Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t.
    But her body was moved seconds later as a man wearing gloves pumped her chest and removed her from the house. Colin’s arms were around me, tight, and the wave of despair was so powerful, I was surprised it didn’t knock me from my feet. I rubbed the fabric of his shirt between my fingertips, as tears slipped down my face.
    Six days later, Colin held me on grass soaked by rain. My heels sunk into the dirt, slowly, as if my body wouldn’t let me leave her alone.
    Alone like I was.
    I placed two white daisies on her mahogany casket as it lowered into the earth, to my best friend’s final resting place. My goodbye was silent, because I was too afraid to speak it.
    Around my wrist was her daisy headband. In my heart was her smile, her laugh, her goodness. I wanted to believe she was leaving those pieces of herself with me, entrusting me to take care of them. Of her. She couldn’t be gone forever, not really.
    We were Ellie and Trista. I didn’t know how to not be a conjunction.

Chapter Four
2011
    “ H e doesn’t love you .”
    She sat in the worn leather chair, reeking of cigarettes and dollar store perfume. Her hair was lifeless and limp, a sharp contrast to how she’d looked when I’d last seen her a year earlier.
    I chose to ignore what she said and sat on the plaid sofa across from her. My grandfather was taking his afternoon nap, which was good because I’d need to wipe down his chair and then air out the house. Too bad I wouldn’t be able to remove her as easily as I would her stench.
    “What’s wrong, Mom? Joey leave you?” My words were placid, my posture unaffected as I lounged on the couch, angling my body away from hers. “Is that why you’re here?”
    She sniffed and I imagined a faint dusting of powder around her nostrils, an image I’d seen in real life too many times to count. “Joey is a nobody,” she said, as if she was trying to convince us both of that fact. “Do you know he hasn’t paid my rent for the last two months?”
    She wasn’t even easing it into the conversation this time—her need for money was quick and angled in a way so that I’d feel pity for her.
    But twenty-two years of her excuses, her mistakes, had sewn themselves to my bones, hardening my spine and my resolve when I said, “You’re not bumming money from Grandpa again.”
    She sneered at me, a curl of her smeared purple lips. The cracks in her face were more pronounced when she did that, from her lips and the lines around her eyes. Life had been hard on my mom—but my mom had been hard on life, too. “You can’t tell him what to do with his money. I’ve got every right to it, more than you.”
    “I never said I had any right to it. I pay for rent here,” I said, gesturing my hand to the tiny trailer.
    She rolled her eyes; her lashes a hundred spider legs, lumped together and scraping her blue eyeshadow. “I just need my money and then I’m out of your way, dear daughter.” Her tone was layered in acid, a product of years of pushing everyone away and then blaming it on them when they stopped resisting.
    “Grandpa leaves tomorrow. He doesn’t have time to entertain you.” I glanced at the clock that ticked above her head, mentally calculating how long we had until he woke up.
    “I know he sold the house—don’t bullshit me. He’s got money.”
    “That he needs to support himself in the assisted living home.” I wouldn’t let her leave with a lick of grandpa’s money. He’d give in, he always did for his wayward only child. “They’re going to bulldoze this place and make way for something else on his land.”
    Finally, I saw a flicker of something in her eyes. They darted around the room, no doubt taking in the mementos along the walls. Did she feel anything beneath her faded leather jacket, beneath the name tattooed on her chest, her boyfriend before Joey’s name in proud black ink?
    I often wondered if her heart was made of something else, if it skipped a beat here or there, and