Chapter 1
Chapter One
Ben
Being a single dad of two little girls was not for the weak.
Balancing the single dad gig with a thriving veterinary practice? I’d been trying to do it for several years, and most days all I could do was hold on and get through the day, hoping everyone’s needs were met.
Take today, for example.
This chilly, rainy Sunday morning four days before Thanksgiving had started with an emergency call just before five a.m. from Bill Gibbons, a family friend since my childhood.
His mare was in labor and needed help. I’d been waiting for my coffee to brew, preparing for my morning chores, planning to wake up the girls for feeding time as usual—our animals’, not the girls’—when the call had come in.
When a mare experienced dystocia, there was no time to waste—both her and the foal’s lives were in danger.
I’d woken the girls as my mind spun through options for childcare. I didn’t want to call Grandma Berty, because she’d stayed with Evelyn and Ruby last night until nearly midnight while I went to my weekly single dads’ night. At seventy-four, my grandmother needed her sleep.
Normally I’d call one of my techs, but Kat was sick, and Brad was out of town, so I’d had no choice but to grab a box of granola bars and some juice boxes and pile the girls into the truck with me.
“Daddy, I want to get a baby in Freckles’s tummy,” Ruby, my six-year-old, said from the backseat as I drove us home from what thankfully had ended up a successful birth.
My girls had hung out with Alice, Bill’s wife, during the tense birth, but they’d been able to witness the newborn foal standing for its first time just before we left. They’d been happily chattering nonstop ever since, still riding the high of that enchanting miracle.
I couldn’t help but be moved by it myself, even though I’d seen it dozens of times. I’d also experienced tragic results in similar situations, so I was all too aware we’d been lucky today.
“Freckles can’t have babies. He’s a gelding,” Evelyn, nine, told Ruby in her older-sister-knows-all voice.
“Bay Leaf then,” Ruby persisted. “She’s a girl.”
“A mare,” Evelyn corrected.
“A mare is a girl, and she can have baby horses,” Ruby said. “Please, Daddy?”
A laugh burst out of me, but instead of hell no, I said, “No baby horses for us for the foreseeable future, Ruby Tuesday. We’ve got our hands full already.”
“Grandma Berty said we shouldn’ta got the llamas.” Evelyn was wise beyond her years, an old-soul type, but she didn’t hesitate to keep me abreast of all my dear grandmother’s opinions. Which was good and bad.
In this case, the logical part of me acknowledged Grandma Berty could be right, but the animal-loving sucker in me would never give those llamas up. Not even escape artist Esmerelda.
“Betty and Esmerelda are part of the family,” I reassured my girls.
“So their last name is Holloway?” Ruby asked, pulling another grin from me.
“Of course it is,” I confirmed.
“I’m hungry,” Ruby said, flipping mental channels at the speed of a first-grader.
“We’ll get a real breakfast as soon as we feed the animals. How about pancakes?” I watched my younger daughter’s brown eyes light up in the rearview mirror.
“Yes!” Ruby said.
“I bet the chickens are even hungrier,” Evelyn said. The hens—all eight of ours and Emerson’s six—and Gordon, the rooster, were her responsibility, and she took it seriously.
“Maybe after we feed everyone and I get cleaned up, we’ll go to the diner for brunch,” I said, thinking it’d be nice to have Monty’s crew at the Dragonfly Diner cook for us.
The birth had been touch and go. Getting the foal into the right position had been a challenge, and the adrenaline had finally receded, leaving me exhausted.
“We can’t go to the diner,” Evelyn said. “Miss Emerson is moving in today.”
“Shit!” I looked at the dash clock.
“You said a bad word, Daddy,” Ruby informed me.
“We’re late,” I muttered, only half-present in the conversation, my mind jumping to Emerson and her kids and how long they’d been waiting for us. “Which doesn’t make bad words okay,” I dutifully said to Ruby.
“We’re almost home,” Evelyn said.
I was, in fact, about to turn into our driveway.
As I pulled in, I noted the clinic parking lot was empty. That wasn’t always the case, even when it was closed, as people brought ill or injured animals in at all hours.
Next, out of habit, my gaze veered to the pasture, where the horses and llamas spent their days, to ensure that Esmerelda hadn’t escaped.
Of course, none of them were out of the barn.
I hadn’t had a chance to feed them or put them outside.
It looked like an indoor day for them anyway due to the incessant cold drizzle.
As soon as I could see past the house to the driveway, I spotted Emerson’s SUV. I could tell it was running, as the windows were steamy, and the back wiper swished across every few seconds.
Damn.
At least they’d waited.
I pulled up next to the SUV and turned off the engine. Emerson looked my way, and I mouthed the word sorry, but I wasn’t sure she could see me through the steam and rain.
“Evel—”
“I got the chickens, Dad,” my older daughter said before I could.
“Go in front of Miss Emerson’s car,” I said as she let herself out the back passenger door.
She didn’t answer, so I watched to be sure she did as I said. Without a glance at Emerson or her kids, Evelyn walked to the front of the vehicles, her mind fully on the birds, I would bet, then ran toward the chicken coop to do her morning chores.
“Let’s go, Ruby.”
I got out and opened my daughter’s door so she could climb down. She raced around to the passenger side of Emerson’s vehicle, likely looking for Xavier.
“Around the front, Ruby!” I called out. “We don’t go behind cars, remember?”
“Sorry, Daddy!”
Luckily Emerson wasn’t going anywhere, but I wondered how many times a parent needed to repeat the same thing for a kid to finally hear it and follow it. Three or four thousand was my guess.
I made it to Emerson’s door without her getting out. When I got there, I saw why. Her four-year-old daughter, Skyler, was curled up in Emerson’s lap, her head tucked into Emerson’s shoulder.
I heard the door on the other side open, and Ruby and Xavier, who were thick as thieves whenever they were together, ran toward the house, wrapped up in their conversation. Emerson’s dog, Nugget, raced after them, around them, in between them, tail wagging, excited to be free of the car.
Finally Emerson opened the door and flashed a smile that was not at all real. Her makeup-free green eyes were tired and concerned. She wore her toffee-colored hair in a messy bun on her head.
“Hey, Ben.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here at eight thirty. I got an emergency call on a distressed mare in labor.”
“It’s totally fine. We were late too. Everything okay with the mare?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “She and her foal are doing well. Everything okay with you?”
As Emerson slid down from the driver’s seat, Skyler clung to her like she was never going to let go. Supporting her daughter with one arm, Emerson reached in and picked up a kid-sized backpack.
“Hi, Skyler,” I said to the back of her head. “Welcome.”
Emerson frowned over her daughter’s head. “She’s sad to leave Kizzy’s house. It’s the only home she remembers having.”
“That’s rough,” I said sympathetically. “I think you’ll like staying here, Sky. It’s like living in the middle of a petting zoo.”
She turned her head to look at me, staying glued to Emerson.
“You like animals, right?” I asked.
She nodded, her eyes wide.
“And you get to share a room with Evelyn. It’ll be like a sleepover every night.”
“I wanna sleep with Mommy,” Skyler said and turned her dark-blond head away from me.
Emerson and I exchanged a look as she said, “We’ll see, baby girl.”
“Let’s get in out of the drizzle. I still need to feed the animals, and I promised my girls pancakes after that.”
Skyler flipped her head back to face me.
“Do you like pancakes?” I asked her.
She nodded. “With lots of maple syrup.”
“We’ve got lots of maple syrup.” I made a mental note that food won out over animals with this little one.
I led them to the house. Once inside, we were swarmed by all three dogs.
Fortunately our two knew Emerson’s and got along with her.
My two cats, Pixie and Jett, however, were untested.
I was sure we’d know soon enough how that would go down, but I didn’t have time to search for the felines right now.
“Let’s go upstairs so you can see the room where you’re staying,” I said to Skyler, wanting to do something, anything, to help Emerson out.
Moving was a lot. Moving right before Thanksgiving had to be extra chaotic.
Emerson’s mother-in-law had put her in a difficult spot by moving to Las Vegas unexpectedly then selling her house, where Emerson and her kids had lived for four years, suddenly.
I suspected Emerson would’ve bought it from her mother-in-law had it not been in the Heights, which translated to high dollar.
I got the impression the military had taken care of Blake’s widow sufficiently but not at a level where she could afford the bougiest neighborhood in town.
Emerson claimed to be fine with it all and happy for Kizzy, who’d eloped with an old friend, but I wondered how the woman could justify displacing her son’s widow and her grandkids like this.
Our arrangement was temporary, just until the end of the year while Emerson searched for a house, so she and her kids would be somewhat unsettled for the next six weeks. That’d be a challenge for anyone, but for a single parent…
“I wanna sleep with Mommy,” Skyler said again.