Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
RHETT
I’d never seen anyone move as fast as Piper when the crash sounded from the hallway.
She nearly ripped the door off its hinges as she went outside, yelling her boys’ names.
I was on her heels, and peering over her shoulder, I saw two little brown-haired boys at the end of the hall, one of them sprawled on the ground, white as a sheet, the other looking wide-eyed from the other side of a tower of tumbled chairs.
A few feet in front of the boy on the ground, Piper’s phone skittered to a stop.
Behind the boys, more stacks of chairs remained untouched.
At a glance, I knew what had happened. They’d gotten bored and tried to climb the chairs, with disastrous results.
It only took the sight of his mother for the boy on the ground to start crying. Piper sprinted over and dropped to her knees. “Nate,” she said, panic and tension making it come out as a rasp.
“Mama,” he answered, voice sounding much younger than it had when I’d heard it before. “My arm.”
“Don’t move it. Stay there, baby.”
“I dropped your phone,” he said, eyes moving to the device.
Tension gripped me. This was the moment Piper would flip.
I’d seen it a thousand times. How many memories did I have of acting out, being reckless, just for a scrap of my mother’s attention?
And then for her to yell at me, to turn her aggression on me, to punish me for it.
Call me names, tell me how little she thought of me.
I broke one of my mother’s vases once when I decided to throw a baseball indoors.
I stepped on a shard and cut myself so bad I needed a dozen stitches on the bottom of my foot, and my mother railed at me for weeks.
She was angrier about the vase than she was about my injury.
I still had a scar running across my heel to prove it.
So I knew what was about to happen. Piper would snap at her sons, and all that anger that had been directed at me would turn to them. Vulnerable little boys, who just needed their mother’s care.
Wasn’t that how it always went?
It was how it had been for me. If it wasn’t my father’s fists, it was my mother’s ire. They loved beating up on the one person they had power over.
Piper turned and glanced at her phone, and my blood turned to ice. Every single muscle in my body clenched—hard. I took one step toward them—and stopped.
Because Piper didn’t yell. She didn’t vomit out all that anger I’d stoked in her. All she did was turn back to her son and say, “Don’t worry about the phone. Is it just your arm that hurts?”
“And my ankle,” he said.
“Don’t move,” she repeated, then looked at the other boy. “Alec, are you hurt?”
He had tears shimmering in his eyes, but he shook his head. “No.”
“We didn’t think they would fall over,” Nate said, face turning even whiter.
Piper’s hands moved quickly but gently over Nate’s body as she checked him for other injuries.
“We’re going to the hospital,” she said.
“Alec, grab my purse.” She slid it off her shoulder and, almost as an afterthought, tossed the raffle ticket inside.
A ticket she’d been ready to go to war for, chucked into her bag like it was an old candy wrapper.
She shoved the phone into the purse and gave it to the younger boy.
Then she got to her feet and crouched down, one arm going around her elder son’s back.
“On three, I want you to put your weight on me and your good leg, okay? We’re going to hop down the hallway, and then you and your brother will sit on that bench just outside the entrance while I bring the car around. Got it?”
The boy nodded.
She wasn’t asking for help. She wasn’t getting caught up in her panic or her emotions. She was the rock on which her sons could stand and feel safe. She was dropping everything for them—even the promise of a free house.
It was so far removed from everything I expected that I’d moved before I realized what I was doing. When I scooped Nate into my arms, Piper let out an outraged noise. The boy clung to my shoulders with his good arm, his injured one cradled against his chest.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Piper’s eyes blazed brighter than I’d ever seen them. The mama bear’s claws were out.
“I’m taking you all to the hospital,” I said. The thought had only been half formed until it came out of my mouth. But now I was sure.
“Put my son down and back away.”
“Piper,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “you can’t drive with two kids, in the dark, on unfamiliar roads right now. You’re trembling.”
“I am not.”
“Hold out your hand.”
Sticking her jaw out with the kind of stubbornness that I could almost admire, Piper thrust her palm out. Her eyes dropped down and widened when she took in the violent shaking of her fingers. She extended her other hand and inhaled when both extremities trembled together.
I gentled my voice. “I’ll drive you. I know these roads, and I can get you there faster than you’d get following your GPS.”
I knew she wanted to refuse. The internal battle she waged against herself was written in every tense line of her body, every conflicted emotion raging in her eyes.
Then her other son came and wrapped an arm around her, and Piper gave in with a slump of her shoulders. “Okay,” she said.
Tension I hadn’t noticed eased within me.
My chest loosened, and I gave her a curt nod before spinning on my heel and heading for the door.
When I came level with David, who was still standing in the doorway of the community center office, I angled my head toward the tumble of chairs.
“You mind if we leave these for you to clean up?”
“Go,” he said, agreeing.
“Thank you,” Piper said quietly to the other man, and the four of us headed down the hallway toward the exit.
I could feel Piper’s tension radiating beside me, but she kept the pace and kept both her sons within touching distance.
She opened the door for me to slide through, making sure I didn’t jostle Nate as I did, and then she waved me toward her car and opened the back door.
“Alec,” she said, “can you clip yourself into your seat?”
“Yeah,” he replied, circling to the other side where a booster seat was strapped to the back seat.
I slid the injured boy onto the free space beside the booster, then moved aside so Piper could clip him in. She touched him carefully, then finally stroked his cheek and pressed a kiss to his head, murmuring something I couldn’t hear.
But I did hear the tone—that comforting, nurturing tone of voice that had been so rare for me to hear in my own childhood. My chest tightened, and it took all my self-control to keep my expression neutral as Piper straightened and fished through the purse she’d taken back from Alec.
“Here,” she said, handing me her car keys, suddenly looking exhausted.
My fingers curled around the keys, and since I was beside the passenger door, I opened it up for Piper and closed it when she was inside. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, got in, adjusted the seat, and started the car.
The boys were quiet, and Piper’s tension radiated across the space toward me.
“There’s roadwork on the freeway every night this week. I’ll take some back roads through the valley. We should be there in twenty.”
Her chin dipped, the light from the community center’s streetlights glinting on her earrings and necklace. “Okay.” She spun around to look between the front seats to where her boys sat quietly. “Nate, honey, you okay?”
“My arm is sore.”
“I know, baby. We’ll get it checked out and the doctors will tell us what to do.”
“Okay.”
“Alec? Are you clipped in?”
He tugged on his seatbelt to show her.
“Mom?” the other boy said when Piper had turned forward again and I’d put the car in gear.
She spun around again. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was my fault,” Alec jumped in to say. “My idea to get on the chairs.”
“Let’s just get to the hospital, and we can talk about whose fault it was after, okay?”
Through the rearview mirror, I watched both boys nod.
Then I backed out of the parking space and headed for the hospital.
It was a tense, quiet twenty minutes, but we pulled up outside the regional hospital and Piper snapped into action.
She unloaded her sons, putting Nate in a wheelchair and keeping Alec by her side.
When she walked through the doors, I drove off, parked the car in one of the visitor lots, and then headed into the bright lights of the hospital lobby.
Piper was sitting on a hard plastic seat, one son on either side, her arms around both of them. She gave me a tight smile when I handed her the car keys.
“Thank you,” she said, then started rooting through her purse and pulled out her wallet. “I, um… I can’t leave the boys here to drive you home, but I can give you the cab fare to get back.”
“Piper,” I said, holding up a hand as my brows slammed down. “I’m not taking money from you. You don’t owe me anything for a ride to the hospital. Christ.”
Her jaw clenched as she hesitated, a twenty-dollar bill pinched between her thumb and forefinger, dangling between us.
The woman wouldn’t even accept a ride. Were her principles that stringent?
She didn’t believe in simple favors? Suddenly angry, I stomped across the lobby and mashed the buttons on the coffee-dispensing machine.
With a little paper cup in either hand, I marched back to where Piper sat and thrust one of them at her.
“Take it,” I said when she hesitated. “It’s not filled with poison. Just bad coffee. You’ll need it—these things always take forever.”
“Thank you,” she said, fingers closing around the cup. She took a sip, grimaced, and then took another. Her eyes drifted to the big automatic swinging doors that led deeper into the hospital, clearly hoping to see someone emerge who would call her name.
But when I took a seat on the other side of Alec, her gaze shifted to me. “What are you doing?”