Free Somewhere Over the Freaking Rainbow (A Young Adult Paranormal Romance) (The Secrets of Somerled) by L.L. Muir Page A

appetite.
    Almost.
    “Hey, are we going to eat?” He stopped and stared.
    Mom was crying. She never cried; she knew what it did to him.
    “What’s going on? Don’t cry, Mom. What is it?” He hurried to her side, feeling his body gear up for horrible news. “Is something wrong with Granddad?”
    “Sorry, honey. Everything’s fine. I’m just getting old. Old people cry over stupid stuff.”
    Jamison looked at the papers in front of her. A pile of bills, a pile of stamped mail ready for the post office, and some legal documents.
    “That Granddad’s will?”
    “Yeah. I’m not ready to read it, though.” She shoved it all back in the fancy folder and tossed it in the top middle drawer. She might not be ready, but ready wasn’t far away.
    Then he saw it. The letter. It had to be.
    “What’s this?” He snatched it up before his mom could stop him. “It’s addressed to you, in Texas.” He moved to the other side of the desk and sat down, ignoring his mom’s outstretched hand, holding it easily out of her reach. “You wrote ‘return to sender’ on it? Why?”
    “I was very angry with him, and you know it. It’s why we left.” She put her elbows on the desk and bracketed her face with her hands, pushing back her hair, but still hiding her face.
    “This is dated—uh, that would be—six months after we left. I thought he didn’t know where we were. You said that’s why I never got any letters, because he couldn’t find us, because you didn’t want him to.”
    “Yes. I didn’t want him to.” She slammed her hands down on the desk and reached again for the letter.
    “And did he? Did he send letters to me?” He ignored her hand.
    She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes.”
    Jamison let the pain wash over him. Invisible. Invisible .
    He couldn’t look at her.
    “I’m sorry. At least I didn’t let you think it was because he didn’t care. I didn’t take that away from you. I just took you away from him .”
    “I should have asked,” he muttered to himself. He hadn’t asked because he didn’t want to hear something he couldn’t handle. Now Jamison knew, no matter what his granddad had done, he wouldn’t love him any less. It wasn’t possible.
    “You should have asked what, if he was sending letters?”
    “No.” He looked at her then and had the same knowledge hit him again. No matter what she’d done, what poor choices she’d made, he wouldn’t love her any less.
    Now the only thing to do was to get these two back together, the two people he loved, the two people he’d like to beat senseless.
    “I should have asked what he’d done to make you angry enough to leave and never come back.” He leaned forward. “I’m asking you now.”
    “It doesn’t matter. We’re back. You can spend as much time with him as you can, as much time as he has left.” A tear ran down her cheek, but Jamison wasn’t dishing out pity.
    “It does matter. I’m going to read this letter—”
    “No—”
    “—and you can’t stop me. So, would you like to explain before I do?”
    His mom glared at him. He didn’t care.
    She tipped back in her chair and he thought she wasn’t going to answer him, but she started playing with the stack of envelopes and talking in that odd voice a mother uses when reading a bedtime story, as if she hopes the kid would fall asleep before she had to read the whole thing.
    “I got pregnant at seventeen. Before you were ever born, your dad left me. Actually he left two days after the wedding at the courthouse and never came back to Flat Springs. Your granddad took me back home, said at least Shaw had given my child a name and that any man who could leave a pregnant wife was doing her a favor by going.”
    “You’ve told me this before.”
    “Hush. You asked, now shut up until I’m through.”
    Jamison sat back in his seat.
    “We got along just fine. You were happy, so I was happy, and that was enough for me then. I believed I could find love after you