“I need help deciphering this address.” I was almost crying. “I need help.”
“You already said that, dumbass.” Sammy snatched the paper out of my hands, and the envelope tore more.
“Samuel!” I wailed, now frantic. “Don’t!”
Sammy, realizing that I wasn’t fucking playing, froze.
“Jesus, what the fuck, Sie?” he asked, looking at me like I’d lost my fucking mind.
I had.
“It’s from Gabriel.” I sniffled. “He wrote me back.”
He narrowed his eyes. “The dumbass that stopped talking to you for two years? That one? The one that you cried about for a whole entire year because you missed talking to him?”
Sammy’s anger didn’t surprise me.
He thought that I should’ve moved on a long time ago.
It was only a pen pal, according to him.
But Gabriel and I were more than pen pals.
We were best friends.
And now, after reading that information he’d written in the letter, I had to write him back.
Had to.
He had to know that I still cared.
Sammy muttered something vicious as he saw my tears, and he slowly took the letter back from me and started to read it.
He stiffened as he read it, and I ignored him as I showed the envelope to Louis who actually looked like he cared.
He took it into the kitchen, and I slowly followed, dread a large knot in my gut.
“It says Texas, at least,” he said as he studied it under the better light of the kitchen.
I knew that part.
“I know,” I said. “I’m fairly sure I can make out the first two numbers in the PO Box, too.”
“It says 3939,” he murmured. “The city is different, though. Not Kilgore.”
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not.”
“For it to have that large of a PO Box number, it’s got to be somewhere where there’s a bigger city. This says L at the beginning.”
“There are over a hundred fifty cities in Texas that start with L.” Sammy muttered. “About thirty of them are big enough for that many PO boxes.”
So that was how we narrowed down our search to seven places over the next hour.
And a half-hour after that, we narrowed it down to one, thanks to Sammy totally pulling out his cop badge and calling around acting like he was important.
“Longview,” Sammy said with a grin, waving the paper. “There’s a Gabriel Stokes in Longview at that PO Box.”
My entire heart went erratic.
“That’s so close!” I cried out.
Sammy and Louis shared a look.
One that I couldn’t quite decipher.
“What’s that look for?” I asked them both.
Both shook their heads.
It was Sammy who, of course, said something.
“I’m just wondering whether you writing him back is a good idea,” he admitted.
I snatched up my letter, my newly written down address, and downed the rest of my beer before heading to the door.
“Nobody really asked you, now did they, Sammy?” I grumbled as I walked out the door.
My mind was on other things as I drove home. Mainly the fact that Gabriel was so freakin’ close to me that I might as well be in the same city as him.
Nerves vibrating, I drove up to my place and nearly groaned when I saw Mark, my boyfriend’s, car there with him still in it.
Soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, now.
See, Mark didn’t want the same things as me.
Mark wanted to live his life. He wanted me in it. What he did not want was any children with me.
He wanted to get married. He wanted to move into a big house. And he wanted to travel.
None of that included a child, which I desperately wanted.
I was a nurse in the NICU. I worked with babies every day.
I loved babies.
Mark, however, hated them.
He didn’t want anything to do with them.
And that was driving a huge wedge between us.
At first, I thought that I would be able to deal with the not having kids thing. Especially seeing as I worked with them sixty hours a week. But then, as the babies got better and moved along with their parents, ready to start their lives all fresh and innocent, I realized that there would be no denying it.
I wanted a child.
I wanted multiple children, actually.
And if that was a deal breaker for him, well then, he was a deal breaker for me.
When I pulled up into my driveway, Mark didn’t even bother getting out of the car.
“Hey, where have you been?” he asked when I walked toward him.
He’d rolled the window down halfway. I could barely see his face through the tint.
Even as it was, I had to bend down to even see into his car.
He drove one of those low-slung cars that you had to plug in to use.
Sure, it was good for the environment, but it looked so out of place, especially in my neighborhood.
“I had something to do. I’m sorry I didn’t even think to call you.” I frowned. “Are you getting out of the car?”
He shook his head. “No, I only had about an hour to see you.” That annoyed me because we’d planned on dinner. How were we going to have dinner in that short of a time period? “I have a conference call on this case that I’m working on. I’m just going to take it right here. Then I’m going to head home and get some sleep.”