Having It All Read Online Free PDF

“Because word is, during that altercation at the Corral, your man was in the process of retaliating…but then you asked him not to. Word is you said you couldn’t bear losing him or seeing him in prison again. Which he would be, if he murdered someone.”
    My throat is a ragged burn. I can’t answer.
    “I guess I’ll just hope evidence turns up that can help me get the bastards who shot at you locked away—along with anyone who might have told them to pull the trigger. Then there will be no one around to threaten you, and no one your man will need to protect you from, you see?”
    I nod and he gets to his feet, hat in hand.
    “Well, maybe just sleep on it, Miss Erickson. A bit of rest has a way of jogging the memory.”
    And he obviously knows that being terrified of losing someone you love does, too.

Chapter Four
    Jenny
    “I never hated hospitals the way that some people do,” my dad says.
    It’s the first thing either of us have spoken in a little while. The clock reads just after four. Anna’s dozing against my shoulder. In a room down the hall, Saxon’s pumped full of painkillers and he’ll be sleeping until morning, at least—and I can’t sit with him, because Pine Valley’s hospital is tiny and now he’s sharing space with a teenager who fell from a window while trying to sneak out of his house. The kid’s parents are sitting beneath the silenced TV mounted in the corner. The mom is sleeping and the dad looks about to nod off. Whatever happened, the kid must not have been hurt too bad. If he was, they’d have shuttled him to the hospital up in Bend.
    I don’t like hospitals or hate them. But I would have guessed my dad hated them. Especially now, when being here must make him think of everything that’s coming for him.
    Or not coming for him. Because I don’t think he’ll wait until he’s in a hospital. I don’t think he’ll make me sit in a room like this. No. He’ll take a ride down to Crater Lake, maybe. It was always one of his favorite runs. And the north road winding up around the caldera doesn’t have guardrails or a shoulder, despite the sheer drop on the other side of the white line. A sick man could just…fly.
    So I can’t even ask him why he doesn’t hate them. The iceberg in my chest has become a glacier moving into my throat. I just look at him instead. He’s not looking back but watching the woman at the nurse’s station.
    His voice is a little rougher now. “They remind me of your mother.”
    Who’d been a nurse, too. She hadn’t worked here. Her scrubs were a different color. But I guess it doesn’t matter.
    I take his hand. Years ago, when I’d first gone to college, I started on a medical track mostly because of my mom. Hoping to carry on some kind of legacy for her, because she hadn’t got much of a chance to make her own. I ended up majoring in organic chemistry, but instead of heading to medical school, I went for a master’s in business admin and started up my brewery. I’ve never regretted it until now. If I’d gone to medical school, maybe I would have known that Saxon wasn’t dying, that his artery wasn’t perforated.
    Instead I brew a lot of beer. I don’t know if I could ever drink enough to make me forget the moment I thought he was dead.
    “And you know what your mom would be doing right now, Jenny? She’d be sitting up at that desk and thinking that all of these assholes just need to go home.”
    “Dad—”
    “He’s right,” Anna mumbles next to me. My pillow of a shoulder has left a big pink splotch on her cheek. She signals to Stone, who nods. “And I need to get going, or Saxon’s going to be really pissed and fire me for falling asleep at the Den tomorrow. You want to crash at my place?”
    “I’m not going.”
    She looks over my head to my dad. I don’t see what passes between them but she nods and stands, stretching her arms and popping her neck. “God, I’m going to feel this crick all week. All right. Call me if you need