Secret Twins For My Ex’s SEAL Best Friend (Billionaire Silver Foxes’ Club)

4. Robert

four

Robert

Almost a week later, I sat in the school car lane and drummed on the steering wheel.

I was waiting for my daughter to come rushing out the door the way she always did, a group of children pushing her out like they were at a concert.

I saw one of my lawyers calling and shot a look at the school doors before answering. I didn’t want to miss her, even if it meant missing a potentially important business call.

“Hey, Tanya, what’s up?” I asked absent-mindedly, as I watched the other grades come out.

We were up to third grade so far. Two more grades and my little fifth grader would come out. I scanned the heads I could see, looking for her crop of red curls.

“It’s about the self-defense weapons,” my lawyer said, her voice serious. She always got straight to the point, which I appreciated about her.

“What about them?” I asked, watching the fourth graders come out and run to their parents’ cars. They had to be reminded to wait for their parents, to not run away from their teachers into the road. It was like watching someone try to catch chickens.

“We can’t distribute them to the UK. The UK doesn’t allow the use of lethal or non-lethal weapons for self-defense in public. The keychain blades are too long, metal, and locking. There’s no way we can get around it. We can’t distribute them there.”

I felt that anger coming up, the anger that came from my past. Losing friends in the Navy had been difficult. Losing my late wife had been the hardest thing I’d ever gone through. Raising a daughter now sparked the pain and anger over her murder in the strangest ways.

I had started a company devoted to women’s self-defense so that I could keep everyone from going through what I had gone through. From losing what my daughter had lost. From what my wife had gone through.

“I’m not letting women be unprotected because of some bullsh—” My daughter opened the back door just then and climbed in, and I sing-songed, “Rin-Rin, how are you, my girl?”

“Got it. We can talk later, Rob,” Tanya said crisply, “but I’m not letting you catch a lawsuit because of your principles.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Corinne with a forced smile. She was the spitting image of her mother, my late wife, at that age with frizzy red hair and brown eyes.

Every time I saw her, I felt this twinge as I realized that I’d forever see Quinn through my daughter.

It was a strange pain, seeing her as a young girl, only eleven years old, and so haunted. I often felt a twisting pain when Corinne cried, knowing what Quinn would have looked like crying as a child.

I swallowed it down, as I always did, and waited for her to throw her bookbag in the back and flop into the leather seats of my Range Rover.

That day, a sullen look passed her small face, and I shook her shoulder with one of my hands before returning it to the steering wheel. “What’s up?” I asked her, looking over quickly before looking back at the road.

“I don’t like it when you call me Rin-Rin. I’m not a kid.”

“What about Renaissance?” I asked, smiling wide at her.

She shook her head, but I could see a small smile tugging at her lips, even as she crossed her arms and peered out the window. “What’s wrong, Princess Corinne? Tell Daddy so he can fix it.”

She pouted but turned her body to me and asked, “Did you know Thanksgiving break is coming up in just a couple of weeks?”

“Yes, of course. We’re going to do something special.”

“You knew? Why didn’t you remind me?” she cried out, re-crossing her arms for dramatic effect. “It’s in two weeks. That’s not far away at all.”

“No, it’s not,” I agreed, watching her through my peripheral vision, trying to understand how Thanksgiving was linked to her bad mood.

I let her sit in silence, something I had learned from Jeremy in therapy. It took a while to get used to not hammering her with questions and forcing her to fess up, but once I stopped, our bond got even stronger. She’d learned to open up, to express herself, and to stop relying on someone begging her to talk.

It was something I needed to learn – to open up. It was so hard for me. Corinne got it from me, and I felt bad every time I saw the learned behavior in her.

Finally, she huffed and said, “That means I won’t see Benny.”

“Who’s Benny?”

“My crush!” she exclaimed, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, though she’d never told me about any crush. “I won’t get to see him for an entire week! What if he doesn’t like me anymore when we go back to school? I’m going to miss him so much!”

I cringed internally. The reminders that my daughter was growing up came more and more frequently these days, and each one was a painful blow.

I tried not to let her see it on my face as the anxiety started to rise in my chest, a tightening that took away my ability to breathe.

I tightened my grip around the steering wheel, feeling the blood leave my fingers, and looked straight ahead. “You have a crush on a boy? Named Benny? Is he nice?”

“Duh! And he’s funny, and he’s cute, too.”

I didn’t know how to navigate these conversations, conversations about boys, with my daughter.

I missed my wife, and I wished she were here to do this. I knew she would have been able to say the right thing, anything, but I felt powerless and full of anxiety.

I was afraid of what it would be like as Corinne got older, and I was afraid to let her be in the world as a girl who would eventually be a woman.

What had happened to her mother had been so wrong and so unfair. She’d been murdered outside a bar, on her way home, by a patron, someone she also thought was funny and cute and nice. She hadn’t known him well, but she had known him. She’d looked into his face and served him and smiled at him, and he’d looked in her face and thought about what she’d look like underneath him.

He’d wondered what she’d look like with no life left in her, and he’d made it happen.

I glanced over at my daughter, and so much came crashing into my awareness. The night I’d found out, I’d been on active duty, and my master chief petty officer had called to talk to me and broke the news.

They’d discharged me soon after under special circumstances, and I’d gone home a single dad with traumas up to my ears.

The victims’ advocates had gotten me into therapy, and Quinn’s life insurance had been enough to take care of us, but it hadn’t been enough to fix me.

I wiped the sweat away from my forehead. It pricked my brow, and I felt a heat rising through my body. I was breathless, hot, and dizzy.

“Daddy? Are you okay?” Corinne asked, her voice higher pitched, her woes forgotten.

I nodded, or at least I tried to nod, swallowing hard. My swallows felt impossible, like a lump I couldn’t pass, and I moved to the left and the right, trying to elongate my torso to get more air into that space.

The world felt like it was crashing around me. I glanced at Corinne and saw her mother’s face, gray and unnatural, an open gash on her lip.

I closed my eyes against the image and pulled over to hyperventilate.

Corinne’s voice was far away as she attempted to comfort me, and I could only see her mother, then the face of someone from my platoon, his eyes blackened, lifeless, cloudy, flies around it.

I wanted to scream, and I held it back for Corinne, even as the sound crawled up my throat for release.

I squeezed my eyes tight and told myself, “You’re safe. This isn’t real. You’re safe. This isn’t real.”

Corinne’s voice was loud but far away as she shouted, “Daddy, are you okay? Daddy, should I call 911? Are you dying Daddy?” She sounded so panicked. When I opened my eyes, I could see that she had climbed into the front seat, tears streaming down her face.

I pulled her into me and held her close, rubbing her back and wishing someone was rubbing mine.

The panic attacks had been getting worse as Corinne had gotten older. There were a few years there when she was young, and I had coping skills and my business was thriving, where I felt on top of the world.

Lately, the more she approached middle school, the more it felt like all of the good was slipping away from me again. It was unmanageable and scary, and I didn’t know how to calm my nerves.

I closed my eyes against the warm crown of her head and inhaled, smelling the Target perfume she wore. I could afford something better, but she wanted a perfume that smelled like bananas per some TikTok video she saw.

She was safe.

And I was safe.