The Rise of Emery James by Shae Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

back to my work. After a minute she asks what I'll have to do after I sand. I smile a little. She's back to her quiet questions.
    Each day she talks a little more. She asks me about people she used to know. I remind her of memories from our past. She asks me about my job and about my family. I tell her stories about school and avoid asking her too much about her life since she left Oklahoma. I feel like it is information that she's going to have to volunteer. Something tells me not to push the subject.
    I know that it wasn't all roses and happy endings. Her husband's death aside, I can tell there is more. It makes me tense to think about it. My imagination is probably a lot worse than the reality. It’s been working overtime trying to fill in the blanks. I need to know why she is so jumpy. The other night she spilled a glass of tea on the counter and she nearly went into a panic to clean it up. I had to grab her hands to keep her still until she'd calmed.
    "Em, it's just tea."
    She'd stared at me with big eyes for a full minute before I'd finally felt her relax. That's the shit that gets me. The stuff I need answers for more than anything else. Because the idea that she was afraid of him or that he might have hurt her in any way at all consumes me with an all-out rage that I'm not sure how to channel into anything productive. But I can't let her see it. If I'm right, then rage is the thing that will send her running the fastest.
    So I spend some extra time pounding my punching bag and imagining it is him. I don't have to know him to hate him.
    Just the thought that someone ever hurt her is more than I can handle. I can't ask her about it, but I'm dying waiting for her to volunteer the information. Chances are she never will. I may never know what happened. I know her well enough to know that she's more likely to ignore it all. But I can't handle that. It doesn't matter to me that he's not here to hurt her anymore, I still need to know.
    So when Henry suggested we ride together to the site of our newest project, I had 45 minutes to contemplate how to ask him for the information that I need. I've spent the entire ride there and twenty minutes on the way back wrestling with whether or not to ask him. Part of me feels like it's betraying Emery to ask him what he knows and I don't want to do that. But I know something happened while she was gone. And my gut tells me it has something to do with her husband.
    I have this need to bring this new version of Emery out of her shell, but I don't know how to do that when I don't know how she got there in the first place.
    "It's nice having Emery back home, huh?" I start, throwing Henry a cautious glance. Asking him about her makes my stomach flip in nervous somersaults.
    "Yeah. It's been too long. I missed the hell out of her while she was gone," he says.
    "How is she doing? I mean, I see her almost every day, but she's still really withdrawn. I worry about her."
    Henry grunts under his breath, his focus on the road ahead. I watch as his jaw tenses and I worry that my fears are about to be confirmed. I clench my fist at my side, waiting for him to validate every whacked out theory that's been playing in my head for weeks.
    "I don't know, Cole. I worry about that girl every second. She's not much for talking about it, but she's going through a really rough time."
    "What did you think about her husband?" I ask.
    "Never met the guy," he admits. I see his knuckles grip the wheel a little tighter.
    Shit .
    "You're kidding right?" I ask. I can't imagine that Emery would marry a guy that had never met her family. It seems crazy to me and completely out of character for the girl I know. The girl I knew.
    "I wish I was. No, she met Gabe in school not long after her Nana passed. She was really upset when that happened and said she wasn't ready to come home and face it. She's always avoided stuff like that, so I let her stay away," he sighs, heavy with regret. "When she called to tell me she was