LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Maybe I shouldn’t have come today, Livi Camden thought as she leaned against the wall in one of the downstairs bathrooms of her grandmother’s house.

      For over a week now she’d been having slight waves of nausea—mostly in the mornings. But on this warm, sunshine-filled Sunday afternoon—the second week of October—it became much worse than a slight wave the minute she’d come in and cooking smells had greeted her.

      The bathroom had a window to the backyard and she opened it so she could breathe in the outside air.

      Better...

      The wave began to pass.

      That was good. She hated feeling nauseous and she also didn’t want to have to go home. She loved Sunday dinner at her grandmother’s house with all her family—even if she wasn’t sure she was going to be able to eat much today.

      Family had been everything to her since she’d lost her parents as a child and, along with her siblings and cousins, had become the responsibility of her grandmother. It was her family that kept Livi going when loss struck four years ago with Patrick’s death.

      Plus, GiGi had called and said she wanted a few minutes alone with her today, and whatever request her grandmother made of her, Livi did her best to fulfill—especially if it meant helping with the family project of making amends to those wronged by the Camdens in the past.

      The discovery of her great-grandfather H. J. Camden’s journals had confirmed all the ugly talk that had haunted the family for decades. It was rumored that the Camdens had regularly practiced underhanded and deceitful tactics to build their highly profitable empire of superstores.

      The current Camdens were determined to do whatever they could to make up for the past. Quietly, so as not to invite false claims on them, they were finding ways to help or compensate those who had genuinely been harmed.

      It was a cause Livi believed in and she was ready, willing and able to do her part.

      Actually, she hoped that was why her grandmother wanted to talk to her.

      Maybe doing something good and positive for someone else might make her feel better about herself these days. And it might also give her something to think about other than the biggest mistake she’d ever made in her life, for which she couldn’t seem to stop chastising herself.

      Another wave of nausea hit her and again she took some deep breaths of cool backyard air, trying to relax. She was sure that stress over her horrible choice two months ago was causing the nausea.

      “Hey, Liv, are you okay? You’ve been in there a long time.”

      It was her sister Lindie’s voice coming from the other side of the door.

      “I’m good. I’ll be right out,” she answered, glancing at herself in the mirror.

      Her color was fine—her usually fair skin wasn’t sallow, the blue eyes that people called “those Camden blue eyes” were clear and not dull the way they got when she was genuinely under the weather. She looked tired, but not ill.

      So it probably was stress, she told herself. That’s all. She was upset about what she’d done and that was making her stomach upset. When she calmed down and managed to put Hawaii behind her, her stomach would settle.

      Leaving the bathroom, she tried not to breathe in too deeply the cooking smells as she went to the kitchen. But even shallow breaths caused the queasiness again. So she opened the door to the patio, angling a shoulder through the gap so she was once again breathing outdoor air without being completely outside.

      Her sister and her cousin Jani were in the kitchen, gathering dishes, napkins and silverware. They both paused to watch her.

      “Are you still sick with that weird flu?” Lindie asked her.

      A touch of the flu—that was the excuse she’d given the first few days that she’d been late getting to work while she’d waited out the nausea at home.

      “It can’t be the flu—that doesn’t last as long as this has,” Jani contributed.

      The downside of being so close to her family—they sometimes knew too much.

      “Okay, so it’s not the flu,” Lindie said. “But what is it? You’ve been all wound up ever since you got back from Hawaii.”

      “Travel can make a mess of my stomach,” Livi hedged.

      “But you’ve been back for weeks—plenty of time for your stomach to readjust.”

      “Her wedding anniversary was while she was there,” Lindie pointed out to their cousin, as if she’d just hit on a clue. Then to Livi she said, “Was it bad this year? Did it set off something and put you back in a funk, stressing you out?”

      Oh, the anniversary set off something, all right, Livi thought. But she couldn’t say that.

      “My anniversary is never a good day.” And this year her response had been completely over-the-top and stupid. But again, she couldn’t tell anyone, so instead she said, “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve been a little tense since then. And that always gets to my stomach. I’m sure it’ll pass, the way it always does,” she added with confidence.

      But those smells were getting to her again, so she opened the door a little farther and moved a few more inches over the threshold.

      Her left hand hung on to the edge of the door. Her left ringless hand.

      And just the way Lindie had before Livi went into the bathroom, Jani noticed.

      “Am I seeing what I’m seeing?” she exclaimed. “You took off your wedding rings? That’s probably it!”

      “Oh, sure, I should have thought of that,” Lindie concurred.

      “Did you decide in Hawaii?” Jani asked. “That’s a big deal, taking off your rings. No wonder you’re all tied up in knots! Was it the anniversary that finally got you there? That had to be agonizing for you. And now you’ve done it... But that’s good,” her cousin added quickly. “That’s great! Of course, it couldn’t have been easy for you, and it’s bothering you and causing the tummy trouble. But don’t put them back on! This is the first step for you to really heal.”

      Livi felt like such a fraud. Along with the intermittent nausea, for some reason her fingers had swollen and she couldn’t get her rings on. She had every intention of wearing them again when the swelling went down.

      But since this assumption provided such a ready excuse to appease her sister and cousin, she let them think what they wanted.

      Which might not have been the best course, because then Lindie said, “Maybe when she feels better we can even get her to go on a date.”

      “No,” Livi interjected firmly, thinking that she couldn’t let this go too far.

      “You need to, Livi,” her cousin added. “Usually people have their first love, get their heart broken—”

      “Or break someone else’s heart,” Lindie interjected.

      “Then do a lot of testing the waters with other people before they find Mr. Right,” Jani finished. “But you—”

      “Married my first love.”

      “And missed getting the experience of casual dating. And now you’re just stuck in this limbo—Patrick is gone and you don’t know how to do what the rest of us learned a long time ago. You need to get comfortable with the whole dating thing. Then maybe you’ll be able to—”

      Don’t

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