Take One With You by Oak Anderson Read Free Book Online

actually the catalyst of his change of heart, something he was sure she’d find supremely hilarious when he told her.
    High-larious, Dad, she’d say in that sarcastic tone she seemed to reserve for all things related to her father. If they spoke at all, that is. It seemed like the only time they communicated the last couple of years was at some local constabulary, as he was bailing or talking or threatening or cajoling or promising her way out of one bit of trouble or another. He didn’t know where she got all of that anger, but he wasn’t so blind as to think himself innocent or unaware that his child was spiraling out of control.
    Still, it was easy to solve the immediate crisis and then move on, basking in the relative quiet between storms and losing himself in his work. It was simply the way things were, and it was an awfully hard path to turn back.
    Until one of his colleagues had come home to find his son hanging from a hook in the back of his wife’s closet, inches above her thousand dollar Manolo Blahnik pumps.
    It was the shoes that got him. He wasn’t even sure how he’d heard that detail; it certainly wasn’t his colleague. Probably a staffer’s gossip had crossed some invisible line between poor taste and downright venom, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t get that image out of his head. The juxtaposition was perfectly horrendous. Perfectly apt. Perfect.
    On the night he died, the senator was looking forward to catching some shut-eye on the overstuffed couch in his outer office before the final vote in the morning, after which he was going to begin some important legislating back home. Putting his family back together.
    Sarah had been a real handful lately, and in spite of her weekly tantrum about him not paying attention to her, or because of it, really, he couldn’t wait to give lie to that particular complaint as his first order of business.
    It was this excitement that probably killed him, as he was actually awake when the text came in. His aide had shut down the phones and the senator was so tired that he probably wouldn’t have heard his cell if he’d made it into REM sleep, but he was going over the conversation with Sarah in his mind when the familiar text tone interrupted his reverie.
    He looked at his phone.
    assholes giving me shit again
    He had to laugh at those words next to the picture of his little girl. Sarah’s avatar was from when she was four years old. Such a beautiful child. Such a potty mouth.
    He looked at the time. He could make it upstate in a couple of hours, do whatever needed to be done, and then just hop a morning puddle jumper in for the early session. Sarah would be completely shocked he didn’t let her stew until tomorrow evening, given the calendar. Maybe she’d even take the flight back with him. It would be nice to show her around one last time and then tell her his plans.
    He texted her back.
    on my way
    He added ‘I love you’ in Morse code, spelling out the dots and dashes, something he hadn’t done since she was a little girl. It had always been their little secret from her mother, a fun remnant from his Navy days. Even if she’d forgotten how to read it, she’d remember the meaning.
    He grabbed his coat and was out the door, laughing at the look he imagined on her face if she’d managed to see the text before they took her phone away.
    Sarah’s mother was nowhere nearly as effective at damage control as her husband had always been, which was just another thing for which she could be blamed by Sarah. She wanted to blame his death on her, too, but even Sarah couldn’t bring herself that low.
    Her parents had been talking on the phone when her father had missed the curve and careened off the road just half an hour from the jail. As Senator Crane figured, the police had called his wife and she had decided to wait until morning to fill him in, and had thus been taken completely by surprise at his call. She hadn’t even been aware that their call had been