Chapter 40
The office smelled of stale coffee and ink, the kind of place where lives got shredded and filed away in manila folders. Frankie sat beside me in a stiff chair, her shoulders tense, papers clutched in her lap. She looked smaller than I’d ever seen her.
The walls were closing in on her, like she was already braced for the worst, and it gutted me.
All I wanted to do was pull her into my arms, snarl at everyone in the building that she was a damn good mother, better than anyone I’d ever known, and drag her out.
But I couldn’t, not here.
Trav was blowing up my phone, obsessively inquiring about what was happening and how Frankie was doing. The kids were asleep, and her mother had broken down the moment he told her the news.
There was nothing we could do to quell their fears; we could simply support them as we let the process run its course and hope that justice prevailed.
So, I sat still, jaw tight, trying to be steady when she glanced at me. Because if I lost it, she would too.
The agent across the desk shuffled through the report, every word another knife twisting in my gut.
Unfit. Neglect. Exposing minors to an unsafe environment. Unsupervised time.
My fists curled on my knees. Neglect? I’d seen Frankie skip meals so her kids could eat. I’d seen her stumble in exhausted from late-night shifts and early school drop-offs but still make it work to do homework and bedtime stories simultaneously while going to school for her own degree.
I’d seen her carry the weight of the entire world alone and somehow never let it crush them.
If that was unsafe, then I didn’t know what the hell safe was anymore.
Frankie’s voice cracked when she finally spoke up, cutting through the silence as the agent prolonged the suspense, scribbling in her notes. “I love my kids. They’re my life. I’d die before I let anything happen to them.”
The agent didn’t even look up, as if Frankie’s heart bleeding on the table didn’t matter.
I reached under the desk, found her hand, and squeezed. She squeezed back, so hard it hurt, but I didn’t let go.
She was breaking in front of me, and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t shield her from this. I could only sit here and hold her while strangers decided if she got to keep the two people who mattered the most to her.
And I swear in that moment, I hated Danny more than I’d ever hated anything in my life.
The agent’s pen scratched across the form as if she were already writing the verdict when she finally cleared her throat and started the investigation.
Interrogation was more like it.
“Ms. Blake,” she said without looking up, “do your children often spend evenings at the ice rink unsupervised while you’re working?”
Frankie’s voice shook. “They’re never unsupervised. The players, coaches—”
“Are not parental supervision.” The woman cut in, cold as steel.
“But I am,” I cut in just as powerful. “Travis and I are parental figures in their lives as their mother’s partners.
Therefore, we qualify as parental supervision when they’re at the rink.
And they’re never there without us. So no, the answer to your question is no, they do not spend evenings at the rink unsupervised while Frankie works. ”
The woman’s eyes squinted in indignation slightly before she looked back down at the papers.
“Ms. Blake, your petition shows a pattern of neglectful behavior.” Looking back up at Frankie, she pushed on, “The elementary school they attend documented four instances this year alone when you’ve been late to pick them up. ”
I could hear Frankie swallow, but she replied through her fear. “Never more than a few minutes. The doors were always still open; I wasn’t that late. It was just a few minutes.”
“Were you spending that time with your lovers?” The woman cut making my skin crawl.
“No,” Frankie answered firmly, “I was at college, attending classes to get my business degree. Those four instances were when my class ran over, and I was stuck arriving a few moments late. That’s all.”
“How many sexual relationships have you been in over the last four years?”
“Are you kidding me?” I roared, and Frankie flinched, the accusation laced with enough venom to bruise her.
“None.” Frankie replied firmly, “I don’t date.
I don’t go out. I don’t have friends. I don’t do anything but work, go to school, and take care of my kids, taking them from hockey practice and art camp and every other extracurricular activity I can afford because I want them to be well-rounded individuals.
” She took a shuddering breath and pressed on.
“Until I started dating Travis and Elliot, I hadn’t been with anyone since my children’s father. ”
The agent turned her gaze to me. Sharp. Too sharp.
“Mr. Torres, correct? You and your friend—Mr. Hayes. You’re both romantically involved with Ms. Blake?”
Frankie inhaled sharply, shame burning her cheeks. This was her worst fear come true.
I squared my shoulders, meeting her stare head on, “Yes. Both of us. And if you think loving Frankie makes her an unfit mother, then you’ve never seen what real parenting looks like.
It doesn’t matter if there’s one or two of us, the dynamic in our household does not differ from any other single parent dating and introducing their children to their partners. ”
The pen stopped scratching across her notes, and the room got colder almost instantly. “Are the children exposed to your—relationship?”
The question was acid in my gut. What the fuck did she think we did in front of the kids?
“They’re exposed to love. To safety. To two men who would lay down their lives for them, same as their mother.
That’s what they see. They’re loved by a woman, and two men, who are finally giving them the good male influence in their lives that they’ve been lacking since their father beat the shit out of their mother so badly, she ran for her life and returned to Cedar Bluff. ”
Frankie broke then, tears spilling as she buried her face in her hands. “They’re my babies. I would never hurt them. I would never put them at risk.”
With a mask of impassive power, the agent wrote something else, and I felt my control slipping with each stroke of her pen. My voice dropped, low and dangerous.
“You’re twisting her life into something ugly because her ex fed you lies. You want to investigate? Fine. But don’t sit there and act like you already know the end of the story. You don’t know her. You don’t know us.”
The agent didn’t flinch, didn’t even acknowledge the fury radiating off me. Just opened the folder next to her on the table and pulled out something.
“What do you have to say about this?” she asked, laying down a dark photo on the table in front of Frankie.
“Oh, my God—” Frankie’s voice broke on a startled sob as she flipped the photo over, disgusted by the image.
“Jesus fuck.” I growled, ripping it from her hands and crumpling it. “Seriously?”
“Well,” The agent asked, raising one brow. “You tell me what that is, because to me, it looks like you’re engaging in a sex act in the middle of a public parking lot. Topless in the wide open, not even trying to hide it.”
“You can’t throw out nude photos of a woman and hold them against her when she didn’t consent to them being taken!” I roared.
The agent didn’t even blink. “The security camera footage from the outside of the rink had them. We didn’t invade any privacy to obtain them. If you wanted privacy, perhaps you should have had your orgy behind closed doors.”
“You listen here—”
“Elliot, please,” Frankie cried, pulling me back to my seat as I rose to my feet, towering over the infuriating woman.
I fell back down into the chair, my body coiled tight like it would snap at any moment.
“My children were nowhere near that situation, Ma’am.
I would never do something like that around them.
And I wasn’t in the wide open, I was in a personal vehicle. ”
“No, they weren’t around that night, Ms. Blake.
” The woman stood up, gathering her paperwork, “Because once again, someone else was taking care of them for you while you frolicked around doing whatever you damn well please.” She walked away from the table.
“We’ll be in touch. In the meantime, no contact with the minors involved. ”
Without another word, she left the room, leaving a shattered and broken Frankie in her wake.
The truck ride to Lucy Blake’s home, in the middle of the night, was a quiet kind of hell.
Frankie sat curled against the passenger door, her forehead pressed to the cold glass, papers clutched tight in her lap. She wouldn’t let go of that damn envelope holding all the cruel and untrue things they claimed against her.
She had no tears left to cry, no words left to say, she was simply silent. And the silence was so thick it pressed in on my chest, making it hard to breathe.
We should be going home, to the cabin, to Travis and the kids, but the agents refused to budge on their order for no interaction, and Frankie was being forced to stay at Lucy’s for the time being.
I just prayed it wouldn’t be for long, because a part of her was dying inside with each minute separated from her children.
I wanted to fill the silence, promising her it would be okay, that we’d fight it, and that the department created to protect children wouldn’t succeed in destroying a happy home based on lies fed to them by a monster. But every word felt like a lie when she looked so broken.
So instead, I reached across the seat and wrapped my hand around hers. She didn’t move, didn’t squeeze it back, but she didn’t pull away either.
I held on anyway.
By the time we pulled into her mom’s driveway, it felt like years had passed since I had left the house that morning for work.
How had I lived three lifetimes in a single day?
The porch light outside Lucy’s small cape glowed warm, but everything inside of me was ice as Frankie silently slid from the truck without making any eye contact with me.
Lucy was waiting in the doorway, wrapped up tight in an oversized sweater, her face pale and crumpled. She didn’t ask questions as we walked into her home, she just pulled Frankie into her arms the second she crossed the threshold.
“My baby,” She whispered, rocking her grown daughter like she was a little girl all over again. “My sweet baby girl.”
Frankie clung to her for a second before she slipped free, her voice hollow and thin. “I can’t. I can’t be soft right now. Please, just let me go.”
With dead eyes, she turned to me, like the fight had already been drained from her soul.
“Eli,” She whispered, swallowing down as emotions tried to make her crumble, “Take care of them. Please, just—tell them I love them and that I’m sorry.
” She broke, shoulders crumbling under it all as she sobbed, “Tell them how sorry I am.”
The bottom dropped out of my world as I took a step toward her, “Frankie, no—”
But she backed away, moving down the hall and disappearing into the dark of her childhood bedroom, the door clicking shut behind her with finality.
I stood frozen in the entryway, Lucy’s hand clutching mine, her eyes wet and pleading. “Don’t let her give up, Eli,” She begged, “He can’t win. She won’t survive it.”
All I could do was nod, heart splitting wide open because I knew her words were the truth.
Frankie wouldn’t be able to exist on this earth if she was kept from her kids, they were her world.
“Don’t let her out of your sight,” I murmured, taking a deep breath and forcing my shoulders to stand firm and strong.
“We have to be sturdy when she can’t be, but we have to keep her safe. ”
Her mom nodded, knowing how fragile our black cat was at that very moment, and squeezed my hand. “Go home to Trav, I’ve got our girl.”
I backed out of her home, back out into the icy cold night even though I wanted to push my way into Frankie’s space, and hold her tight while she fell apart so all the broken pieces of her soul would have a safe place to be stored until she was ready to let me put them all back together again, but I couldn’t.
Not at the moment.
Instead, I pulled out of her driveway and headed toward home.
I couldn’t help Frankie right now, but I could help the kids to feel as little of a ripple as possible while we all lived in limbo.
With my very last dying breath, I’d take care of those damn kids like they were my own, because at this point, they were.
They were ours.
And so was their mom.
We’d prove it.