Free The Afterlife series Box Set (Books 1-3) by Willow Rose

when I do, she always tries to distract me with something else.”
    I had to admit that sounded like a good plan.
    “Okay,” I said. “Can you distract me then?”
    He smiled and put a hand through his sand-colored hair.
    “Sure. Give me a second,” he turned around and started walking but then stopped. He looked at me again.
    “By the way, my name is Jason,” he said.
    “I’m Meghan.”
     
    He was only gone for a few seconds but that was enough time for me to worry that someone else in the house would wake up and find me here. Also I had started wondering what my friends were doing on the other side of the mirror. They had gotten awfully quiet and since they had tried to pull my hand, they didn’t seem to have tried anything else. Knowing them, I guessed they had run and left me here.
    “I found the perfect distraction,” I heard Jason’s voice say. He had come back to the bathroom and was holding something in his hands. He showed me what it was.
    “You have got to be kidding!” I said. “A puzzle?”
    He smiled again. I was about to burst into laughter. I hadn’t made a puzzle since I was a kid. At first I thought he was trying to make me laugh, but little by little I realized that he was serious.
    “It is not any kind of puzzle; it has eight thousand pieces. Believe me, it will work,” he said and took off the top of the box. Then he tipped out the many pieces on the white bathroom tiles. Then he took a big piece of cardboard and placed it next to the pieces.
    “We’ll make it on the cardboard. I always do,” he said and looked up at me with anticipation in his brown eyes.
    “What? I can’t even reach them. I am stuck, remember?”
    “You can tell me which ones to pick and where to put them.”
    I sighed. This had to be by far the stupidest thing anyone had ever suggested to me. He turned the top of the box and showed me the picture. It was very beautiful—a woman and a man kissing in the window of her bedroom.   
    “It’s Romeo and Juliet,” I said. “The eternal story of two who can never have each other.”
    Jason looked at the box. “I guess you’re right. My mom gave it to me. It’s good for me to have something to do, she says. So I won’t think too much.”
    “What do you worry about?”
    He gave me a curled smile.
    “Nothing … and everything, I guess.”
    I sighed. “Listen. This will take forever to make, and I really have to get back soon.”
    I didn’t want to break Jason’s heart, but a puzzle wasn’t really me and especially not now, when I was this stressed out and in kind of a panicky mode.
    He looked up at me while showing me a corner piece. “I found the first one,” he said and looked at the picture on the box. “It looks like this goes in the right upper corner.”
    He placed the piece on the cardboard. “There,” he said and smiled like he had finished the whole eight thousand pieces.
    I couldn’t help smiling. “Only seven thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine to go,” I said.
    He didn’t seem to mind my reluctance. He just kept going and soon some of Juliet’s face had grown out of the pieces. I kept pulling my arm but the more I did, the more it seemed to be stuck. I was really getting tired of this situation, but didn’t know what to do. So I stared at Jason who was eagerly building the puzzle on the floor in front of me. Now I saw him searching for a piece of Romeo’s hat. As his fingers went through the pile of pieces I saw the red hat with the green feather. Jason didn’t seem to have seen it and just kept looking.
    “There,” I said and pointed with my free hand. “His hat. It was right there on your right.”
    Jason searched and picked out the piece. Then he looked at me with a smile.
    “That’s the one I was missing. Thanks,” he said, placing Romeo’s hat and completing the head.
    I couldn’t help being fascinated by his passion for this puzzle and soon I was just as much into it as he was. I looked for the pieces and directed him