Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
BLESS YOUR HEART
LOUISIANA
After the talk with Maggie last night, I catch myself driving toward the one person’s house I’ve dodged for most of my adult life.
It’s the place I promised myself I’d never revisit—not because I didn’t want to see Aunt Joe, but because I couldn’t bear anyone peeling back the layers of the pain I’ve kept buried so deep.
That hollow ache inside me, the one that no one sees but that consumes everything.
I knew Aunt Joe would uncover it in an instant.
Because she carries the same weight—the quiet, unspoken sorrow we share: the wrenching truth that neither of us could have children.
That loss isn’t something we’ve ever said aloud, but it’s the bond that’s been there all along.
After Maggie’s words last night, I realize maybe it’s time to finally face it with someone who understands.
I don’t even notice the magnolia trees lining her driveway—their blooms blurred past by the tight knot of panic squeezing my chest. Honestly, part of me wants to burn those bitches down just to make the feeling stop.
Aunt Joe’s house looms ahead, a massive farmhouse that feels like it’s stuck in a different century.
The wraparound porch creaks under its own weight, the wood worn thin and rough from years of sun, rain, and storms it’s seen.
The faded blue shutters hang crooked, peeling white paint giving it a stubborn, weather-beaten look that makes it feel even more intimidating.
The front door looks thick and solid—like it’s been slammed open and shut a thousand times, holding its ground no matter what tries to push in.
The porch is cluttered with mismatched chairs, some rocking gently in the breeze, giving off this quiet, stubborn kind of permanence that makes my throat tighten.
It’s the kind of house built to outlast everything and everyone inside it.
So far it has.
I put my car in park to find her already standing on the porch waiting for me. I get out and she looks me up and down, “Come help me finish up breakfast.”
I trail behind her into the kitchen. I step next to her at the sink and stand there like I’m waiting for a damn speech. “What do I do?”
“Go wash the greens and put ’em in the pot. I’ve got everything else ready.”
Wash the greens? How the hell do you wash greens?
I stare at the pile of limp leaves in front of me, trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with them.
After a few seconds of contemplation, I grab the dish soap and pour a generous amount on the greens, giving them a good scrub like I’m washing a dirty plate.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I freeze, dish soap in hand, looking up at her like she’s lost her mind. “Washing the greens?”
Aunt Joe’s face twists into a look of pure horror. “Hell no! You trying to fuck our bellies up! Use the vinegar, Jesus Christ.”
“Well, who the fuck cooks greens at seven-thirty in the morning!”
She narrows her gaze at me. “I don’t like that traditional breakfast bullshit. Now grab the fucking vinegar.”
I stand there for a second, completely baffled, staring at the bottle of soap in my hand like it’s a foreign object. “Vinegar? For greens?”
“Do I look like I want my food tasting like dish soap, girl?” She snatches the soap from my hand like it’s the plague, and I can almost hear her teeth grinding. “You rinse ’em with vinegar. That’s how you get all the dirt off. Not with a damn scrub brush and dish soap.”
I blink at her for a moment, still processing, then throw my hands up in the air. “You could’ve fucking told me that before I started!”
“Not my job to babysit you fool.” She shoves the vinegar bottle into my hands. “Now do it right.”
After rewashing the greens we sit silently at the kitchen table just staring at one another.
“So, Marie’s back, I hear.”
“Yeah.”
“I heard you wiped the floor with her at the bar.”
“I did.”
Aunt Joe lets out a small grunt of approval, a hint of a smile tugging at her weathered face. “Good. Someone needed to.”
“Thanks.”
“Soph know?”
“Hell no, let’s keep it that way.”
She nods. “Say no more.”
There’s a pause, the kind that stretches just long enough to get uncomfortable. Aunt Joe shifts in her chair, her gaze steady now—less casual, more knowing.
“But that’s not why you’re here, is it?”
I look at her. Try to speak. Try to force the words past the tightness in my throat, but they won’t come. They sit there, heavy and knotted, too raw to name out loud.
Her voice softens, but the edge is still there. “What’s wrong, Lou? Cat got your tongue?”
Like a light flip switching the old memory flickers to life—my daddy’s voice, low and teasing, rising up from some deep, buried place. Like he’s still here. Like he’s leaning in through her mouth to say it himself.
It hits harder than I expect. Makes me feel small and seen all at once.
Still, I can’t speak.
The timer on the stove dings, ending the back and forth before I can really say anything.
I move to help Aunt Joe set the table and then freeze, my eyes landing on the spread she’s laid out.
Smothered pork chops, fried potatoes, greens, and homemade yeast rolls—my favorites.
I’m so surprised I almost forget to breathe for a second. How did she know?
“Wipe that face off your head,” she scolds before handing me a plate piled high. “I know what the hell you like to eat.”
I take my plate and sit patiently waiting for her to take her place beside me. Once we’re both seated I dig in, not pausing for idle chit chat. I’m on my second plate when she damn near makes me choke.
“So, you can’t have kids. Big fucking whoop.”
The porkchop I was chewing lodges in my fucking throat. “What the fuck!”
“I know damn good and well Maggie didn’t raise you to be so daft,” she sasses, crossing her arms over her chest. “I swear you and Maddox are going to put me in an early fucking grave.”
“You knew didn’t you?” I question her.
“Yeah, you're easier to read than you think.”
I fucking knew it. Can’t hide shit from her.
“I told Maggie last night,” I say softly.
“Maggie is only familiar with the pain of losing a child, not the empty pain that comes from never being able to carry one. No, that pain was especially reserved for your Aunt Joe.”
I watch her, my heart tightening as I see the pain flash in her gray eyes.
It is the kind of hurt that comes from a deep, broken wish—a longing so intense it carves itself into your soul.
The pain of wanting something you can never have, of watching that dream slip away, leaving nothing but an unfillable hole where it used to be.
“I’ve let you avoid me for so long because I knew you’d come to me when you were ready because this isn’t a conversation you can just force on someone.” Aunt Joe gets a far away look in her eye. “You haven’t told Henry.” A statement, not a question. I shake my head in reply.
“I don’t know how,” I say, barely more than a breath. “The only thing that man has ever wanted was a family of his own. And I…I can’t be the one who takes that from him.”
The silence that follows isn’t empty—it’s full. Heavy. Like the air knows the truth before I even say it.
“I see it in his eyes when he talks about it. That quiet kind of hope. Not loud or demanding, but steady. Steady in a way I’ve never been. Like he’s already saving a place at the table for people who don’t even exist yet.”
I swallow hard, pressing the heel of my hand against my chest, like I can stop the ache from spreading.
“And I want to be enough—I do. But how do you stay with someone when you know you’ll always be the end of a dream they never got to live?”
My voice cracks, softer now.
“Loving him means wanting him to have everything…even if it’s not with me.”
“So you’re just fucking stupid, aren’t you?”
The words land sharp enough to make me blink. I glance up from my hands to find Aunt Joe staring me down, her gaze like iron—unflinching, unmoved, and burning with a fire I forgot she still had.
“That man,” she says, voice clipped and sharp like broken glass, “has spent the last ten years scraping by on whatever scraps you were brave enough to give him. A little softness here, a flicker of hope there.” Her eyes narrow, burning bright and fierce beneath the heavy weight of years spent waiting.
“And still, you can’t see it. You’re too tangled up in your own broken to realize… ”
She leans forward, her breath warm against my skin, her gaze piercing and unflinching. “You are the God damn dream.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Her words echo around the room, crashing into everything I’ve tried to hold steady.
She exhales, not tired—but like she’s been holding this in for too long. Then her hand finds mine, warm and calloused from a life that hasn’t been kind but never broke her.
“I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to really hear it,” she says, her thumb tracing slow, deliberate circles over my knuckles.
The gentle pressure pulses beneath my skin, grounding me.
“There were nights I didn’t think I’d make it.
Nights where the silence of this house felt louder than any scream.
Nights I ached in places no one could see, and if it weren’t for Frank—if it weren’t for the way that man loved me—I wouldn’t have survived. ”
She stops, voice catching like a broken thread for the first time. Her breath trembles—shaky, ragged—like she’s holding back a storm.
“I couldn’t give him kids.” The words taste bitter, heavy, stuck deep in her throat. “I tried everything. Prayed till my hands bled. Begged like it was the last thing I’d ever do.” Her fists clench tight, nails digging into her palms. “When it didn’t happen, I thought it would tear us apart.”
But it didn’t.
She exhales, slow and raw, the kind of breath that’s been held for years. “Every damn morning, that man rolled over and looked at me like I was everything—like I was enough, and guess what?”
Her eyes burn with fierce, painful love.
“He made me fucking believe it too. Never once let me think my love was less, or that I was less—just because I couldn’t give him children.”
I blink, but the tears come anyway. Hot and slow. Shaking something loose in my chest.
“You think love has rules?” she asks gently.
“That it only counts if it comes with babies and milestones and matching last names?” Her voice softens.
“Love is what he gives you now, Lou. It’s what he’s been giving you—patient, quiet, steady.
It’s not based on what you can’t give him. It’s who you are.”
She squeezes my hand.
“And don’t you dare tell me you’re afraid to take that love. Because if you were strong enough to choose Dallas—if you were brave enough to open that bruised heart of yours to that boy—then don’t you stand here and pretend you’re too broken for Henry.”
“You better than anyone I know understands that blood doesn’t make you fucking family.” Aunt Joe’s thumb presses into my skin, slow and steady, tracing soft circles that somehow both soothe and anchor me. Her touch is rough from years of hard work, but gentle now—like a lifeline.
“You carry all that pain,” she says, her voice low and steady, “but you don’t have to carry it by yourself. You never did.”
Her words hang in the air, heavy and warm, filling the quiet between us like the scent of worn leather and earth after rain.
“She’s right, you know,” Evie’s voice cuts through, calm and sure, like a steady heartbeat in the silence.
I turn slowly, surprised to find Evie standing in the kitchen doorway, the soft morning light casting a gentle glow around her. One hand rests lightly on her swollen belly, the unmistakable sign of new life growing within her.
“Take it from a bitch who knows,” she says quietly, “sometimes chosen family is the only family that matters.”
Her words press down on me, heavy and urgent. I want to apologize—for the jealousy I buried deep inside, for letting her glimpse the raw, aching part of me I hide from the world. I want to shrink away, afraid of how exposed I feel in this moment.
Evie won’t let me pull away. She comes over and gently strokes my hair with that unique tenderness only she knows how to give.
“It’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling, whenever you are feeling it, especially about this,” she says, nodding toward her swollen belly. “Anger, jealousy—it’s all damn normal, Lou. But what’s not okay is carrying that pain alone. We’re here to share the heavy stuff, remember?”
Her words wrap around me like a shield, softening the weight I’ve been trying to bear by myself. It’s the same thing I said to her not so long ago.
“It’s not okay! You’ve been through so much…” I admit, my voice low and laced with shame.
Evie looks at me with that steady, unyielding gaze, her eyes sharp and glassy with unshed emotion, and shakes her head slowly.
“And guess what? I’m not made of fucking glass, Lou.
I’ve been sick worrying about you—because you’re my family.
” Her voice tightens at the edges, raw with truth.
“When I moved here, I had no one until you. Pregnant with the twins, scared out of my damn mind, and you were there every step of the way.”
She swallows hard, and I can almost feel the warmth of those moments—her hand gripping mine in the sterile chill of exam rooms, the sticky vinyl seats, the sharp scent of antiseptic clinging to our clothes.
“You never missed a single doctor’s appointment.
You held my hand through every ultrasound, through every sleepless night when I thought I couldn’t do it.
Hell,” she lets out a breathless laugh, “you even scrubbed in the day they were born. I remember the way your fingers shook when you held them for the first time—like you couldn’t believe they were real.
You put Charlie and Bash first despite your silent suffering. ”
Her hand tightens around mine—a fierce, grounding grip that steadies me. “You showed up for me when I needed you most. That’s family. Not blood, not DNA—just showing up.” She pauses, eyes shining with something fierce and tender all at once.
“You know how lucky I am that I got to choose my family? Because I’d fucking choose you, Joe, and Vic every single time, and bitch your just as lucky because you chose us.”
I pull her close, wrapping my arms around her, and press my head gently against her swollen belly. “I love you.”
She smiles, a playful glint in her eyes. “I love you too. Now, tell me—why was my husband whistling happy as a clam over owing you a twenty dollar bill and a box of Whoppers?”