Read Online Wanted: Devil Dogs MC by Evelyn Glass - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Evelyn Glass
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irony of it. When she was at med school, she would have given anything to be able to survive on the few hours of sleep she was getting a night. She could have used that time for much-needed studying; there had never seemed to be enough hours in the day to cover everything she had needed to. She feels a burst of sadness, a sliver of regret, as she thinks about the textbooks that remain in the bag she hasn’t yet unpacked.
She hasn’t even looked at them since she arrived back in Chicago. They seem to belong to another time, a time when her mother was still alive, a time when life had been simpler, easier, when she hadn’t felt so out of control of her future. It’s strange to think that only a few months ago, she had been so sure of exactly what she was going to do. It all seemed so clear to her then. She would finish med school, move back to Chicago to do her residency and work her way through the ranks until she became a thoracic surgeon, fixing people’s hearts, their lungs, the parts that kept them alive. Now, that seems like a pipe dream, like a future and a life that belongs to someone else.
1:37. The digital clock next to her bed blinks at her and no matter how much she stares at it, she knows this is all the sleep she’s going to get, at least until four when she’ll stumble back into bed again and sleep for another two hours. But that’s only if she’s really lucky.
She throws off the bed covers and throws a University of Dallas sweatshirt over her skimpy nightdress before padding quietly downstairs, careful not to wake her lodgers. She unlocks the office and tells herself that the one perk of insomnia is that she gets a head start on her long to do list for the day.
But, right now, in the eerie pre-dawn silence, her focus isn’t on the bills in front of her or on the checklist of things she has to do. Instead, her eyes are drawn to the drawer of the desk, where she keeps the letter her mother had written to her when she’d found out how sick she was. The kindly attorney who had dealt with Caroline Bishop’s will had given it to her. Isabel had carried the letter around with her, read it over and over again, to the point where she knew it by heart. But she still took it out to read it, because it was written in her mother’s hands and because, for those few brief minutes she has the letter in front of her, it’s as if her mother isn’t really gone, not forever anyway.
Carefully, she pulls the letter out of the envelope that bears her name and carries it to the kitchen, filling the kettle and boiling it and setting up the teapot. It had become her little routine: waking up, reading the letter, drinking tea at the kitchen table like she used to do with her mother. She’s pretty sure a psychiatrist would tell her she’s avoiding dealing with the fact that her mother is dead, that she is holding on to patterns of behavior that wouldn’t benefit her in the long run.
But she doesn’t care about any of that, not by a long shot. All she cares about is trying to understand, trying to get her head around why her mother had kept her illness from her for so long, why she had chosen to deal with it alone, why she had given Isabel so little time to say goodbye.
She unfolds the letter, rereading the words she already knows. Her mom had told her to sell the boarding house, to get rid of it because she had never been able to. It turns out that Caroline Bishop had been tied to this place, tied to it with memories of the man she had loved and the life they had shared together before he died. She didn’t want Isabel to be locked down in the same way she had been. In the letter she’d told her daughter to use the sale money for tuition fees, to make something of herself so, in her mother’s words, she ‘didn’t end up like her.’
Isabel feels a single tear fall over her cheeks, just as she always does when she reads that line because the truth is she can’t think of anyone
She hasn’t even looked at them since she arrived back in Chicago. They seem to belong to another time, a time when her mother was still alive, a time when life had been simpler, easier, when she hadn’t felt so out of control of her future. It’s strange to think that only a few months ago, she had been so sure of exactly what she was going to do. It all seemed so clear to her then. She would finish med school, move back to Chicago to do her residency and work her way through the ranks until she became a thoracic surgeon, fixing people’s hearts, their lungs, the parts that kept them alive. Now, that seems like a pipe dream, like a future and a life that belongs to someone else.
1:37. The digital clock next to her bed blinks at her and no matter how much she stares at it, she knows this is all the sleep she’s going to get, at least until four when she’ll stumble back into bed again and sleep for another two hours. But that’s only if she’s really lucky.
She throws off the bed covers and throws a University of Dallas sweatshirt over her skimpy nightdress before padding quietly downstairs, careful not to wake her lodgers. She unlocks the office and tells herself that the one perk of insomnia is that she gets a head start on her long to do list for the day.
But, right now, in the eerie pre-dawn silence, her focus isn’t on the bills in front of her or on the checklist of things she has to do. Instead, her eyes are drawn to the drawer of the desk, where she keeps the letter her mother had written to her when she’d found out how sick she was. The kindly attorney who had dealt with Caroline Bishop’s will had given it to her. Isabel had carried the letter around with her, read it over and over again, to the point where she knew it by heart. But she still took it out to read it, because it was written in her mother’s hands and because, for those few brief minutes she has the letter in front of her, it’s as if her mother isn’t really gone, not forever anyway.
Carefully, she pulls the letter out of the envelope that bears her name and carries it to the kitchen, filling the kettle and boiling it and setting up the teapot. It had become her little routine: waking up, reading the letter, drinking tea at the kitchen table like she used to do with her mother. She’s pretty sure a psychiatrist would tell her she’s avoiding dealing with the fact that her mother is dead, that she is holding on to patterns of behavior that wouldn’t benefit her in the long run.
But she doesn’t care about any of that, not by a long shot. All she cares about is trying to understand, trying to get her head around why her mother had kept her illness from her for so long, why she had chosen to deal with it alone, why she had given Isabel so little time to say goodbye.
She unfolds the letter, rereading the words she already knows. Her mom had told her to sell the boarding house, to get rid of it because she had never been able to. It turns out that Caroline Bishop had been tied to this place, tied to it with memories of the man she had loved and the life they had shared together before he died. She didn’t want Isabel to be locked down in the same way she had been. In the letter she’d told her daughter to use the sale money for tuition fees, to make something of herself so, in her mother’s words, she ‘didn’t end up like her.’
Isabel feels a single tear fall over her cheeks, just as she always does when she reads that line because the truth is she can’t think of anyone
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