Free Missing Hart by Ella Fox Page B

in her? How many times had she made me laugh? It felt like the answer to each question was thousands. My best friend was gone and I’d never see or speak to her again. The weight of that thought was soul crushing.
    I lay there for hours, remembering the hundreds of things about Marissa that I had loved so deeply. Eventually I drifted off to sleep where I was plagued by dreams where I would see Marissa alive and discover that the entire thing had just been a misunderstanding.
    Just before dawn the following morning, I woke up disoriented. A million thoughts ran through my mind in under two seconds and I started to panic, but I calmed down when my senses processed Dillon’s scent. For a moment I felt like a hideously terrible person for taking any kind of comfort at being wrapped in his comforter and sleeping in his bed. My best friend was dead, and I had no business having any gooey feelings toward her husband, regardless of the fact that their marriage hadn’t been traditional.
    I needed to get up and do something normal, so I snuck into the hallway bathroom and took a shower. Leah had lent me a tee shirt the night before to wear today, and since I washed my underwear in the sink the night before I was at least presentable. After braiding my damp hair, I curled back up in Dillon’s bed with the note that Marissa had left me, trying to find the strength to read it. I wrestled with it for the better part of an hour but in the end I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t ready, at least not yet.
    Dillon and Leah were both up and sitting on the couch when I wandered out into the living room. The good news was that they weren’t sitting in silence. The bad news was that the only noise came from the TV and it was tuned to the weather channel. They clearly weren’t focusing on the television, instead just sitting side by side as they held hands. Overall it was an improvement from the night before, so I felt a bit of relief. Every day would be another step forward but, somehow, we would all get through this. There wasn’t any other option.
    We spent the morning choosing a funeral home and dealing with all of the details. Dillon said very little at the funeral home, but I could tell he was worried about something. When we left, Leah cornered him and got him to admit that he was currently in no position to put out thousands of dollars for Marissa’s cremation and services since all of the money that they had in savings had been eaten up by the move. Leah told him that she would give him all of the money that she had in savings to help, but he immediately shot her down.
    “Absolutely not, Lee. This isn’t your responsibility. I’ll talk to the funeral director later about a payment plan or I’ll get a credit card. I didn’t say I couldn’t do it, I just said that it was going to be hard because the timing is bad.”
    The sheer fact that we could see that he was worried, compiled with the fact that he admitted that he was, told me that while he could figure it out, he shouldn’t have to do it at the spur of the moment.
    After we were finished at the funeral home, Dillon drove us to the spot that we now knew that Marissa had left her car. We all did our best not to look around for any visible signs that something horrifically terrible had happened the day before. I volunteered to drive her car back to Dillon’s, but since we had agreed earlier that I would be the one to tell everyone at work that Marissa had died, I told them it would take me some extra time to get there.
    I fully planned to go to work, but my first order of business was to go back to the funeral home to pay for the funeral. Although I was allowed to, I had never spent any of the money I made working at the bookstore. In addition to my work earnings, I had money in my account that was an accrual of the trust fund my grandfather had left. To me, to all of my siblings, that money was blood money. None of us had ever touched it. Dante and Damien had already given