A Very Different Kind of Love Story
Doctor Richard Mason has just received a certified letter informing him of several things; he’s adopted, his biological father has died, and Mason has been put in charge of his physically and mental challenged sister, Hannah Rice. If that wasn’t enough to shatter the personal reality of this brilliant but jaded loner, according to the terms of the will, Mason must let his sister live with him in his tiny house and invade his tiny life or she will be sent back to a state run group home where she has spent the last 30 years of her desolate life. But, along with Hannah comes a 3.5 million dollar trust fund and a whole pack of dark family secrets.
Upon her arrival in his life, Hannah struggles to communicate with Mason, the brother she’s longed for since she was a girl. Even in her addled state Hannah knows this is her last chance at having the family that was long denied her. Ever the optimist, Hannah breathes new life into her brother’s dreary world. All Mason can ponder is how to get rid of her and the responsibility of caring for her.
Mason is world-renowned for healing bodies but is woefully lacking when it comes to the human heart. In his fumbled attempts to save his sister she may just end up saving him.
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Excerpt
“Over my dead body,” Mason grumbled loudly. “I’m not going to stick her in a place like that, Hannah doesn’t belong there.”
“Just temporarily until you ca—”
“No.” Mason could not stand the thought of Hannah locked away in a state hospital even if the State of Vermont did proclaim it ‘safe’. He knew what kind of lunatics ran around there and she was not one of them. People tied to beds or screaming from straightjackets. People walking around like zombies zoned out of their minds on meds. They’d eat her alive in a place like that. “The Trust will pay her expenses as long as she’s living with me, right?”
“As her brother, yes,” The attorney reiterated.
“I could get a bigger place to live.” He mused aloud.
“The Trust would pay for that.”
Well, didn’t that just figure? Maybe James Rice wanted to force his closeted lovechild to have to live with her. Why? The man left her in one home or another for the last twenty years, why the hell would he care? He didn’t care enough to keep her with him.
“Too bad, I like my house.” Yes, he did and he did not intend to leave it. “What about my fifty grand? I can spend that anyway I want, right?” The lawyer nodded. In that case, since he didn’t need the money, he could use it to pay for several months of care at Elysium but he would have to shell out for the rest each year. If he paid for four months or so up front, maybe by the end of that time, a slot would open up in a group home closer than Peekskill, New York. Then what? Then yank her out of her new comfortable modern surroundings with the pool and the horses and dump her back into some shabby group home? That did not seem fair. Even if he bit the bullet and doubled his clinic hours—oh, wouldn’t that make Sinclair giddy?—he would still have a hard time coming up with the other $75,000.00 a year. Assisted Living wasn’t cheap. He could take the twenty-five grand and get her an apartment close by with a live-in assistant that would be easier and cheaper than Elysium.
“I see those wheels turning, Richard, before they really get rolling I should tell you that if you put her into the community, in an apartment perhaps, and the boys in Victorville find out, Hannah will forfeit the Trust. It will become Null and Void.”
“And the money?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” the lawyer began, “it will all go to some horse charity in Victorville. Every dime.” “Guy was a real prick,” Mason bitched. He thought his father had been an ass. Well, James Rice was turning out to take the cake on that one, wasn’t he? The man had his daughter pigeonholed and he wasn’t going to let her go not even in death.
