Hos in this House

His favorite person always said that he was crazy with a side of crazy.
Shaw “Thumper” Bauer met Katana Lei Palao at the lowest of lows.
He was fresh out of the Army and had the PTSD to prove it. The last thing he needed was to get
a woman pregnant that he barely knew. What started out as just one night turned into six months
of watching this woman, who had slowly become one of his best friends, wither away and die.
He’d thought he’d seen the last of what death had to offer after getting out of the Army, but
Katana, the woman who made him look at life differently, took that away from him, too.
After the death of his best friend and soon-to-be-born child, Shaw has anger seated deep in his
heart.
Hate that flares to an intensity he’d rather not examine the moment Katana’s sister rides into
town with her life insurance payout and a smile on her face.
Olympia Palao then has the audacity to move into the apartment next to him.
Her smiles and her soft words haunt him for a year.
Then he finds her delirious with the flu, and he reluctantly agrees to help her because he’d rather
not watch another person die.
That’s when he learns the truth.
Olympia wasn’t there because she didn’t care.
She was there because she didn’t know.
Katana had hidden it all from her, and only shared at the last possible moment, days before she
died.
For a year, Olympia has been living with grief even Shaw couldn’t understand, and Shaw only
made it worse.
But somehow, their grief has brought them together at the worst possible time.
One moment, they’re trying to survive, burying their heads in the sand and pretending that
everything is all right. The next, they’re realizing that they’ve learned to survive, but they need
each other to do it.