Page 43 of Biker Orc Baby Daddy
Inside: ticket stubs from movies I barely remember, a few photographs from college, some old tax returns I should have shredded years ago.
And a hotel receipt.
My hands shake as I pull it out. The paper is thin. Worn at the edges. I've touched it too many times since that night, running my thumb over the faded ink while trying to remember details that champagne and time blurred into impressionistic smears.
The Riverside Inn. Room 304. One night.
I flip the receipt over slowly, carefully, as though the fragile paper might disintegrate under too much pressure. My fingers are still trembling slightly, a fact that irritates me even now, even alone in the sanctity of my own apartment where no one can witness my lack of composure.
The back of the receipt is what I've been avoiding looking at directly, even though I know exactly what's written there. I've memorized every loop and angle of the letters through sheer repetition, through late nights when I couldn't sleep and found myself pulling this box from the closet just to confirm that the memory wasn't entirely fabricated by my desperate, wishful mind.
In my own cramped handwriting, the kind I use when I'm trying to write quickly, trying to capture something before it slips away entirely, there is a single word scrawled across the faded paper.
Hibiscus.
Just that. No explanation. No date beyond what the hotel receipt itself provides. No attempt at poetry or sentiment, because that's not how I work. I deal in facts, in data, in concrete information that can be filed and retrieved and relied upon. But even facts can lie when filtered through the fog of champagneand desperation and the particular ache of knowing something beautiful is temporary.
I'd written it down because I needed to remembersomethingtrue about her when everything else had become unreliable. The perfume. The way it clung to the hotel room even after she'd gone. That particular note of floral sweetness that I could almost taste on the back of my tongue.
Hibiscus.
I'd written it down the morning after. Stood in the empty hotel room with the sheets still smelling like her and tried desperately to capture something—anything—concrete before the memory dissolved completely.
The perfume. That's what I'd managed.
Hibiscus.
I bring the receipt to my nose. The scent is long gone, of course. Just paper and old ink and my own foolish hope that I could somehow preserve a moment that was never meant to last.
But I remember.
And today, in Colum's office, I smelled it again.
Fainter. Mixed with vanilla and baby powder and the particular chaos of new motherhood.
But unmistakable.
Cecie.
I sink onto the edge of my bed, still holding the receipt, and let the full weight of realization crash over me like a wave I have no hope of outrunning.
Sis was Cecie.
Cecie is Sis.
And Orry?—
Orry is mine.
CHAPTER 7
CECIE
"Orry, no. That's not, those aren't for eating."
I pry the lip gloss tester from his sticky fist. He protests with a shriek that could shatter windows. Mrs. Henderson, browsing foundation three feet away, flinches.
"Sorry. Teething." I offer my best customer-service smile while fishing a teething ring from my apron pocket.
