Chap­ter 10

A week lat­er, I come down to the liv­ing room and find Nina hold­ing a full garbage bag. My first thought is: Oh God, what now?

In only a week of liv­ing with the Win­ches­ters, I feel like I’ve been here for years. No, cen­turies. Nina’s moods are wild­ly unpre­dictable. At one moment, she’s hug­ging me and telling me how much she appre­ci­ates hav­ing me here. In the next, she’s berat­ing me for not com­plet­ing some task she nev­er even told me about. She’s flighty, to say the least. And Cecelia is a total brat, who clear­ly resents my pres­ence here. If I had any oth­er options, I would quit.

But I don’t, so I don’t.

The only mem­ber of the fam­i­ly who isn’t com­plete­ly intol­er­a­ble is Andrew. He is not around much, but my few inter­ac­tions with him have been… unevent­ful. And at this point, I’m thrilled with unevent­ful.

Truth­ful­ly, I feel sor­ry for Andrew some­times. It can’t be easy being mar­ried to Nina.

I hov­er at the entrance to the liv­ing room, try­ing to fig­ure out what Nina could pos­si­bly be doing with a garbage bag. Does she want me to sort the garbage from now on, alpha­bet­i­cal­ly and by col­or and odor? Have I pur­chased some sort of unac­cept­able garbage bag and now I need to re-bag the garbage? I can’t even begin to guess.

“Mil­lie!” she calls out.

My stom­ach clench­es. I have a feel­ing I’m about to fig­ure out what she wants me to do with the garbage. “Yes?”

She waves me over to her—I try to walk over like I’m not being led to my exe­cu­tion. It’s not easy.

“Is there some­thing wrong?” I ask.

Nina picks up the heavy garbage bag and drops it on her gor­geous leather sofa. I gri­mace, want­i­ng to warn her not to get garbage all over the expen­sive leather mate­r­i­al.

“I just went through my clos­et,” she says. “And unfor­tu­nate­ly, a few of my dress­es have got­ten a tad too small. So I’ve col­lect­ed them in this bag. Would you be a dear and take this to a dona­tion bin?”

Is that it? That’s not so bad. “Of course. No prob­lem.”

“Actu­al­ly…” Nina takes a step back, her eyes rak­ing over me. “What size are you?”

“Um, six?”

Her face lights up. “Oh, that’s per­fect! These dress­es are all size six or eight.”

Six or eight? Nina looks like she’s at least a size four­teen. She must not have cleared out her clos­et in a while. “Oh…”

“You should take them,” she says. “You don’t have any nice clothes.”

I flinch at her state­ment, although she’s right. I don’t have any nice cloth­ing. “I’m not sure if I should…”

“Of course you should!” She thrusts the bag in my direc­tion. “They would look amaz­ing on you. I insist!”

I accept the bag from her and nudge it open. There’s a lit­tle white dress on top and I pull it out. It looks incred­i­bly expen­sive and the mate­r­i­al is so soft, I want to bathe in it. She’s right. This would look amaz­ing on me—it would look amaz­ing on any­one. If I do decide to get out there and start dat­ing again, it would be nice to have some decent cloth­ing. Even if it is all white.

“Okay,” I agree. “Thank you so much. This is so gen­er­ous of you.”

“You’re very wel­come! I hope you enjoy them!”

“And if you ever decide you want it back, just let me know.”

When she throws back her head and laughs, her dou­ble chin wob­bles. “I don’t think I’m going to drop any dress sizes any­time soon. Espe­cial­ly since Andy and I are hav­ing a baby.”

My mouth falls open. “You’re preg­nant?”

I’m not sure if Nina being preg­nant is a good or bad thing. Although that would explain her mood­i­ness. But she shakes her head. “Not yet. We’ve been try­ing for a bit, but no luck. But we’re both real­ly eager to have…