Love Is More Than Skin Deep (A Hidden Hearts Novel Book 4) by Mary Crawford

playing that game.”

    I feel like I’m going to throw up. I can’t believe I’m back in the same spot of uncertainty again. I thought that’s why I’ve gone through this twice already. “Did they give you any more information about why they wanted to see me?” I probe as I push the delicate pieces of crêpe around my plate. I’m sure that if I actually had an appetite, that this would be delicious. Unfortunately, food tastes disgusting right now and the very idea of it seems repulsive to me.
    Mark silently observes my behavior for a few moments before he offers me his plate of buttermilk pancakes. “Want to trade?”
    His calm demeanor is driving me crazy. How can he just sit there eating breakfast when our whole lives may be blowing up in our face? I take a deep breath as I respond, trying desperately to stay sweet, although I feel anything but. "No, no thanks. I'm not hungry this morning.”
      "You need to eat." Mark chastises. “The doctor said that it was important for you to keep your weight up to be able to fight off everything."
    "Look, I said I wasn't hungry, okay?" I snap. "I’ve got way too much to think about to worry about whether I'm packing on calories."
    Mark sighs, but says nothing.
    “I don't understand what they could possibly need to talk to me about. I thought we had all the best people there helping us. The person was beyond vague on the phone. It was just some mumbo-jumbo about proper protocol being breached and records being compromised, but not to be overly concerned because it was something that they've dealt with many times before. What kind of Psychobabble is that? It all seems pretty crazy to me. What if my parents had it right all along?” I ask, my voice breaking with emotion.
    Mark slides around the circular vinyl booth until he's sitting right next to me. He puts his arm around me and tucks me in next to his shoulder before he asks, "Shelby, what's going on? You've had scary visits to Dr. Charleston before and you never seemed quite this unnerved."
    "I don't know. It felt like they were lying to me about something.” I reply, shivering at the memory. “I guess this is starting to feel a lot like my childhood.”
    "What do you mean?" Mark asks as he pours me some tea and doctors it with honey.
    "Growing up, it seems like my whole life was one big pursuit around how to make my brother better — at least that's how it started out before my parents discovered Reverend Pratchett. At first, we were a relatively normal family. We started traveling from a revival service to revival service and church to church, so that pastors could pray for him to make him better. Most of the legitimate pastors could see that there was something seriously wrong with Owen and urged my parents to take him to the hospital.” I answer as I fiddle with the teacup.  
    Mark reaches out to gently still my hands.
    “I was too little to understand why my dad wasn’t able to maintain a job and so they didn't have health insurance and they were too paranoid to believe in signing up for government assistance, even basic needs. Over time, the more reputable pastors began to fall away and we began to travel farther and farther away and seek out people on the fringe that would tell my parents exactly what they wanted to hear. Some of this stuff was so outrageous that even as a child I could tell that it was certainly not true, but other things I never actually knew whether they were true or false."
    "That must've been terribly confusing for you," Mark comments.
    "Oh, you've no idea!" I exclaim, "Savannah and I were just kids, but we started feeling like it was our responsibility to protect our parents from themselves. It was not only confusing, it was scary. I remember as soon as I learned what money was, I started hiding some of it away because my parents felt like 'God' was telling them to give these people all of our money that we managed to scrape together for food.”
    Mark grits his teeth and shakes his