Sensitive Read Online Free PDF

door. “Mr.

    King, your daughter needs you to know that Johnny didn’t have anything to do with her death and she wants you to stop blaming him for it.”

    I stood there, holding my breath and biting my tongue as Alex ran his thumb along my lower back in a soothing gesture that no one but the ghost could see.

    “How dare you,” he said, starting to swing the door shut. His face stark with anger and pale from shock.

    “Ed!”

    “Quiet, Kelsey.”

    “Ed!”

    I stuck my foot in the door, looking at Molly, begging her for more. I was angry and panicky and a bit put out. It all twisted in my belly, a toxic soup of emotions. I could see her mouth moving but it was really hard to pick Molly’s words out of the ether. But I managed. “She says to…she says to stop calling Johnny on her birthday and hanging up. But only after he knows it’s you.”

    Molly was talking frantically, I was struggling to hear and Kelsey King said, “Ed?

    Do you do that, Ed?”

    “Who are you?” Ed said to me.

    I struggled to hear his daughter above all the ruckus. “I am a friend of…I am a friend,” I finished.
    “She says to stop drinking so much that you pass out on the day she died. That’s no way to remember her.”

    “Ed?” Kelsey said again, her big gray eyes ricocheting between me and him. Her body language said so much of this was news to her.

    “She said that she was the one who got the drugs and that Johnny tried to talk her out of it. She tried them anyway. He…” I shook my head.

    Molly was yelling now but her voice seemed so far away. My upset and her mother’s fear and her father’s anger were all working together to dampen my ability to hear her. Alex said, “He tried to save her.”

    I turned to the Kings and said, “He tried to save her. He even put the drugs in his pocket to preserve her memory. So you would feel better about her. He took the blame.

    And she wishes he hadn’t.” I gushed now that I could hear her. I didn’t breathe. I rushed to push it all out at once. “But they weren’t his, they were hers and she bought them with the money from…”

    Here it was. I could tell by the urgency with which she said it. This was the part that would convince Ed King that his daughter had given him a message. “The money you paid her to help you pick out the pink leather purse for your wife. You spent the day together and you laughed and you joked and you slipped her a twenty to let you take all the credit for the gift,” I breathed.

    Ed King stared at me and his wife took his arm and then his face seemed to fold in on itself and he wept. Hard and long and deeply. It was like watching someone dance naked or have sex. I turned to say something to Molly but Alex squeezed my shoulder and said, “Good job, Harper. She’s gone.”

    * * * * *

    “That seemed too easy,” I said.

    Alex took my hand and we walked up the dark road. So different from the city, this dark moonlit section of road in the middle of the country. The fall wind cut right through my jeans and cardigan and I shivered. Alex, ever the chivalrous angel, took off his loose-fitting duster and draped it around me. “Easy isn’t wrong.”

    I snorted. “That’s why you like me,” I said.

    Not much on the humor, the angelic. He looked confused and then ponderous and said, “I’m not sure why I’m drawn to you but I am.” He turned and put his huge toasty hands on my waist. I didn’t think, I stood on tiptoe and I kissed him.

    “I like you, too,” I said. I remembered seeing him walking somewhat absentmindedly up my road and liking him on sight. Being attracted to his broadness and tallness and darkness. I smiled as he kissed me some more. His hands slipped up under his own coat, cupping my breasts through my sweater. The heat of his skin seeped through the cotton and had my body ready for him that fast. In a blink. In a heartbeat.

    “I’m glad you like me, Harper. Am I allowed to…” Alex walked me backward