Within These Walls (Within These Walls #1)(83)

“Jude, I admire what you did, and I’m so grateful to have you back in our lives again. But are you sure you made the right choice?” Her expression was warm and comforting.

I looked down to the floor, gathering my thoughts. “If you had the choice, right now, between spending a lifetime alone or a single year with Dad, which would you take?”

“The year,” she answered without hesitation.

I nodded without looking up. “But what if it were in reverse?” I questioned, meeting her gaze. “What if you had to choose for him? Only one year with you or a lifetime, Mom? Would you choose differently?”

Her lips pursed together, and I knew she understood.

“Why does it have to be one or the other, son? Why can’t you have both?”

“Because I can’t be in two places at once,” I answered.

Twenty-nine: It’s Time—Lailah

“YOU FILED AN appeal?” I bellowed, slamming my salad fork down on the hard wooden surface of my mom’s solid oak dining table.

She startled slightly from the noise, and I watched her eyes widen in surprise.

“Yes, um…” she stumbled before blotting her lips with her cloth napkin and sitting up in her seat. She glanced over at Marcus, who had suspiciously joined us for the evening. With a nod, she turned back to me. “I know you asked us not to, honey, but this is your life we’re talking about, and I—we couldn’t just sit around and do nothing.”

I looked at the two of them. “So, both of you were in on this?”

They nodded their heads.

“When?”

“When what?” Marcus’s brows furrowed together.

“When did you submit the appeal?”

“A day or two after Jude left,” he said.

My heart fell at his answer. For a split second, when they’d mentioned an appeal, I’d thought Jude might have been behind it as well. He’d been so angry, so firm against my decision, that I just thought maybe he would have done something.

I hadn’t wanted him to, so I didn’t know why it saddened me that he hadn’t.

“So, you submitted an appeal. What now?” I asked, picking up my fork to push a grape tomato around the bed of greens on my plate.

“Nothing.”

I looked up at my mother, who was smiling.

“What do you mean, nothing? Did they already deny it?”

“No, Lailah. They approved it.”

My fork tumbled from my fingers, falling to the floor with a clattering clank. My eyes stung with repressed tears as I jerked them from Marcus’s jubilant expression to my mother’s.

“Approved?”

They both nodded, rising from their chairs with open arms that wrapped around me.

“Are you sure?” I asked as the emotional dam broke, and moisture dampened my cheeks.

“Yes.” They laughed. “We’re sure.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Change of heart. Divine intervention?” my mother said.

I looked up at her with a dubious expression, and she laughed.

“Who cares? It’s approved!”

“Oh my gosh! I can’t believe it!”

My mom took my hand, pulling me up from the chair. “Come on, I made something special for you. It’s in the kitchen.”

We all followed her into the small galley kitchen and watched as she moved things around in the refrigerator. Finally, she turned to face us, proudly displaying a bowl full of homemade chocolate pudding.

I stared at it, frozen in place.

“I always saw the empty containers in your trash can at the hospital, so I figured you had a thing for it even though those store-bought ones are so high in sodium. Really, Lailah, you should know better.”

Flashbacks of Jude pulling out tiny packs of pudding, his dimple etched into his megawatt grin, before we spent the night talking over our spoonfuls of chocolate. The night he’d fed me in the hospital, and my stomach had turned into butterflies came blazing back and then fizzled into a moment not too long ago when we’d spent an evening in his apartment, licking the sticky dessert off each other’s bodies.

“I’m actually not that hungry,” I blurted out, turning my head away to flick away the tears that had begun to trickle down my cheek. “Maybe some popcorn later though?” I added quickly, looking up with a fake smile plastered on my face.

My mom nodded, looking over at Marcus, who just shrugged.

We settled down onto the couch and watched a movie together. Eventually, Marcus did make a bowl of popcorn. No one touched the pudding. I thought it had been blacklisted even though neither of them understood why.

It had been nearly a month since I’d seen him, felt his touch on my skin, and heard his deep voice whispered against my ear. Every minute had felt like a year. I’d always thought watching time go by in a hospital bed was agonizing. Seeing the seconds tick by without Jude was hell.

I couldn’t turn on the television without eventually running into his face. He was everywhere. He was like the lost city of Atlantis for the financial world. Even the Hollywood gossip magazines and TV shows were picking up on it, taking photos of him on the street, as they told the story of his tragic past.

Will Jude Cavanaugh find love again?

The world all wanted to know.