Free Home for Christmas: New Adult Holiday Dark Suspense Romance by Emme Rollins

over her and then passed.
    She couldn’t live this way anymore. She had to do something. Anything. No matter where she went, she felt as if the world were closing in on her, as if she really was the trash Brody always claimed, being compacted into a neat little throwaway piece. She and Maggie had lived under the cloud of Brody’s viewpoint for so long they both believed it was true—they didn’t deserve any better.
    But the boys did.
    Ginny remembered them this afternoon, a million years ago now, Sean’s sticky hand in hers, Michael’s long legs flailing underneath him on the swing, begging for purchase. She was determined neither of them would ever know what it would be like to live as human garbage.
    The tears came. She swiped at them, but they came too fast for her to stop them, falling onto the bag lying between her feet. Her hands trembled as she picked it up and, without thinking, she pulled the drawstring and looked inside.
    “No,” she whispered, feeling instant salvation and damnation settle in the pit of her stomach like an anchor.
    There was no denying the reality of what was in the bag. She took it out and counted it there in the glow of a streetlight, and then she counted it again, because it was more cash than she’d ever seen in her lifetime.
    Twelve-hundred dollars.
    She looked around but the street retained the early morning quiet the suburbs often did, house lights dark, blinds closed, a world asleep. Just standing was a struggle, between the exhaustion and the weight that felt as if it had been lodged somewhere beneath her rib cage. She didn’t know how she was going to manage to walk to the shelter in this state.
    She was no longer a part of this world where houses were warm, beds were soft and food existed as if by magic in refrigerators. She wanted the boys to be. It was the best Christmas gift she could think of to give them.
    She tucked the money deep into her backpack and zipped it, shrugging it on, ignoring the taut ache of her muscles and the numbing exhaustion creeping into her limbs. She walked just to keep moving, unsure of her destination, following the thought of sleep like an illusion, a mirage she chased on some distant moonlit pavement.
    * * * *
    “Hey, Mags, do you remember Nick Santos?” Ginny asked her sister as they went through the dumpster out behind the mission.
    “Oh my God, what made you think of him?” Maggie brushed hair out of her face with her mittens, glancing behind her at the boys climbing up the distant hill. They were little dots from where they stood, their high voices, calling to one another and laughing, carrying toward them on the wind.
    “I saw him the other day.” Ginny’s voice echoed in the dumpster as she hung halfway in to reach a perfect boy-sized cardboard box. She pulled it out, triumphant, tossing it next to the other one she’d found behind the dumpster. It had grease on the bottom, but that was fine, because it had a sort of wax coating all over. That’s exactly what she was looking for.
    “Oh yeah.” Maggie frowned, her brow knitted. “Isn’t his dad... oh fuck. Ginny, his dad’s the chief of police here!”
    Ginny nodded, taking paper out of the box and tossing it into the dumpster.
    “Does he know I’m here?” Maggie shook her arm, eyes wide. “Oh God, how did I not remember that?”
    “He doesn’t know about you.” Ginny put one box into the other. “But Nick saw me. We talked. I didn’t tell him anything.”
    “Thank God.” Maggie relaxed a little. “I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m so glad Tim forgot about the money in the safety deposit box. That means we can get that apartment.”
    “I’m glad too.” Ginny had given her the money and told her it came from the safety deposit box. The decision hadn’t been an easy one, exactly—but in spite of the wrongness of it, it felt like the right thing to do at the time.
    More than anything, she wanted to see her sister and her nephews in their own place before