The Healing (The Things We Can't Change Book 3) Read Online Free Page B

nothing. I wish I could become a nothing. No feelings, no sense of shame or dirtiness or feelings at all. It would be so much better than all of this.
    “Go away,” I sniffle, raking my nails down my arms and then along my thighs. I wish I could rip it all off, disassemble every part of my body so someone else can look at it and figure out what’s wrong with me. Then they can fix my broken parts and put me back together the correct way, so I can be a whole person again.
    But I know as I reach for the knife, needing to release the pressure of the dirtiness inside me, that I can’t be fixed so easily. Nothing can be. Maybe it’s time I accept that I just can’t ever be fixed and I will always be broken, and that’s something I can’t change.
     
     
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
     
     
    Ezekiel
    48
     
     
     
    Sunday morning I’m rudely awakened yet again, though this time it’s not by my dad. My bed trembles and the world shakes and I jerk upright, wondering how there can be an earthquake in central Ohio. Then I see Koby jumping on my bed and Dominic taking a running leap toward me, and I fall back down with a groan.
    “Get out,” I say into my pillow. “I need a break, I’ve been working my ass off.”
    “Cameron got picked up for possession!” Koby crows. “And he’s over eighteen, so he’s going to the big house!”
    This causes me to sit back up, instantly wide awake. “What did you say?”
    Dominic isn’t respectful enough to shed his shoes the way Koby did, and just begins jumping up and down, arms raised as a buffer between his head and the ceiling. “Cameron Fuller is doing time in the big house!” he says. “Picked up last night, no one to pay bail. The Fuller threat is done. You can walk freely about Columbus with no fear.”
    “Like I was scared of him,” I scoff, though it’s not a one hundred-percent truthful statement. Still, relief steals over me, invisible manacles lifting up off my wrists, a weight of worry and a stress off my back that I didn’t even realize I was carrying.
    Cameron, put away. And with him, hopefully, the barely there-but-still-present threat that we all were the last to see Ian Parker before he was shot. I fall back onto my pillows and breathe a sigh of utter relief.
     
    Koby and Dominic hang around for a few hours, and then we all troop to Dom’s house to watch him pack to spend the next month at his grandma’s house in Akron, as he does every summer. Of course, ‘packing’ to us mainly involves tossing half our closet into a duffle bag and calling it a day. So it doesn’t take long and we all end up in front of the Xbox like always. We play until Dominic’s dad kicks us out so they can pack up the car. Koby and I have to leave for our shift at the club anyway.
    When I get home, my dad is there but in the kitchen. It’s late, and I head upstairs to bed without saying hello. He doesn’t call after me. I strip off my work clothes and get into a pair of gym shorts and collapse onto my bed.
    My head is spinning around and around, much too heavy and full for my taste. As always, Evie is a huge part of it. I wonder how she’s doing. Clarissa left on Thursday with Hunter and so far as I can tell, they haven’t returned and Evie is all alone in that house.
    Raped.
    I still have trouble swallowing it. I don’t want to care at all, but it just goes on the already massive list of the ways the world has screwed Evie Parker over. Most people don’t go through the amount of emotional trauma she has their whole lives, let alone in seventeen years.
    No wonder she doesn’t want anyone to touch her and always looks ready to jump out of her skin. I can’t blame her at all. I can’t believe Ian Parker didn’t kill the guy. He’s not the kind to take a family threat or harm lightly. I can’t believe that Tony is still alive.
    My own hands tremble as I think of what he did, an all-consuming rage that makes me see red. I try to keep it contained, tell myself it’s