Descent (Black Heart Romance presents Heaven & Hell)

“I’m afraid I’m your only option.” We already covered that today, so he doesn’t dwell on it. “I
thought you had a sister. Georgia, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. She’s my half-sister, though, we didn’t grow up together. We didn’t meet until we were
adults. I mentioned that my dad left my mom and moved to Chicago when she was pregnant with me?
Well, Georgia’s mom was in Chicago.”
“Ah. Affair, or…?”
“I’m not sure. Some sort of fuckery, it messed my mom up. She was raised in a pretty devout
household, so having a kid when you weren’t married wasn’t something they were psyched about, but
then to be left pregnant and alone…” I shake my head. “Wasn’t great. She was heartbroken and kind of
left to fend for herself.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
“Yeah. We struggled a lot when I was little. We always struggled, really. We never got to a
comfortable place, but she struggled more when she was young. By the time I was two, we finally had
this rental house to live in. It was supposed to be rent-to-own—she desperately wanted to own her
own home—but the guy who owned it screwed her over. She was overly trusting and didn’t get it in
writing, so after she had already sunk a bunch of cash into repairs since it was supposed to be our
house someday, he refused to sell it to her.”
Calvin scowls. “That’s unprofessional.”
“He was extremely unprofessional. A smalltime slum lord. He sucked.”
“Did you live there long?”
I raise my eyebrows and nod. “Oh yeah, we didn’t leave. My mom loved the house. She fell in
love with it the first time she walked through it. It was a fixer upper, but she didn’t care. Said the
place had great bones. She loved everything—the window seat in the dining room, the way the sun
rose and the view of the front yard out of the bedroom window. She loved the arches and the built-ins,
even the tiny hallway closet. We made a lot of great memories there, and she wasn’t willing to part
with them just because the guy was a jerk. She has pictures on the wall of me riding a bike for the first
time in that driveway in a little pink dress—because, yes, I wore a dress to ride a bike.”
Calvin smiles. “That doesn’t shock me.”
I smile fondly at the memories. “But yeah, she valued the house more than getting out from under
that jerk’s thumb, so we stayed there and she just spent years renting the place. She should own it by
now, she’s surely paid the place off at this point, but… the guy’s a dick.”
“I could buy it for you, if you want me to.”
My eyes widen. “Huh?”
“That way you would own it instead. I’m sure your mother would prefer that to the current
situation.”