Read Online Family Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 2) by Debra Trueman - Free Book Online

actually being mad at her before.  It definitely wasn’t a feeling I wanted
to get used to.  Maddie and I had been friends before we were lovers, and I
valued her friendship as much as I valued her status as my spouse and as the
mother of our children.  I didn’t want to be mad at her. 
    The phone rang and it reminded me that I needed to call Niki. 
I hung up on the salesperson and dialed Niki. 
    “The important thing is that she’s okay, Collins.  Don’t lose
sight of that.”
    “I’m not.  Thanks for your help, and sorry for the
inconvenience.  I guess I kind of jumped the gun in calling you.”
    “It’s no inconvenience.  I’d have done the same thing if it had
been Stacy.  Except she’s so hot tempered I’d have been worried for whoever she
was up against.”
    I laughed.  Niki was right.  The only thing that mattered was
that Maddie was okay.  Everything else was secondary.  By the time she got
home, all I wanted to do was take her in my arms and hold her.  I could have
strangled Felicia, but I was content to hold Maddie.
    “Let me start by saying that when we talked earlier, I had
every intention of turning around and coming right back home.  I just don’t
want you to think that I lied to you when I told you that,” Maddie said.
    She seemed genuinely remorseful on that point. “I never thought
you lied to me.”
    “Okay, good.  I’m glad we got that taken care of,” she said,
then she launched into her story.  “After I talked to you, Fee and I were
getting ready to leave when we noticed the administrator guy and the woman we
had talked to were driving off.  So we thought that maybe since they were gone,
we could talk someone else into letting us see Fee’s brother.  We went back
inside, but there was no one around in the lobby reception area.  It’s real
weird though.  All the doors that go off the lobby, there’s four of them, are
kept locked.  Like the patients are locked in.”
    “Is it a psych hospital?” I asked.
    “That’s what I was thinking.  But why would Fee’s brother be
put in a psychiatric hospital?  He’s a quadriplegic, not a psycho.”
    “Maybe just part of it is for psychos,” I suggested.
    She waved her hand at me.  “Let me continue.  So we’re scoping
out the reception area.  It’s big, almost like a hotel lobby.  And there’s this
cart by one of the doors with all these name tags on it.  Each name tag had a
room number on it, so we figured they must be names of patients.”
    I could only imagine where this was going.  “I don’t think I
want to hear this.”
    “Be quiet and let me tell you!” she said.  Her eyes were
sparkling with excitement.  “There are name tags with room numbers on them,”
she continued.
    “How many were there?”
    “I don’t know.  Maybe twenty.  And this real cute little Hispanic
woman comes out and she asked if we were touring or visiting, so naturally we
told her we were visiting.”
    “Naturally.”
    “So I read off the name of a patient from one of the name tags
and told her we were visiting him.”
    “Why’d you do that?  Why didn’t you tell her you were visiting
Fee’s brother?”
    “We’d already tried that and it had gotten us kicked out.  And
you know what?  She didn’t even ask if we were family or anything.  We signed
in and she gave us a visitor’s badge and she took us right back to the
patient’s room.  Now, why would it matter if we were family or not when it was
my cousin we wanted to visit?”
    I started to say something but she shushed me.
    “You don’t need to answer,” she informed me.  “So we went to
this poor old man’s room, bless his heart.  He was out of it; Alzheimer’s or
something.  But he was perfectly content to have us there.  Fee tried to pump
the old man for information on her brother, but it was useless.  I’m sure he
wouldn’t have recognized his own family, much less my cousin.”
    Oliver and Max had gotten out of bed and were