Six
M onday morning, the day before Veterans Day, I got a text from the school district that classes were canceled due to a flood advisory that quickly became a warning. I was stunned.
“When I was going to school,” I told Darwin as he put blueberry muffins in the oven, “we never missed a day due to rain. I walked through a hailstorm once.”
“I’m sure you did,” Tatum said cheerfully, patting my back.
She wasn’t actually listening to me.
When I glanced at Darwin, he smiled and nodded.
“Cool story, bro,” Griff teased me.
“You all suck,” I muttered as Tatum put my new French press down in front of me.
She’d filled it and brought it over carefully, along with a carton of half-and-half and an enormous stoneware mug I had mentioned I liked and so was spared in the great purge at the yard sale. “But thank you for the coffee.”
I got a smile in return.
I’d bought the press at a store in Seattle the day the kids met their psychiatrist. Dr. Marlowe wanted to start off with Tuesdays and Thursdays.
She would take Tatum and Darwin together, and Griff alone.
What presented to her initially, in the joint session with Tatum and Darwin, was that their trauma was in losing their mother and abandonment.
They would talk about that together, especially since the issue of not wanting to hurt one another’s feelings had been resolved.
Now that they could mention their mother, she felt she’d help them more together.
Griff had different issues, so he would be talking to her alone.
I figured that would work well. While the two younger kids were in with Dr. Marlowe, Griff and I could talk or whatever.
While he was in, I could take Tatum and Darwin on a walkabout.
Of course, the colder it got, the more interesting the strolling would get, but that would be Luke Duchesne’s problem.
I’d be gone by then. And yes, I was assuming he would continue the therapy sessions, but if everything the kids had expressed to me was true, then he had wanted that for them, he just never found the time to interview doctors.
Me, with my inside track of Benji having friends and colleagues all over the country, had made it easy for him.
All he had to do was follow through. I sincerely hoped he would. I was cautiously optimistic.
After pouring my coffee and adding the cream, I sat there with it, inhaling the smell of bacon. Griff was getting really good at making it, and even peppered it, which I liked. When Tatum bumped me—she was sitting beside me on the bench—I turned to her.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She shook her head.
“I know you,” I reminded her.
Sucking in a quick breath, she said, “I heard what you said last night.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I came down to fill up my tumbler with water and I heard you telling Wink that if Dad said no, you would take him with you when you left.”
“Well, love, what else would we do?”
“He won’t make us get rid of Wink when I tell him what happened.”
“I’m sure he won’t,” I agreed. “So then what are you worried about?”
Sharp exhale. “I don’t—I don’t want you to go.”
I smiled at her. “Love, you know I won’t be here for?—”
“You said you’d never leave what was yours,” she said miserably. “Aren’t I yours?”
I was sitting there, looking at her, and the world fell down around me. It was like sitting on a bench and suddenly getting hit by a freight train.
What had I done?
This could never, ever, happen. Or, more precisely, if the fixer saw it happening, we were immediately supposed to course-correct and call for someone else to take over.
This had never happened to me before. No one ever got attached. Not to me. How had I missed that I was fucking up?
Apparently, I wasn’t as bad with kids as I thought. Young kids, toddlers, even older, five, six, no good, but ten and older, I was all right. I never knew that about myself. As usual, epiphanies came at the worst times.
I needed to get up from the table and call Shaw.
I needed to be swapped out, like, yesterday, and yes, Rais or one of the new people were going to be pissed about this, especially as close as we were getting to Thanksgiving, but there was nothing I could do about that.
There were boundaries for a reason, lines to never cross, and I was way over mine.
“Nash?”
I looked up at Darwin.
“Why is Tatum crying?”
“She—”
“I’m just worried about Wink at the vet today, and I’m happy that now we can all go, but still, what if he’s sick?”
It was very nice of her to tell a little white lie to her brother.
“He could be,” Darwin stated flatly. “He could have, among other things, feline leukemia virus, or feline immunodeficiency virus, or feline panleukopenia.”
“What?” Tatum gasped, sounding horrified.
“I researched it last night before my no-screens-time kicked in,” Darwin assured me. “And I read up on all of them, and they’re terrible.”
“Oh no,” Tatum whimpered.
“What is happening?” Griff asked from the stove.
Before I could reply, there was furious pounding on the sliding glass door.
We all turned, and there was Luke Duchesne, dripping wet, flailing his arms around.
Over the booming thunder and driving rain, we hadn’t heard him open the garage door—I hadn’t replaced those remotes because there were only two, one in the Jeep and the other in his truck.
So he must’ve opened the garage, gotten out of his truck, tried to come in, found out that the door had a new lock on it, and probably banged on it to no avail.
With the rain, from the garage, through the mudroom, there was no way we could’ve heard him.
Strangely, he’d then made the decision not to go to the front door and ring the doorbell—since his key wouldn’t have worked there either—but instead to walk all the way around the side of the house, in a hurricane, to the back door.
That made no sense. I was starting to wonder about the man.
His choices, in a lot of areas, were not great.
Regardless, the kids scrambled to let him in, and I went and moved the pan of bacon off the burner before darting to the mudroom for towels. I returned fast, but he was already yelling.
“Why the hell is there a lock on the door from the garage alluva sudden?” That question was for everyone, and then he zeroed in on me. “Who the fuck are you, and why are you in my house?”
I took the breath I always did. “I’m Nash Miller,” I explained, then beaned him in the face with a beach towel he immediately batted to the floor. “I was hired by your ex-brother-in-law to protect you and your children from?—”
“I don’t give a fuck who you are! No one told me anything about this, and you need to get the hell out of my?—”
I hit him with the second towel, harder, which must have startled him because it rendered him momentarily speechless.
“Please don’t raise your voice. It’s way too early, and I have not had my coffee yet.”
“I—”
“Don’t yell at Nash, Daddy,” Tatum scolded him, shaking her head for emphasis as I returned to my seat on the bench. “He’s been here taking care of us and saved me from burning down the house.”
“What?”
“Plus,” Darwin chimed in, “Griff got beat up by Chief Wilson— ex -Chief Wilson now—and Nash was the one who got Griff out of jail.”
“Out of police custody,” I reminded him. “He wasn’t in jail.”
“Nash got him out of police custody ,” Darwin amended.
“ What ?” His voice was going up.
“Instead of being upset,” Tatum continued, smiling at him, “you should stop and take a minute and think, Wow, the house looks killer. Isn’t that amazing ?”
Killer was one of my words. I noticed she’d picked up a few.
“I—”
“Right now you have to ask yourself, Is it me? Am I the only one freaking out? Because everyone else seems pretty okay.”
He glanced from one child to another and then back to me.
“I would suggest,” I began, unable to stifle my yawn, “that you maybe go take a warm shower, decompress, and then when you come back out, we’ll all have breakfast.”
Taking in the room a second time, he saw Tatum nodding enthusiastically over my suggestion and Darwin giving him a thumbs-up. Griff, though, was not happy. He groaned loudly and then bolted to the stove, having completely forgotten the bacon in the ensuing chaos.
“Oh, you moved it,” he said, smiling over at me. “Thank you.”
“It’s what a sous chef does. I’m the backup.”
“Can everyone?—”
“ No, ” Tatum wailed at her father, who had taken one step into the room off the very thick, very absorbent mat by the door. “I just mopped last night with the hardwood-floor stuff, and if you get water all over it, I swear I will murder you!”
After a moment, Darwin laughed. “Ohmygod, you sounded just like her.”
Tatum caught her breath. “I did?”
“You so did,” Griff said, chuckling.
Tatum was thrilled for a moment before she refocused on her father and glared. “Take off your boots and your socks, leave them there, and go to your room and change.”
His brows furrowed, I suspected more in confusion than anger, but he did as he was directed and squished away. A moment later he called out to us from his room that there was a kitten on his bed.
“His name is Wink, and he has to go to the vet in two hours,” Darwin yelled back. “Are you changing your clothes so you don’t get pneumonia?”
No answer.
“You told me you don’t get sick from being cold or wet, that it’s from germs,” Tatum whispered to her brother.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that,” he whispered back.
“Of course he does,” Griff said. “He’s not stupid.”
“Are you cooking bacon or talking?” I asked.
“I’m cooking bacon,” Griff groused at me.
“I want mine with pepper,” I said to distract him.
He scoffed. “Like I don’t know how you like your bacon.”