Released (Caged 3)

Resting now.

Nothing more we can do.

A few days.

Maybe a week.

I felt my body go numb as the doctor spoke. Tria had to shake my arm before I even realized he had left, and a nurse was trying to dig information out of me.

“Are you the next of kin?”

“No,” I managed to say. “I don’t think she has any. I mean, I don’t know of any. No one ever came to visit her.”

“We lived next door to her,” Tria clarified, “but we moved out a while ago. She has a social worker who might know more. Liam? Do you have the worker’s number?”

I fumbled around for my wallet, dug out a little card, and handed it over.

“We’ll contact the social worker,” the nurse said as she walked out of the room.

I’d heard that phrase about people feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, but this felt more like a body-sized vise had wrapped itself around me to the point that my insides were going to just pop right out of the top. I dropped down on one of the nasty plastic benches because it happened to be where my ass landed. It could have just as easily been the floor.

I was never one to cry at bad news, but as soon as I dropped to the bench, the tears just overflowed.

Chapter 16—Choose the Name

Tiny.

That was the word that kept coming into my head as I looked down at the miniscule figure lying motionless in the middle of an oak box that was way too big for her. Cream-colored satin surrounded her withered body.

The little funeral home next to the small, Catholic cemetery was nearly empty.

Tria and I sat in the second row, and Krazy Katie’s social worker sat behind us. Across from the social worker sat Erin, who refused to listen to me when I told her she didn’t need to come. Damon hung around in the back row, like chauffeurs usually did—always in the shadows. In the front near the cask

et was a priest standing up and talking about how Krazy Katie was in a better place.

He didn’t actually say Krazy Katie—I amended it in my head. As far as better places went, well, I couldn’t really argue with that. Where she had been sucked balls.

I hadn’t been able to refuse when Michael said he would pay for a proper funeral for the woman who had been my friend, if that’s what she had been. I wasn’t really sure how to think of her. I felt as if I were in a fog of disbelief for the past four days.

That’s how long she lasted.

The doctor said she had to have been in rough shape and a lot of pain for a long time, which made me feel fucking great. How could I have missed that? How could anyone have missed that?

But we did—we all did. I missed it. Tria missed it; her social worker—everyone. By the time I started wrapping my head around what was happening, she was gone and I was borrowing a suit from Ryan for the funeral services.

I told my family to stay away—they didn’t know her. There was no point in their coming. Michael agreed but only if Damon drove us so we didn’t have to take the bus or whatever. I agreed so he would get off my back.

Tria’s fingers gripped and released my hand as she used the tissue in her other hand to wipe her nose. I tried not to focus on the stress she was under and how it might impact the baby. Erin assured me it would be better to let Tria get her emotions out at the funeral than to try to keep her calm, so that’s what I did.

Honestly, I was having too hard a time keeping myself together to worry overly much about Tria and the baby. Maybe the change of pace was good for me. I cried in the hospital when they first told me, but I hadn’t since then, not even when Tria came running out of the hospice room to tell me it was over.

Krazy Katie had been suffering, and watching her like that sucked. She couldn’t breathe right, and every time she tried, she would cringe from the pain. It was too stressful for Tria and way too much for me to take when I couldn’t even handle my own shit. I leaned on Michael and Chelsea a lot, and I even had two more sessions with my mom.

They went about as well as the first one.

To top it all off, I felt like shit when Krazy Katie was gone. If it had been something other than cancer, I probably would have been okay with feeling like shit, but I didn’t. I felt like shit because part of me was glad it was over.

A big part of me.