Bonus Prologue
Day of the accident . . .
Fuck. I can’t believe Liam, my best friend, got hit by a car. My wife, Cassie, called me about thirty minutes ago, telling me that she went down to see a patient in the emergency room, and she saw him get rushed into a trauma bay.
My hands were shaking to the point that I must have dropped my keys about ten times on my way to find my shoes. Finally, what feels like ages after the phone call, I run into the emergency room, breathing hard with tears barely contained. I cannot lose my best friend.
“Ronan, here!” I hear Cassie say as she waves me over to the nurse’s station at the center of the room.
“What’s going on?” I ask, pulling her into my arms.
“They’re not allowed to tell me what’s going on—I’m not his next of kin or his emergency contact.
But Eva here was a doll and accidentally left his file open on her computer while she had to step away from her desk.
” She tilts her head to the nurse pretending to ignore us behind the desk.
“From what I could see in his file, he went out for his morning run when a drunk driver hit him. He has a broken leg and is currently in surgery for that, a broken arm, concussion, broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and multiple cuts and bruises. They brought him straight to surgery, so that means he was stable enough when they brought him in. Now that you’re here, they’ll be able to tell us more.
You’re marked as his emergency contact.”
Hit by a fucking drunk driver. In what fucking world do people think they can drink and drive?
I need to calm down before I have a heart attack.
Taking deep breaths, I spot a set of chairs by the doors leading to the exam rooms, dragging Cass to the chairs by a hand I’m squeezing way too tight. I sit down and calm my thoughts.
“He’s going to be fine. It’s Dr. Isa handling orthopaedic traumas this morning.
You know the woman is a miracle worker, and she only works with the best, so her anesthesiologist is Dr. Night.
The guy doesn’t blink. Liam is going to be as good as new once he’s out.
He’s going to be grumpy and moody before you know it, but at least this time he’ll have something to brood about. ”
She’s trying to make me smile. She’s always going on about how a smile, any smile, even a fake one, or a fake laugh can increase dopamine.
I get what she’s trying to do, but the only thing it’s accomplishing is heightening my blood pressure.
I can’t lose my best friend. Apart from Cass, my sister Sloane, and dad, he’s the only family I have.
Cassie used to joke that he was my lobster.
Breathing out a soft, “Fuck,” I lean back into the chair, letting my head hit the wall and bringing Cass’s hand to my knee, before closing my eyes and thinking back to he first time I met Liam.
It was almost twenty-five years ago. My dad had just moved me and my baby sister to Vancouver from Victoria after mom died giving birth to Sloane.
I don’t know why, but our dad thought it was a good idea to move our small, traumatized family to a new city after losing the glue that kept it happy and moving forward.
Sloane was born in the spring, and that following September I was starting school in a new city.
That first day of school is when I first met Liam Jones.
Cass likes to say we met like starstruck lovers—opposites attract and everything.
She was there too, and says she remembers it like it was yesterday, even though we were all ten years old.
I can’t remember how or why we gravitated toward each other, but we just did.
I don’t even remember what he first said to me that got me laughing for the first time since my mom died, or why he kept frowning the entire time, but it’s something we’ve been doing for the past two decades. Me laughing, and him frowning.
A few hours, a couple of crappy cups of coffees, and a horrible phone call to Liam’s mom, who’s apparently on vacation thanks to Levi and his three brothers, later, Dr. Isa comes out and finds Cassie across the room right away.
“Ronan. I wish we were seeing each other again under different circumstances, but it is what it is, I guess,” she says in a no-nonsense tone.
“You can follow me and I’ll bring you to his room.
I’ll explain to you what I had to do on our way there.
I’m sure Cassie told you the extent of his injuries when you got to the hospital, but I have to warn you, he looks worse than he actually is.
When he first came in, we were worried about the collapsed lung, but we were able to correct that fairly easily and quickly.
It didn’t take him long to completely lose consciousness, and at that point the concern moved to bleeding and the swelling of his brain, but scans showed that that wasn’t an issue, so I was able to go in right away to fix his leg.
Both wrists have fractures as well, but did not require surgery.
The right is in a hard cast and the left in a soft cast. The leg, however, was a mess.
He broke his tibia at two places and his fibula at one spot. ”
Taking a breath, she turns toward me before opening the door to his room.
“It was a bad break, Ronan. He’s going to need extensive rehab to begin to regain function.
To put it bluntly, he’s going to have to re-learn to walk.
From what I understand, he’s a fairly active man, so that will help his recovery tremendously.
When I left him, he was still asleep, but he should be waking up slowly.
Again, I have to warn you, he doesn’t look good.
He has bruises and cuts everywhere, and I had to leave some pins in his leg to help the healing process. ”
Opening the door, she lets Cass and I enter the room first.
Immediately, I feel the tears that I haven’t let fall yet make their way down my cheeks.
She wasn’t lying when she said he looked bad.
I can only hope she’s right when she says he looks worse than he is—he better.
Slowly making my way to his bedside, I drop my hand on top of his before really giving him a look.
At first, he looks peaceful, lying there, which is a miracle considering he has two black eyes and a cut lip.
His blanket is pulled up to his chin, but I can only imagine that his arms and torso are the same tie-dye colors as his face.
My eyes trail down his body until I get to his left leg that’s resting a little higher than the rest and that looks to have a halo around it—must be all the hardware keeping it together.
“You are going to be so pissed when you wake up,” I whisper with a small chuckle, knowing he won’t know what to do with himself, or know how to accept help from anyone around him.
I was right when I told him he was going to be pissed when he woke up.
I swear I saw a nurse cry leaving his room in that first week after the accident before he banned me from coming in.
Let’s not even get started on what I heard him yell at his mom.
Thankfully, finally, after just shy of two months, he’s ready to be an outpatient at a clinic instead of being stuck in the hospital twenty-four seven.
It better change his mood and his shitty attitude.
The guy needs to get his ass kicked—in the most loving way, obviously—but I can’t do that right now, so we’re all stuck with asshole Liam for the time being.
“What do you mean I can’t go home? I thought I was free to go—be an outpatient as of today?”
Shit. I can hear the frustration and anger rolling off his body and I’m not even in his room yet. I was supposed to be the one to tell him that he couldn’t go back home. Why would he think that he could go back to his two-floor walk-up apartment with only one properly functioning leg?
“You didn’t tell him he was moving in with Sloane?” Cass asks, eyes wide. “He’s going to kill you. It was nice knowing you; I’m happy I increased your life insurance last year,” she says, as we enter Liam’s hospital room.
“Did you fucken know about this? She just told me that you knew I couldn’t go back home, you son of a bitch!” he shouts at me the second he lays eyes on me.
“Yes, I knew,” I say sheepishly, scratching at the side of my face.
“Maybe you could leave us alone for this?” I say, turning to the nurse who looks like she, herself, wants to kick his ass, but her professional obligations won’t let her.
With a stiff nod of her head, she leaves the room, closing the door behind her with jerky movements.
She’s not going to be gentle when helping him get dressed later.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks again, still pissed.
“Liam, you’re not the nicest guy on a good day.
The only time you are happy and jolly and not a brooding asshole is with Hannah and Summer, and even then you’re kind of a dick and you barely ever talk to them.
So, really, you’re always a dick. I knew you’d react like this, so I didn’t tell you,” I say deciding to be straight with him.
“But I start an outpatient program on Monday and it’s already Thursday,” he questions.
“That you are . . . in Victoria,” I tell him.
“What the fuck do you mean Victoria?” Anger once again marks his face.
“Sloane bought a house in August—a nice three-bedroom, one-floor house in Victoria. It’s right by the university since she’s working on her PhD, so you won’t have to Uber far to get to your physiotherapy appointments.”
His jaw drops. “You want me to babysit your younger sister?”
“If anything, I think she’ll be babysitting you,” Cassie says, finally making herself known and earning herself a look from me. Of course, that’s what my smart-ass wife decides to say.
With an eye roll, I turn back to Liam. “No, not to babysit. The university has the best rehab program in the area, and she’s the only one that doesn’t have stairs in her house.
All of our bedrooms are either in the basement or the top floor, and I think the doctors were fairly clear when they said you shouldn’t be doing stairs.
Plus, she’s rarely home. She’s always studying and she has like two or three classes to teach a semester on top of that. ”
After over an hour of dealing with Liam’s shit attitude, we finally convince him that this is what’s best for him and that he’d be doing me a favor.
“God, the guy is a pill!” I say, exhausted, once Cass and I are back in my car headed home, after having dropped Liam off to be Sloane’s problem for the next few months.
“It’s not going to work, you know,” she says to me with a smirk.
“What’s not going to work?” There’s no way she knows why I did my damn best to convince Liam to move in with Sloane.
“Your little matchmaking plan. Your sister is going to see right through you.”
Shit. She knows. How could she know?
“Sloane isn’t some little naive ten year old anymore. She doesn’t have a crush on him anymore.”
That’s how she knows. She once asked why Sloane was never around when Liam was around and I finally told her it was because Sloane had the biggest and most obvious crush—borderline obsession—with Liam when she was younger.
That is until Liam pulled a Liam and must have said something to her and she never wanted to be in the same room as him after that.
“She’s not going to fall in love with him. They’re not going to get married and have some weird childhood crush, grumpy-sunshine romance like you love to read about.”
“Hey, you love when I show you what I learn in those books, so don’t bitch. And you have to admit they would be perfect for each other! He could do a lot worse than Sloane and Sloane could do a lot worse than Liam. Plus, I know he won’t hurt her.”
Rolling her eyes at me, she says, “Yeah. Okay. We’ll talk about that. I give her two weeks before kicking him out.”
She doesn’t say anything else on the topic for the rest of the ride, and thank God she doesn’t.
I can’t keep anything from my wife, but I can’t tell her about the bet I made with Liam’s dad, his four younger brothers, and Hannah.
She’s going to want in and she always wins.
They made me promise I wouldn’t let her get in on the action.
Every one of Liam’s brothers, and his parents, even Hannah and her boyfriend wanted Liam to move in with them.
Especially Hannah, since Levi and Ian are on the road all the time for hockey.
She said she had all the time in the world to take care of him.
It took a lot to convince them, but they finally conceded to Liam moving in with Sloane.
They all thought I was nuts for wanting to sic Liam on my younger sister, but Lincoln was the first to catch onto my plan.
Being the closest in age to Liam and me, he saw how Sloane followed him with hearts in her eyes as a kid.
He said it wasn’t going to work. He said he would bet me five hundred bucks that she would kick him out by Christmas.
Mr. Jones overheard and wanted a piece of the action—he bet two hundred on Liam only living there one week before calling someone to come pick him up.
Apparently he and Mrs. Jones have visited my sister more than once and they know how much Liam hates house plants.
Who the hell hates house plants? They clean the air, they lighten a place up . . .
I digress.
Once Mr. Jones was in on the action, he told his other kids, knowing they would want in on the action. Levi has five hundred bucks on two months. Hannah has one hundred bucks on the fact that she knows my plan and “it’s never going to happen.” And Lincoln bet two hundred on six weeks.
I will be a rich man when they all eat their words . . .