Chapter Nine LIAM
Chapter Nine
L IAM
I was fourteen the first time I lined up on a field to play American football. My mum had remarried by that point, and decent bloke that he was, Nigel suggested we find a league where I could learn how to play properly, if that’s what I wanted.
And I did.
He didn’t press as to why I wanted to play that sport; maybe my mum had told him not to ask.
They knew soccer—the real football where I was from—would never serve as a proper outlet for all that shit I kept bottled up all the time.
They didn’t press me on that either. Trying to talk through any of the things I felt bubbling under the surface only served to make me angrier, because it was hard to find the right words for the things I felt. Mainly the things I didn’t want to be feeling.
But on the field, I could let them go.
The first time I landed a clean tackle, on a mouthy little shit of a running back, I felt the most surreal sort of high.
He was fast. Faster than most of the guys on my team. But he wasn’t faster than me. After chasing him down for thirty yards, I tackled him ten yards shy of the end zone and felt a rush of head-spinning euphoria that was completely foreign.
An addiction was born.
No matter how hard I had to work to keep playing the sport, that addiction never faded.
No one pushed me to play like my dad, reminded me where I came from, whom I came from.
There were no coaches asking me if I remembered the time my dad’s team got promoted to the Premier League, asking me if he had taught me the things I knew, asking me if I had gotten my work ethic from the man who shared my face and build and speed.
They didn’t ask me anything. I was just me.
It was freedom.
And across the pond, I found a family in locker rooms, along with the thing I was meant to do.
But never once had I imagined that the sport I loved, which brought me sanity and friends and a life, would have me staring down into the face of a little girl who was easily a thousand times more stubborn than I’d ever fucking thought possible.
“Come on,” I coaxed. “Doesn’t this look delicious?”
I swear on my ancestors’ graves, she narrowed her eyes before giving me an emphatic no.
“It’s macaroni and cheese, Mira. Every child in the known universe loves this orange bullshit.”
“You make it wrong,” she said.
My mouth fell open. “I did not.”
She rolled her lips between her teeth and stared me down.
I scratched the side of my face and glanced over at the box. I’d gotten the good kind. The shells with the creamy shit. And maybe that was my error.
Like I could help it that Zoe got the processed powder crap.
I held the spoon out, contemplating airplane sounds and whether I’d need to create a song and fucking dance to get her to eat. She clamped her mouth shut and sat back in the chair.
Then she shook her head.
I sighed, pulling the spoon back and settling it in the bowl.
I crossed my arms over my chest and returned the staredown. “You need to eat something.”
She shook her head. Emphatically. “No. Not hungry.”
“It’s been four hours since she dropped you off, and if you starve under my care, she will never, ever let me live it down.” I pointed to the orange-coated noodles. “You have to try something .”
With a weary hand, I scrubbed the bottom half of my face. I needed a shave. I needed some sleep. And I needed Mira to eat some bloody food.
Then she pointed at the counter. “I have a doughnut?”
“Of course you know what that box is,” I muttered. “No doughnuts until you eat something real, little bit.”
She pushed her lip out in a pout.
When I’d arrived that morning, Zoe was already at the house, bags of Mira’s things neatly lined up in her sky-blue bedroom and a movie running on the large flat-screen TV in the family room.
The little girl in question hardly paid me any mind when I showed up.
Zoe watched me set bags of groceries on the counter and sling my duffel bag onto the floor. “Binders are right there, if you want them,” she said.
Sure enough, tucked against the fridge were two of them. Mira’s name was printed neatly on the spines. Slowly, I let my gaze wander from those fucking books back to the delicate features of Zoe’s face. She was wearing makeup today. Her lashes looked longer and blacker than normal, and my stomach flipped weightlessly at how they deepened the color of her eyes.
Then she arched one of those eyebrows.
It was such a condescending arch too. Something meant to inflame.
That was what Zoe didn’t understand about herself. What she’d never understood about how she dealt with me.
All she had to do—all she’d ever had to do—was simply be there.
Stand there.
Look at me.
Breathe.
That’s all it took, and I was desperately, impossibly inflamed.
Nowhere to put the energy and nothing I could say to make her hate me less after a decade of contention between us.
I answered her slowly. “I’d rather pluck my eyeballs out than open those.”
Contention was better than possibility, though, because the last thing I needed in my life—especially now—was for her to realize her absolute, impossible power over me, the kind she held tight in her fist and didn’t even know about.
Zoe rolled her eyes and walked into the family room, where she whispered something to Mira.
The movie was put on pause, and Mira hopped up off the floor and pranced into the kitchen. She stopped when she saw me, and I tried my best to soften my face. I didn’t crouch down, because I always hated it when adults made little kids hug them or high-five them or do stupid shit when they might be uncomfortable.
“Hey, Mira,” I said. “You remember me?”
Carefully, she nodded. Then she took a few steps out from behind Zoe.
“You remember my name?”
Mira’s hair was messy and wild, and she was still wearing cotton pajamas printed with little ducks in rain boots. She took another step and motioned me closer with her hand.
Zoe started chewing on her thumbnail, her nerves clear, as I bent my knees and put my hands on the tops of my thighs to lean closer.
Mira reached her hand up and pinched my nose. Hard.
I made a growling sound, deep in my chest, and she giggled.
“Uncle Liam,” she said, then honked my nose again.
I tweaked one of her curls. “That’s right.”
From the moment Mira was born, Chris had insisted on the unofficial family moniker. No matter how much I’d argued it, she’d called me Uncle Liam since she was able to form the words. And of course Chris and Amie had popped out a precocious little shit of a child, so she’d been doing it for at least a year.
As I straightened back to my full height and Zoe let out a quiet sigh of relief, Mira stepped forward again and wrapped her arms around my leg.
It was like someone had punched a ragged hole right through my chest. All the skin and bone and muscles—designed to protect everything inside—they folded like wet paper. That’s how it felt when those skinny little arms were wrapped around my leg.
Maybe a better man would’ve leaned down to pick her up.
Maybe a softer man who understood how all this worked.
But with Zoe’s watchful golden eyes aimed straight at me, all I could manage was a soft pat on the top of Mira’s head.
I had the creeping sensation that if I picked her up, if I gave her a proper hug, I’d fucking cry or something, and there was no way I was letting Miss Valentine get the satisfaction of seeing it.
The brick wall inside my chest was too high, too fortified after so many years, and already firmly back in place now that I shared space with her. It wouldn’t come crumbling down again that easily.
Zoe crouched down for the hug I hadn’t given, and she reminded Mira that I was going to take care of her and that Rosa was right across the street.
Like I’d call that woman for help. She terrified me.
“You coming back soon?” Mira asked. Her eyes were wide, and I had to look away.
Zoe nodded. “Very soon. I’ll only be gone for two sleeps.” She tapped Mira’s nose. “You’ll have so much fun with Uncle Liam, okay?” Then she leaned in for a dramatic whisper that I was meant to hear. “Make him watch Moana a lot; I think he’ll love it.”
I rolled my eyes but fought a smile when Mira giggled happily.
“I put the car seat in the garage,” Zoe told me as she stood. “Do you want me to show you how to hook it in?”
“I can figure it out.”
For a moment, she stared me down. “I highly doubt that, but okay. Rosa’s number is on the fridge. She’s around all weekend.” She gave me a look. “Call her if you need help. Please.”
I set my hands on my hips. “It’s two days, Valentine. I can handle it.”
I’d uttered those words before I knew.
Before I knew that saying no to a doughnut could cause weeping and wailing.
Before I knew that an entire day could pass in which she refused to eat any of the food I made for her.
Cold macaroni and cheese ended up being my meal for the afternoon, which I ate sitting on the deck and watching her blow bubbles. Doughnut crumbs still dotted her cheeks.
“You do it,” she said, then shoved the bottle of bubbles at me. She’d spilled half the contents already, and the outside of the bottle was coated with a soapy film.
I took it from her hand and dipped the wand inside. Before waving it gently through the air, I paused to study the excitement on her face.
All day, I’d searched for some hint that she desperately missed her parents. And I couldn’t see a shred of any such thing.
Yeah, she was as stubborn as a fucking mule, but she was happy. She bounced on the balls of her toes, her eyes gleaming while she waited for me to comply with her request.
A knot formed in my throat when I realized just how simple life was for her right now.
I pulled the wand through the air, and she chased the bubbles as she laughed.
No complications existed for her. All the things that had been thrown at Zoe and me over the last month and a half simply weren’t there. Because she had all the things she needed, at least in her mind.
Someone to feed her. Someone to play with her. Someone to be there in the middle of the night.
Someone to make her feel safe.
That brick wall inside me quavered ominously, and I waited for a crack in the foundation, something unsettling and unsteady. But I took a deep breath, and it held.
Somehow.
After a few more minutes of bubbles, my phone vibrated on the table next to me.
Valentine: How’s it going?
Me: She hasn’t run away yet.
Valentine: Helpful. Did she eat lunch? She’s picky. Which you’d know if you read the binder.
Me: She also hasn’t starved. We’re doing just fine, thank you very much.
Me: Busy playing bubbles. Can’t talk.
Valentine: She should have a bath tonight. It’s the first purple tab in the first binder.
Me: It’s a bath, Valentine, not defusing a nuclear bomb.
Me: Go take care of your patient. Isn’t that why you’re there?
Valentine: I cannot tell you how much I hate that I can hear your voice in my head saying every single one of these things.
My lips curved unwittingly, and I was glad she couldn’t see it. If I were a different man, I’d have sent her a different response. Something about how she imagined me when I wasn’t there. But instead, I set my phone down.
It wasn’t until after dinner—I wasn’t proud of it, but once my scrambled eggs ended up on the floor with more tears, I let her raid the bags of groceries I’d brought—that I realized the temptation of those fucking binders.
Starting the bath was easy enough.
Turn on the water. Make sure it’s not too hot. Check.
Pull some clean pajamas off the stack on top of her dresser. Check.
Find the baby shampoo and dump it under the running water. Check.
Mira was wildly unhelpful as I tried to wrangle her clothes off, which was my first hiccup.
“What in the bloody hell,” I muttered when she contorted her body as I tried to pull the shirt over her head. “Hold still.”
She set her jaw and gripped the edge of the tub when I tried to wrestle her hair free. “No bath. I need my ducky.”
“What ducky?” I asked. Was I sweating? I wiped a hand over my forehead, and holy fuck, I was sweating from trying to get her undressed for a bath. “I don’t know where your ducky is. Is he in your room?”
Mira ran across the hall, and I sank against the wall with a deep breath. “Fucking hell,” I whispered.
“Where’s Ducky?” she yelled.
I rolled over to my knees and sighed before standing up. “Hang on, hang on.”
She was yanking clothes out of the bags that Zoe had packed.
“Whoa, okay,” I said. “Easy does it. We’ll find Ducky.”
“Where’s Ducky?” she repeated. Her voice had escalated. Tears were building.
“Can we find him after your bath? Your water will get cold soon.”
She sucked in a breath. Her chin trembled.
“Oh shit,” I muttered.
Then she tipped her head back and let out a massive, ear-shattering wail.
“Right, we’ll find the duck now, then.”
Except I couldn’t.
While Mira sobbed—and truly heartbreaking sobs they were—I ransacked the bags in the bedroom. I tore off the blankets in her crib.
There was a yellow plush duck in the corner. I lifted it up. “This one?”
She cried harder. “No,” she wailed. “Bath ducky. I need bath ducky !”
That’s when I started noticing a theme.
Half her clothes had ducks on them.
On the bookshelf, there were easily a dozen books with ducks in their titles.
On her nightstand sat a small duck lamp.
Finally, the seriousness of this current plight hit me. We had ducks for every fucking occasion, and if I didn’t find the bath duck, then I was bloody screwed.
I blew out a breath, pinching my eyes shut.
Fuck. I needed to go read that fucking binder.
“Hang on,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”
Not that Mira cared. She was too busy nursing a broken heart because I didn’t know where the fucking bath duck was.
When I got downstairs to the kitchen, I set my hands on my hips and stared down the binders for a while.
I could practically hear Zoe’s voice in my head.
I told you so.
My jaw clenched.
Mira’s crying ratcheted up a decibel, and I imagined that at this point, all the neighbors could hear too. I’d be damned if scary Rosa sent Zoe a text telling her about the screams emanating from within these four walls.
I plucked the first binder up, my grim mood settling deeper inside my chest when I saw the alphabetized tabs.
Bath routine.
I flipped to it. The first fucking bullet point had me glaring at the page.
Mira will not take a bath without her bath ducky. I always keep it underneath the sink in the bathroom, because if she sees it before bathtime, she’ll try to hide it somewhere in her room so that she can sleep with it.
I slammed the binder shut with a weighty exhale and tossed it onto the counter, then bounded back up the stairs.
In the bathroom, I yanked open the cabinet door.
Salvation came in the form of a small rubber duck wearing a pink rain hat.
“Look what I found!” I yelled.
Her crying lessened, just for a moment, and when I walked across the hall, she sniffled piteously.
“You find it?” she asked, hiccuping around the words.
I held it out. “I found it.”
Mira scrambled to her feet and ran across the room, stark naked and red-faced from crying, then plucked the toy from my hand and headed straight for the bathroom.
I exhaled heavily.
Thank fuck.
She played in the tub, and I got only a bit of water in her face when I tried to rinse the shampoo out.
Fifteen minutes later, she was dry and in clean pajamas, her bath duck safely returned to his hiding spot. I turned on Moana and caught myself fucking humming along when the titular character pushed her boat into the water for her adventure.
Thirty more minutes and I could put Mira to bed. Then I’d collapse face-first into the guest bed down the hall.
My phone vibrated.
When I flipped it over, my mouth dropped open.
Valentine: Thank you for the highlight of my day.
She’d attached a screenshot of a still frame from a small security camera that I hadn’t noticed, but when I turned around, I saw it. Mounted on the wall and pointed into the kitchen. Which was how Zoe had a perfect view of me reading the binder before bathtime.
“Fucking hell,” I mumbled under my breath.
Mira looked up at me, her eyes big and her hair a bit frizzy after her bath. “Fucking hell,” she repeated. Then she honked my nose and giggled.
I laid my head back on the couch and closed my eyes.
Round one to Zoe Valentine.
Mira climbed out of her crib before I’d moved from my spot on the guest bed. Quiet as a fucking ninja, that girl was, and I didn’t even realize she’d come into the room until I slowly pulled myself to wakefulness and sensed someone staring down at me.
When I cracked my bleary eyes open, she was inches from my face, just fucking staring at me.
“Bloody hell, child,” I said with a gasp, rolling to my back and settling a hand on my racing heart. “That is some freaky shit. Don’t do that again, all right?”
She giggled, clambering up into the bed and flopping down on top of the blankets I’d shoved off before falling asleep.
I’d had not a single dream.
Chris hadn’t shown up anywhere, not even with a Hey, good job on bathtime, dick .
I’d slept like a rock, hardly moving from the moment I sprawled myself across the mattress.
“I need coffee,” I muttered.
She ignored that, turning onto her side with her hands tucked under her face on the pillow.
“I hold you?” Mira asked.
I sat up, wiping a hand over my face. “You hold me? I doubt you can manage it, kid. I’m a pretty big guy, if you haven’t noticed.”
But I ruffled the top of her hair, and she reached forward to honk my nose.
I growled.
She laughed.
And fuck if it didn’t feel good to be able to make her do that.
“What about pancakes?” I asked. “Tell me you like pancakes, because if I don’t get some real food in you before she comes home, I will never hear the end of it.”
The suggestion was a hit. Mira jumped to her feet and started chanting the word.
I sighed. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
Except there was no pancake mix in the pantry. And I hadn’t bought any.
When I went out to the garage and picked up the car seat, intent on driving us somewhere to find breakfast, I had a brief flash of Zoe’s smug smile when I told her I’d be able to figure out how to get the car seat in.
Because I definitely could not figure out how to get the fucking car seat in.
“Shit,” I grumbled.
Mira was jumping up and down the front steps while I worked in the driveway. “We get pancakes, Uncle Liam?”
She was still in her pajamas—this time, ducks holding umbrellas—because she refused to change her clothes, and that was not a battle I was fighting before fortification with food and coffee.
“Soon,” I told her. “Just need to get this stupid thing in my car; otherwise, we can’t go anywhere.”
I pulled up an instructional video online and cursed through the entire thing.
“You need a fucking PhD to get this thing in,” I mumbled.
I cut my hand trying to wrangle it. My forehead was beaded with sweat. Once I’d attached it to the metal hooks hidden underneath my seat—put in a place where no large person’s hands could conceivably reach them—and pulled the straps hard enough, I knew without a doubt that I’d have to cut that damn seat out if we ever needed it moved.
My chest was heaving when I motioned for Mira. “Come on, duck. Time for breakfast.”
At the endearment, her eyes damn near glowed with happiness.
“Duck, duck, duck,” she chanted, hopping up into my car and settling herself into the seat. “I’m a little duck.”
My lips curved into a reluctant smile. “Mira the Duck,” I agreed.
We managed breakfast just fine, though I opted for the drive-through because the last thing I wanted to deal with was some intrepid Denver fan snapping our picture and making a big fucking thing about it online.
Chris’s accident had been headline news for a solid week. There was no escaping the tragedy of it and how it made the fan base feel after seeing his face on the field for more than a decade.
He was a stalwart on the team. Same as me.
And as I drove back to his house, with his daughter happily munching on pancakes in my back seat, I knew that if the situation were reversed, he would’ve handled all this shit so much better than I had.
My bones still felt heavy with it all. Like someone had draped extra weights over my shoulders, looped them to my wrists, and hung them around my neck.
And instead of feeling remotely equipped to step into this new reality, I felt quite like someone had shoved me off a one-hundred-foot-high diving board into an angry, churning body of water. Just keeping my head up was a task; so was trying to suck in air while I navigated something new.
Not that kids were new to me. I had a big family back home. Cousins always running around. Because Mum had married Nigel when I was just starting seventh grade, I was tiptoeing into my teenage years by the time she had a few more kids.
I knew how to change a nappy. Knew how to properly warm up a bottle.
But not once had I ever felt comfortable doing any of it.
I loved them just fine. Got along with the new family. Despite that, whenever I visited, I counted down the days until I could leave. I hated walking around that house, walking around a neighborhood where people recognized me, looking, as I did, exactly like my dad—all my pent-up anger coursing under my skin.
Every once in a while, a British tabloid would snap a picture of me out and about in London, and soon enough, Mum would see a small article with a quippy headline about my career in Denver. Inevitably, there’d be a few lines in the piece talking about how I’d never gone to any of my dad’s games after my parents divorced. Conjecture and assumptions abounded as to why, but there was always a comment about how I wasn’t playing the game he loved.
No. I was playing the game I loved. And he could fuck off if it bothered him.
So, yeah, going home always came with a bucketload of tangled feelings that I strove to avoid. It was easier to let my family visit me. Kept things clean. Neat. Simple.
My mum never held that against me. Not any of it. The lack of visits. The articles. That my eyes, my jaw, the dark shade of my hair—they were all from him. But I always felt, just a little bit, that it must be hard to have his face staring back at her.
It was hard to shake the gloom of my thoughts when we got home from breakfast, and I worried that the dark turn in my head had somehow seeped into Mira.
Because the first thing she did when I unhooked her from her car seat was run up the stairs and stand in the open doorway of Chris and Amie’s bedroom.
It took me a moment to find her because she’d hardly looked at that room the entire time I was there.
“Duck?” I asked. “Where’d you go?”
Her voice came from the top of the stairs. “Mommy and Daddy here?” she asked.
My stomach bottomed out, landing somewhere by my feet, and I was fairly sure that it had yanked my heart out of place on its way down.
Had Zoe put this one in the binder? Some neatly colored tab that would tell me what I was supposed to say to her when she asked this question?
I scratched the side of my face while I walked up the stairs. “No, little duck,” I said gently. “They’re not here.”
She stared into the room. “They still gone?”
“Yeah.” My voice sounded like I’d shredded it with knives. Rusty, broken knives.
Most days, I couldn’t figure out what I believed about God or death or the afterlife. What this whole bloody existence in the world even meant.
I went to church on Christmas and Easter, and I was smart enough not to pray before games, because I knew whoever was up there didn’t give a shit whether we won.
Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel like meeting Chris, standing there with his kid, was the act of some invisible hand of destiny. That someone had orchestrated the pieces on the chessboard, positioning us exactly where we needed to be. That Zoe moving in next door to them was meant to be. A single other decision made by either of us and who knows what might have happened to Mira?
Maybe that was a divine hand moving us all into place. Maybe it was all fucking chance. I might never know.
But I sure as hell wouldn’t be having a theological talk with this little girl until I checked with Valentine.
“Come on, duck.” I held out my hand. “Let’s go do some bubbles, yeah?”
It was too late, though. Her mood, it seemed, was already ruined by thoughts of her parents.
For the rest of the day, we battled.
She didn’t want to eat anything I made for her, except some horrible sugary cereal, which I allowed because I was too fucking tired to worry about it.
She didn’t want to play outside, knocking over the bubbles and then crying because we couldn’t get them back in the bottle.
She wouldn’t nap, and if there was one thing I could not do, it was stand there while a little kid cried their eyes out, stuck in their bed because I’d put them there.
We watched Moana two more times, and I’d probably be singing the songs in my sleep before long, but it made her happy, so I didn’t care.
By bedtime, I saw the meltdown ramping up in her big eyes.
I was braced for it.
She fought me through putting on clean pajamas. Fought me through brushing her teeth.
Even handing her the stuffed duck in her crib didn’t help. She ignored it, tears flowing steadily, her face growing hot and red as she lay there and cried.
“I want Mommy and Daddy,” she sobbed.
“I wish they were here too,” I told her. I scrubbed a hand over my face, unsure of what to do. She wasn’t reaching for me; she simply lay there, her tiny chest heaving with body-racking sobs. “You have no idea how much I wish that, little bit.”
She hiccuped through her tears. “Mommy hold you,” she said urgently. Mira turned to the duck in her crib and finally clutched it to her chest. “Mommy hold you.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Whatever it was cleaved my chest in fucking two, because I couldn’t do anything about it. I braced my hands on the side of the crib and hung my head down toward my chest, completely out of my fucking depth.
It didn’t seem possible that this one room could contain everything she was holding in her tiny body. If I had looked up and seen the walls splitting at the seams, I wouldn’t have been surprised. That’s how my own flesh and bones felt, absorbing all the sadness swelling between me and Mira.
If I pressed down, it would all come spilling out, like liquid from a sponge that had been sitting in water for too long.
“Mommy hold you,” she sobbed again. Her eyes pinched shut, and big, fat tears rolled down her reddened cheeks.
My ribs creaked as I sucked in a breath, my skin getting cold and clammy the longer I stood there—helpless and useless and wrecked down to my core.
“I don’t know what that means, duck,” I whispered brokenly.
Her arms were wrapped so tightly around the stuffed animal that they shook. My hands, still gripping the frame of the crib, eased off the wood, and I shifted toward the wall so that I could lean some of my weight there.
She was so small, and it was bloody unfair that she had to deal with this when she didn’t even know what life had been like before.
Before.
My fist unclenched as I lowered it over her head. The wisps of her curls were soft against my palm as I gently curled it around her skull.
She took a big, shaky breath, her eyes slowly opening in my direction. Her arms still clutched the duck. I slid my hand to the line of her forehead and eased it over her hair again.
“I miss them too,” I told her quietly. I ran my hand over her little locks once more, and slowly, her crying subsided as she stared up at me. “They were my best friends, yeah? It’s so fucking hard to figure out how to live your life when they’re both just ... gone.”
My voice cracked, and Mira hiccuped again, another giant tear spilling over the splotchy skin on her cheek.
Then she inhaled again, and her eyes never left mine.
Bloody hell, I’d have to talk my way through this, wouldn’t I? There’d be no shoving it down or ignoring that it was there, rumbling under the surface.
Not if I really wanted to take care of her the way Chris had wanted me to.
“Your mum was always so nice to me,” I said. I kept my voice low and soothing, my hand still making slow strokes over the top of her silky curls. “The first time I met her, she asked if I was always such an asshole to people. And when I said yes, she laughed and laughed. She had such a good smile, duck.” I swallowed around the growing tightness in my throat. “You’ll have her smile someday, you know? You’ve got her eyes too.” My eyes burned dangerously as I stared down at Mira. “Breaks my heart when I think about how much you look like her.”
Mira sniffled, briefly rubbing her face against the duck, but her tears dwindled as I talked.
“God, I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whispered, my eyes squeezed shut as I dredged up anything I could say to soothe her. I had a decade’s worth of memories of Chris and Amie, moments that numbered into the thousands, all good and all worthy of Mira knowing. How was I supposed to distill an entire friendship into one conversation that would calm her down?
She sniffled again, and I pried my eyes open. Overthinking this wouldn’t help, so I just tugged on the first thread in my mind.
“I wasn’t going to dance at their wedding,” I said in a low voice. “It was a fun party too; that was another thing your parents knew how to do. They always made people comfortable, you know? And I’d almost made it the entire night when your mum came right up to me at my table with some of the guys from the team.” I exhaled a short laugh with a shake of my head. “She held her hand out and said if I didn’t dance with her, it would be bad luck for their marriage. She was so bloody stubborn, and I loved that about her. Because she kept your dad in his place, never let him get away with anything.”
She kept listening. Her tears stopped.
“It was a slow dance,” I told Mira. “I actually know how to dance; Mum made me take lessons when I was twelve. Hated it. But the look on your mum’s face when I actually knew what I was doing was worth every bloody lesson. She smiled so big, duck. I’ll remember that forever.” I pinched my eyes shut again, details pelting me like darts. Like arrows and bullets. “Then she told me about their pretty neighbor that just moved in. Thought I should meet her.”
I had to pause then. For a brief moment, it hurt too much to think about how differently my life could have played out if Amie had gotten her way. If Zoe had been single.
If they were still here to be part of our lives.
But it hadn’t happened that way.
“She thanked me,” I said. “Your mum kissed me on the cheek and told me she loved me, even if I couldn’t say it back, and she thanked me for dancing with her on her wedding day. Don’t know why I didn’t say it that day,” I said in a tortured whisper. “You never know when you’ll regret those little moments, duck. I told her that she looked beautiful and that Chris didn’t deserve her, which made her laugh, but I didn’t fucking tell her I loved her too. Maybe I did later and just don’t remember.”
I scrubbed at my cheek when a single stray tear escaped.
“All right, then,” I managed with a rasp. “Might have to stop talking about your mum. If anyone’s gonna make me cry, it’ll be her. Your dad, though, he was such a shit, and the closest thing I’d ever had to a brother, yeah?”
I told her about playing with Chris. What it was like to have him as a teammate.
Her arms relaxed around the duck, and she kept her eyes on me while her breaths steadied, her blinks lengthening, slowing.
“You’ll hear more about him from everyone as you grow up,” I told her. “You’ll see them talk about him on the telly. You’ll see clips and videos of all the things he did, how good he was on the end of that line.” My chest hollowed, raw and ragged. But I forced the words out, because she deserved to hear them, and Chris deserved to have them said about him. “They’ll tell you all the ways you remind them of your dad, especially if you play any sort of sport, and God, Mira, you can be so proud of that. If you have even a little bit of that man in you, you’ll be such a good fucking human.”
My throat closed up, and I had to stop because my voice cracked again, a trembling deep in my gut that I didn’t dare allow. When I risked a glance at Mira, I saw that her eyelids were fluttering shut.
I breathed out quietly, easing my hand off her hair.
For a moment, her eyes opened, but when she saw me there, they slowly closed again.
Her breathing evened out. Her eyes stayed closed.
Moving slower than I thought possible, I straightened and wiped a hand over my exhausted face. My bones felt ready to collapse, the weariness seeping through every inch of my body.
I was this tired after two days.
Two bloody days.
Zoe had done this alone the entire time—and it made me feel like absolute, utter shit.
It wasn’t like the realization of it made me any more comfortable with the idea of parenting. But I couldn’t ignore the reality of it either.
The next day, when I heard Zoe’s car pulling into the driveway, I breathed out slowly. Part relief, part anticipation, and part fucking stress because now it was real.
“Zoe!” Mira cried, racing for the door.
Her hair was a mess, the kitchen was a bleedin’ disaster, toys were scattered throughout the house, and I didn’t care.
Zoe walked in right as Mira reached the door, and the way her face transformed when she saw the little girl ...
I’d see that smile in my sleep, no fucking doubt about it.
I’d see it stamped behind my eyes when I closed them.
I’d feel it carved into my chest.
That smile was love, and the thought of anyone being on the receiving end of that smile was too much to consider.
“I missed you so much,” Zoe cried, peppering kisses all over Mira’s face. She swept the little girl up into her arms, both of them laughing.
Mira held her so tightly, and I realized that much of her meltdown the night before had probably been about Zoe being gone. The person who had kept her anchored since the accident was suddenly absent.
Whether Mira knew it or not, people in her life leaving would likely always trigger something cataclysmic in her head.
Zoe locked eyes with me, her smile gentling. “How did it go?”
I sighed. “Go ahead and say it.”
The edges of her smile lifted. “Say what?” she teased.
“Just fucking say it, Valentine.”
“Oh, that I was right and it brought me an unholy amount of joy to see you read that binder?”
“Yeah, that.”
She laughed, dropping another kiss on Mira’s head. Then her attention shifted to the kitchen, her eyes widening at the mess there. “Oh my.”
“Don’t you dare judge me,” I told her, my finger jabbed into the air.
Zoe set Mira down, and she ran off to play with her toys. “I’d never,” she said gravely.
I rolled my eyes. “No bullshit,” I started. “Yeah?”
Zoe nodded. “No bullshit. How did it go?”
I told her about Mira standing by Chris and Amie’s bedroom door, how hard it had been to get her to sleep, and Zoe’s eyes welled with tears.
“Probably because I left,” she said quietly.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “We can’t put our lives on hold forever, though. We can’t always be by her.”
“I know,” she said, sighing.
“She kept saying something last night; I didn’t know what she meant. She kept saying, ‘Mommy hold you,’ over and over.”
Zoe held my eyes for a moment before answering. What I saw reflected back at me was nothing less than heartbreak.
“That’s what she says when she wants you to do those things. Or someone to do those things. So if she says, ‘I kiss you,’ it means she wants a kiss good night. ‘I hold you’ means she wants a hug.”
“Well, fucking hell.” I rubbed at my chest. “Like someone ripped my guts out.”
She gave me a tiny smile. Only one side of her lips curved up. “It’s in the binder.”
My eyes snagged on hers. “’Course it is.”
It was quiet for a moment, and in that quiet, words filled my head, rolled off my tongue before I could consider the ramifications. “If you don’t mind leaving those binders,” I said, “I promise not to burn ’em when I’m done reading.”
Zoe’s face filled with something I didn’t want to define. Couldn’t bring myself to read into it too deeply.
“You’re really gonna help?” she said quietly.
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t wise to tell her that it was as much about her as it was about Mira. That I couldn’t leave either of them alone in this situation anymore. It wasn’t wise to admit just how far she’d gotten under my skin.
That she had always been under my skin.
That when I didn’t see her, I could pretend she wasn’t there. But now it was like bloody hooks had been dug into my skin, and I felt myself being tugged in her direction every time she walked into the room.
“I’ll stay here,” I told her. “We’ll make a schedule, yeah?”
And much like she had the night I met her, standing at this exact island in Chris and Amie’s kitchen, Zoe held out her hand.
“We do this together,” she said. “I still want to slap the shit out of you most days, and I don’t think that impulse will go away anytime soon. But we do this together,” she repeated. “Deal?”
I fought a laugh, fought a massive swell of lust, adoration, and frustration. All the things I felt in spades whenever she was in the room with me. The things I’d ignored for years.
Would continue to ignore.
But this time, when I took her hand, there was no ring on her finger. No husband. No boyfriend.
Just me and her, and the little duck linking us together.
“We do this together,” I promised.
I took a deep breath, fought like hell to shove my fear aside, and slid my palm over hers. This time, with her cool skin against mine, I had to worry—just a little bit—that the damage done in this scenario would come from both of us. The difference was that Zoe had no fucking clue what she did to me. What she was capable of doing.
And if it were left up to me, she never would.