Take One With You by Oak Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

tragically cut off, but simply assumed they’d lost the signal and went back to sleep.
    Given the circumstances, all charges were dropped, of course. Even in death, the senator had considerable pull with the local police.
    No one ever knew, until much later, why the senator had decided to drive back in the middle of the night to do what he could have probably accomplished with a phone call, or certainly assigned to a local attorney.
    Every night since, Sarah had imagined killing herself, but instead ended up only implementing new ways to cause herself problems, as if being in jeopardy might actually bring him back. But as he wasn’t coming back anytime soon, the whole situation was basically an exercise in futility. The only reason she got in trouble in the first place was to spend time with him.
    ***
    Marge immediately knew she’d fucked up, but there was nothing she could say or do to take it back. The bitch had her now. She sighed and started tearing up her report.
    Fuck me.
    They both knew that Marge’s slip of the tongue was Sarah’s get-out-of-jail-free card, and she would play it. Oh, how she’d play it.
    Because Sarah was most definitely not her father’s daughter. And that was the other half of the problem.

2 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE
     
    Tweet Details: TOWY “farmers” now estimated at over 2 million worldwide
     

Chapter Five
 
    “I can hack his email account if you want.”
    Charlie had, of course, already done so.
    Anne just looked at her son. She was vaguely aware of how unhappy Charlie had been ever since she’d married Brad, but more and more she’d found ways to dull her own pain that had probably been blinding her to just how separate he’d become.
    “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Charlie,” she said carefully, not wanting to start an argument. They never argued when Jim was alive. They’d been a family then. What they were now was something else entirely.
    “He’s cheating on you, Mom,” Charlie said. He knew this to be true from the emails of course, but couldn’t say so. Subconsciously she knew he was right, but Anne had not yet been able to face the reality of her irreparably broken marriage.
    She slapped him, causing his eyes to grow wide and his jaw to go slack. His mother had never once hit him in all his years. Charlie was almost happy about it; at least it showed signs of life, but the look of absolute devastation in his mother’s eyes made it too hard to be happy about much of anything.
    “I’m sorry,” he whispered, almost like a prayer, but there was no taking back the words that had hurt her so. No act of contrition could ever undo what he’d done in a simple moment of frustration. The look in his mother’s eyes was a look of utter worthlessness, and Charlie would have gladly given life and limb if he could reverse time and take it all back. What made it worse was that he knew his mother wanted the very same thing.
    She lowered her head in her hands and began to cry.
    Charlie tried everything, but she was inconsolable. His stepfather had made his mother feel increasingly bad about herself over the last couple of years, and try as he did to cheer her up, Charlie knew at some point there was a line that had been crossed, and even her only child could not bring her back. For the first time in his life he understood what a soul mate really was, because he knew that his father had been that for her. Losing her husband had taken something from deep inside that not even Charlie could ever replace.
    She had her good days, of course, but for the most part the bad days began to overwhelm her. Where once he had been able to elicit a laugh with one of the jokes they’d shared from when he was a boy, it seemed like her smiles were mere ghostly representations of a time in their lives that would never return. His suggestion of what they both knew, that her marriage was a sham, seemed not to be something from which she would ever recover.
    “Bessie’s out of her