Across the room, Taryn’s voice called out to him from the answering machine, but he couldn’t will one muscle to move his body to answer her call. The message she left would sit with all the others she’d left, he thought, ignored, soon to be forgotten. He’d grown comfortable wallowing in the self-pity that had consumed him since his meeting with Aleta. After getting the large trunk home, he’d settled himself in his bedroom, then began reading. It had taken him just over eight hours to read twenty-plus years of letters and postcards written by Piano Man. To be exact, eight hours, twenty-three minutes, and almost twenty thousand dollars in tens and twenties, to comprehend history rewritten in the man’s scraggly handwriting. In the span of an average man’s workday, everything Romeo had known and believed in had been turned upside down and twisted inside out. With the last letter, his rage had been refueled, bitter and nasty, and now Romeo sat stewing in the filth of it. He hated that his mother’s anger had brought him to this point, and since he could not level his own rage at her dead body, he had turned on Taryn.
