Read Online Broken to Pieces by Avery Stark - Free Book Online Page A

head and closed her eyes in a desperate attempt to keep herself from losing it right then and there.
    "Thank you," she whispered.
    Martin Seville patted her shoulder and started back out to his dusty town car.
    Emily closed the front door softly and leaned forward until her forehead was resting up against the soft wood. There were moments when reality hit a little too hard on her fragile existence, and that was one of them. Her heart was racing and her head was spinning.
    She braced herself against the heavy door in the hopes that the feeling would pass quickly.
    "Emily," Barbara's voice cut through the fog soon after. "Do you want to go sit down?"
    Emily took a deep breath of the mountain air that bled through the small gap between the door and its frame. For some reason it just didn't seem as sweet as before.
    "I need to go up into the attic to get some stuff. Will you go with me?"
    "Of course," Barbara said with a smile. "You got it."
    Emily somehow managed to peel herself off of the front door and guided both of them up a set of rickety, pull-down stairs near the end of the hallway by her parents' room. She was careful not to go too close to their door as she did so.
    That was something she wasn't prepared to handle.
    Under the weight of their bodies, the stairs groaned and shuddered.
    "These things aren't going to break, are they?"
    "No," Emily said with a laugh. "I doubt it."
    Barbara mumbled a reply and slowly followed Emily up.
    At the very edge of the landing, a series of boxes had been arranged in neat rows on either side, making a kind of path that led to a more open section. From that end, the bright light of day flooded in through a hexagonal pane of glass and illuminated the swirling cloud of dust that the women's presence stirred up.
    Barbara grunted, "What are we up here for, anyway?"
    "We are looking for a few boxes labeled with the number four."
    Barbara crouched down under the low beams that crossed above their heads, "And what's in them?"
    Emily crept forward, careful to keep her head down. You only had to forget and run into one of the solid beams once before you learned your lesson.
    "Oh, stuff for the Fourth of July party that we're supposed to have on Tuesday."
    The two of them shuffled around the attic. In no time, their body heat, mixed with the warm sun coming through the glass, made the wide-but-shallow area sticky, almost swampy. Emily rubbed the growing beads of sweat off of her brow with her forearm and scanned the very back of the room.
    "Aha," she said loudly. "I found 'em."
    "Now what?"
    "Uh," Emily lifted one of the box corners but was quickly dismayed when she realized that it was far too heavy for her and her less than physically fit partner to carry down, "I think we should send Tex and Gary up after lunch."
    By the time the older lady hobbled over to where Emily was, the sweat had formed a nice little circle just below the embroidered collar of her billowy, yellow blouse.
    "That's probably a good thing. I can't take much more of this heat!"
    She fanned her face with one limp hand.
    "Are you ready to go down?"
    "Sure," Emily responded and motioned toward the entry way. "After you."
    Following a safe distance Barbara's large, bouncing rear, Emily absorbed her surroundings. The perfectly arranged boxes (surely her mother's work) and neatly written labels (she knew her dad's hand writing from miles away) not only made her heart hurt, but they also forced the secretly terrified young woman to face the fact that she had been pushing down for days:
    There was so much that she had taken for granted.
    Even the curly sloping of her father's 'S' made her wish that she could have been there to watch him write it. One more minute in silence would have been enough, if only she could be with him; to be able to love someone right then and there while truly knowing how badly it hurt to have them ripped away. And even though she was not particularly religious, Emily had been spending much of her restless