Someone to Watch Over Me Read Online Free

straightening the quilt covering her body. Kim put her head over their mother’s chest, as if she had to make absolutely sure her heart had stopped beating.
    They gave him forlorn looks like the ones they’d worn when stupid boys had broken their hearts over the years, or when they’d had a falling-out with each other and vowed never to speak to each other again. Like the ones they’d had when their mother was first diagnosed with cancer. When she heard that it had come back. When she and the doctors agreed it was pointless to fight anymore. When their father’s friend and partner had come to tell them their dad was gone.
    They’d huddled around Jax then, little stair-step girls, all blond and blue-eyed and innocent. Kim had sucked her thumb. Kathie had taken to hiding in Jax’s closet at night until she thought he was asleep and then creeping over to sleep on the floor by his bed. Katie started making lists.
    So this was all familiar territory. Dreaded, but familiar.
    He got the girls on their feet and by his side, and then there was just the dog. Jax was afraid he’d have a fight on his hands, but Romeo seemed to understand. He took his turn nuzzling her cheek and whining over her, and then jumped off the bed and stood quietly by Jax’s side.
    “Good dog,” Kim said, stooping over to hug Romeo and then wrapping her arm around Jax’s waist.
    He took the dog’s leash. Kathie leaned into his other side, her head on his shoulder, and Katie linked her arm with Kathie’s.
    “Okay. Ready?” he asked.
    “We should say a little prayer,” Kathie said. “Mom would like that.”
    “Okay,” Jax said.
    They could say anything they wanted, as long as they left. He bowed his head with the rest of them, and Kim did it. She started off by thanking God for their mother andended with something that sounded vaguely like a threat, a take-good-care-of-her-or-else thing.
    Or else what?
    Katie raised her head and gave her sister an odd look.
    “Well, He’d better take care of her,” Kim said. “All those prayers she said. All the ones people said on her behalf. And she’s still gone.”
    “It’s okay,” Jax said. None of them were particularly religious, except their mother, and he understood exactly how Kim felt. “Now we go.”
    They pivoted around as best they could without letting go of each other and trooped out.
    Two of their mother’s friends were outside the door, one crying. One of her neighbors was standing there holding fresh flowers. At the nurses’ station, three women stood staring, sad, understanding expressions on their faces. Jax looked down at the floor, and then looked away. He just didn’t have anything left, not for anyone.
    The girls pulled themselves together and thanked their mother’s friends for all their kindness during her illness and over the years. They thanked each and every one of the nurses on the floor, showing all the graciousness and kindness their mother had taught them. She would have been proud. His sisters could be a little flaky, each in her own way, but they were strong, smart women, good down to the core.
    Their mother had loved them well.
    She’d loved Jax, too. Completely. Powerfully. Joyously.
    But she’d been disappointed in him, too. He knew that.
    She’d said it, right there at the end, in that jumble of thoughts where she’d believed she’d seen his father again.
    And it wasn’t as if it was a surprise that she was disappointed in him. She thought he was playing at life, wastingit, letting it slip through his fingers. That he had no faith. Not just in the God she trusted so completely, but in other people as well.
    In life and in love.
    Losing his father hadn’t weakened her faith in either of those things. Nothing had.
    So where had it come from? he wondered. The trust? The faith? The hope?
    He trusted that life would hurt him sooner or later, that people would disappoint him and disappear, had faith that there was nothing more to this world than what he