Her Reluctant Wife: A Lesbian Age Gap Romance

Her finger flew over the trackpad, clicking too hard.

Searching. And there, further down, the heading that made

everything true. It was like a piercing ray of sunlight cutting

straight through her brain, sunlight on eyes that had been in

the dark for a long, long time. She fractured apart when she

read the words.

One killed and two injured in horrific rollover.

She slammed the lid of the laptop shut. It wasn’t enough.

She couldn’t erase the headline from the back of her eyes. She

grabbed the laptop, wrenched the charger from it, and hurled it

across the room. It clattered against the wall and hit the floor

in one piece. Fucking brick. She wanted to destroy it so she

could unread the things she’d seen. So that she didn’t have to

know.

Morgan. My sister. Nine years old.

Giana peeled her eyelids open because she didn’t want to

see the graphic images behind them. A continuation of that

nightmare. A memory. Her sister, crumpled along with that

metal. Her body at wrong angles. Pierced. Broken glass and

blood everywhere.

“God, no.” She slammed a hand over her mouth. Found her

lips wet. Her cheeks wet. Tears coursing down all over her

face, a flood.

Her first instinct was to call her parents. It was early yet.

She’d only been asleep for an hour or two. How early, she had

no idea. She didn’t know where her phone was. She hadn’t

checked the time on her laptop. She wanted to call and wake

them up. But that would mean revisiting painful memories that

they didn’t talk about. She knew they didn’t. It would mean

admitting to them that she’d only just remembered now. That