One Day Soon (One Day Soon, #1)(45)

“Okay, great. I’ll bring some Chinese food and we can watch movies. It’ll be fun!” Mom enthused.

“Sounds great. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“All right, sweetie. I love you.”

My heart constricted painfully at those three little words. She said them casually. Almost dismissively.

“I love you too,” I responded. There was nothing casual or dismissive when I said it. Those words counted. Each and every time.

I hung up with my mother, feeling neither good nor bad. Which was the usual. Most times she left me…indecisive.

My life had been filled with transient relationships. I cared intensely. But for only brief periods of time. Some of that was because of me.

Some of it wasn’t.

I had long since lost touch with my friends from high school. I hadn’t spoken to Amanda Decker since graduation. I had a few friends in college, but nothing substantial.

My marriage was over and my current friendships with Lee and Tess were for the meantime.

I didn’t purposefully keep people at arm’s length. I’d only adopted that particular trait in the later part of my life.

I had grown up clinging to the people I loved. Even when I knew that holding on was useless.

But the most significant relationships in my life had occurred during a very short period of time.

Yoss. Di. Shane. Bug.

And I had lost each and every one of them.

So at some point along the way that need to hold on had changed. Altered. Twisted to fit this new, not so shiny version of myself.

Permanence was the thing I’d spent most of my life chasing. It’s why I stayed in my job. In my house. In my hometown. I was desperate for roots. But I was also ill-equipped to nurture the relationships in my life that could ground me.

I would never tell my mother all the horrible, hostile thoughts in my heart because as much as she had hurt me, I needed her constancy. Yet I knew that I had never really allowed her back into my life. We spoke on the phone, she came over to visit, but I wasn’t willing to let her in.

Because the girl who had once embraced the people in her life with open arms had grown into a terrified woman. Scared of being abandoned, I put on a smile and hid behind walls that were easy to build but felt impossible to take down.

“Imogen, hello!” Jason called out as I walked into my office. The familiar click clacking of his shoes on the tile floor echoed down the hall as he followed me.

I dropped my purse on the desk and immediately turned on my computer. I was feeling antsy.

I wanted to get up to the ICU to see Yoss.

Every day since he had been admitted I rushed through my job duties, wanting to get to that moment where I’d walk into his room and see him.

I needed the reminder that I hadn’t imagined him.

Because I had done a lot of that over the years.

Imagining.

“Hey, Jason. How are you?” I said offhandedly, hoping whatever it was, didn’t require a long, lengthy discussion.

“I wanted to talk to you about that new case you were given,” he said, bringing me up short.

“My new case?” I asked, feeling myself tense.

“Yossarian Frazier in ICU,” Jason continued, clicking a pen with fidgety fingers.

“What about him?” I was going for blasé. I was pretty sure I sounded mildly high. I picked up my go-to coffee cup and readied myself to make my escape.

“Tracey Higgins called.”

I groaned and Jason smiled. “No need to tell you that she was less than pleasant,” he continued.

“What was she complaining about this time?”

I picked up my case files and stood by my desk, restless to leave.

“She says you’ve been blocking her coordination efforts. I told her that didn’t sound like you at all,” Jason went on.

I sighed. I hadn’t thought about calling Tracey in again because Yoss had been insistent he didn’t want her services. I had called her the day following her visit to let her know as much. She hadn’t been very nice about it, but that was to be expected.

“You can’t force services on people that don’t want them, Tracey,” I had told her with just a hint of condescension.

“Well what’s a man like that going to do, Imogen? Where will he go? You should insist on him coming to the shelter! You know what happens to the people out on the streets. They die! Do you want that man to die?” she had asked in frantic annoyance.

She was over the top and overly dramatic. But her question hit me all the same.

Where will he go?

The truth was I hadn’t thought much about service plans and outreach, my head and my heart were mixed up in rediscovering the man I had lost.

But that wasn’t right. I had to think about his future. What he was going to do. His situation was precarious. I had to stop thinking about me and my heart and start thinking about what was best for Yoss.

“He doesn’t want to go to the Salvation Army, Jason. And he was very antagonistic towards her. As you know, Tracey’s style can be off putting for a lot of people. And I’m not going to push services down his throat if he doesn’t want them. That’s not how we work, you know that. It has to be Mr. Fraizer’s choice.”

“I know that. You know that. But Tracey is a community resource we can’t alienate. We have to make it out like we’re on the same team. Half of this job is playing nice with the other people at the table.”