make her feet move away from the front of her tiny little cottage house and that very safe little porch only a driveway’s distance away.
    Enough of this! You are strong. You are capable! Enough!
    Ever since the accident, she’d found herself lecturing herself in this strident, confident voice. It was more confident and willful than she thought she was, but she appreciated its energetic stubbornness. It gave her a steadiness to her backbone just when she needed it most.
    It allowed her to put one foot ahead of the other, to begin a walk along the familiar sidewalks of her block. She kept turning her face up to the sky, as though the sun might be there and she could drink in the heat and light. Except there was no sun. It was a beautiful darkness and a crispy coldness, and she was waiting for those deep black-and-gray clouds to start spitting cold flakes at her. Docia took an extraordinary amount of pleasure in the walk, each and every step, and she realized it was because, for all intents and purposes, she shouldn’t even be there. Every doctor, every nurse … every person who had come into contact with her couldn’t understand how she had survived. They couldn’t help being amazed at the way she’d healed from an inch or two past death to this … this walking, breathing person with another chance at life. Knowing that made every nuance of her walk touch her in sharp, beautiful ways. The rasp of cement beneath her sneakers, the distant barking of someone’s dog and the way it sounded more goofy than threatening … the rustle of her puffy winter coat, which was such a poor replacement for theone she’d rediscovered at the beginning of the season, which she’d been told had been cut away, destroyed, and discarded by EMTs with no interest in preserving her hard-won fashions. They’d preferred to attempt to preserve her hard-won life, and she was okay