“Her name’s Morgan?” Ani asked curiously.
“Yeah.”
“What’s the baby’s name?”
“I have no idea,” I said shortly. I turned to the sink and quickly washed my dishes while the kitchen grew quiet except for Arielle’s gurgling.
“Come on, baby,” Bram finally said as I finished up the last pan. “Trev’s probably got a million things to do tonight.”
I didn’t turn around when they got up from the table, but I stopped what I was doing as Ani came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my waist.
“I love you,” she said, laying her head against my back. “Let us know when you get to the hotel tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure,” I replied, patting her hands with my wet ones.
“Keep us updated,” Bram ordered as Ani let me go. “We all want to know what’s happening, too.”
I sighed and turned. “I know you do. I’ll let you know what she says.”
“I just hope she’s open to letting us get to know them,” Ani said with a shrug. “We don’t have to be best friends, but I can’t imagine having Hen’s little girl out there somewhere and not knowing how she’s doing.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said, following them as they made their way to the front door.
The responsibility I’d taken on when I’d insisted on talking to the mother of Henry’s child myself sat like a weight on my shoulders. I’d never had a hard time with people. Usually I could make them comfortable pretty quickly during conversation, and even though I didn’t necessarily like that many people, most of them liked me. I was a generally likeable guy.
Meeting this woman would be different, though. I was Henry’s brother. Henry, who’d apparently wanted nothing to do with his own child and had bailed before the woman had even given birth. I didn’t know if Hen had been paying child support or not—I really hoped he’d at least done that much.
There was a good chance that Morgan Riley wouldn’t want anything to do with me or our family. Unfortunately, if that was the case I couldn’t really blame her. Henry had fucked her over in a big way, and if I was in her shoes, I didn’t know if I would want anything to do with the family who would raise a man like that, either.
I locked the front door and turned off the lights as I made my way into my room. I still needed to pack my bag, and I wanted to get a decent night’s sleep.
My room was boring as hell, much like the rest of my house. In the middle of the room I had a sweet king-size bed that I’d splurged on, but the rest of my furniture was plain and mismatched stuff that had been passed on to me from various family members. I’d spent a lot of money building my house, making it exactly how I wanted it, but I’d never really cared about decorating the place. I’d always figured that when I got married my wife could do it up the way she liked.
Now that I was in my thirties, I was beginning to wonder if the whole wife thing would ever happen. I dated and I met plenty of women, but I’d never found one I wanted to spend more than a few months with. At first things would look promising, but inevitably I’d start questioning whether she was the person I wanted to see every day for the rest of my life and the answer was always no. I usually cut ties when I realized that. Four months seemed to be the magic number for me.
Pulling a duffel out of my closet, I briefly glanced at the box of Henry’s stuff my parents had given me. Some of it was mementos from our childhood, and the rest were things the Marines had sent home from his barracks room. I hadn’t been able to go through it yet, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to open it tonight.
God, I missed my brother. He was a pain in the ass—selfish and egotistical and sure of himself in a way that few people were—but he was also the sweetest and funniest kid I’d ever met. I could still remember when he’d come to us. He was the youngest child my parents had ever fostered. My mom and dad had always chosen to take the harder cases and the older kids no one else wanted, but for some reason they’d agreed to take Henry, even though he’d completely upended their life in a way they weren’t used to. Taking care of a two-year-old was very different from taking care of an older child, but they’d figured it out quickly.
I’d been leery of the tiny blond kid at first. I’d been nervous that I’d trip over him, or I’d accidentally leave my new pocketknife somewhere he could find it, or he’d choke on something and die while I was supposed to be keeping an eye on him. I hadn’t been able to keep my distance for long, though. He’d just been so damn cute. His haircut was some ridiculous form of a mullet and one of his front teeth was missing because someone had knocked it out, but he’d had the biggest smile I’d ever seen and he talked a mile a minute in a language no one understood. For a long time I’d thought he was speaking Russian or something, but when I was older my mom had laughed and assured me that whatever he’d been saying for the first few months he was with us was complete gibberish.
It took less than two years before Henry became a permanent part of our family. By the time he left for kindergarten, his last name was Harris just like mine. And, just like me, he had an Iron Man backpack and a pair of high-top sneakers my parents could barely afford, and the same lines shaved into the sides of his fine blond hair. It didn’t matter how different we looked; my little brother had wanted to be a mini version of me for his first few years of grade school.
I clenched my jaw and shook my head, trying to ignore the memories that would stop me from getting anything done except maybe lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling. I’d done enough of that already. For the first few weeks after Henry’s death, I’d barely felt able to function. My brother had been away for years in the Marines, but at least I’d known he was somewhere in the world, laughing and using cheesy pickup lines that always seemed to work because the jackass was so damned good-looking. I’d known he was just a phone call or a plane ride away. Once he was gone, it was like a giant hole opened up inside me, and it sucked the air out of my lungs until I couldn’t breathe without pain. Losing Henry had caused a physical ache in my chest that was so bad I’d gone to the doctor to have it checked.
I couldn’t fall into that shit again. The nights of drinking until I passed out and days of hangovers on top of my misery were over. They had to be. I was a grown man with responsibilities and parents who’d already lost one son. I didn’t have the luxury of wallowing, even though some days I wanted to. Hell, most days I considered calling in sick and starting the day with a bottle of whiskey, but I didn’t.
I considered losing my brother the worst thing that ever happened to me, and, unlike Henry, I remembered my birth mother and the numerous shitty foster homes I’d been placed in before my parents took me in. I also remembered vividly being taken from the Harrises for over a month because of some bureaucratic bullshit when I was eight. The minute my social worker had led me out the front door had been one of the scariest and worst moments of my life. All of that paled in comparison to losing my baby brother. I would have gone through anything, lived through anything, if I could have been spared that loss.
Chapter 2
Morgan
I wasn’t going to lie—I was struggling. To be fair, I didn’t know many single moms who didn’t struggle on some level. Even the ones who had plenty of money to spend and well-behaved children who never wrote on walls like the ones I was currently cleaning before work struggled. It was just a fact of life. Raising a human alone was a daunting task. When you added in the difficulty of supporting another person financially who couldn’t even wipe their own ass yet and had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, the struggle became very real.
I wasn’t complaining. I really wasn’t. Life was what you made of it—I’d learned that when I was young—but sometimes I just wanted to sit on my ass and not worry about the next bill that was due, or, in this instance, how I was going to get crayon off the walls of the house I was renting a room in for a fraction of what I knew it was worth. Since we’d moved in, I’d done my best not to mess anything up, which was nearly i
mpossible with an active two-year-old. I knew my friend Max was doing us a massive favor by letting us live with him and watch the house while he was traveling on and off for work, and I didn’t want him to regret it. Honestly, we’d be up shit creek if he changed his mind.
The job I had now paid more and had better hours than the shop I’d been working at in San Diego, but I still wasn’t exactly bringing in the big bucks, and living in Southern California was ridiculously expensive. So far I’d managed to keep us afloat, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to juggle everything without asking for help.
I hated asking for help.
I had a safety net. I knew that. It wasn’t as if me and my girl would ever go hungry or become homeless. My pop would never let that happen, and neither would my sister, Miranda. They offered to help out every time I talked to either of them on the phone, but neither of them lived close and I wasn’t quite to the point when I’d accept moving home to mooch off of them. Besides, my sister was currently in college in Oregon and it wasn’t as if we could move into her dorm room.
I just had to buckle down. Find a way to make some more cash so we weren’t living paycheck to paycheck, and eventually find a place to live that was ours alone so I wasn’t constantly worried that my roommate would decide we were too much trouble.
“Mama,” Etta said, clapping her hands to get my attention. “Waynerot.”
“I have no idea what you’re saying to me,” I replied conversationally. “But we don’t write on walls.”
“Me color.”
“We only color on paper,” I said for the fourteenth time in as many minutes.
“Me color.”
“Right. Only color on paper,” I said again. I was pretty sure she was hearing only what she wanted to hear, which was that she was going to get to color again at some point. If there was one thing my daughter got from her father beyond her looks, it was the fact that she picked and chose what she wanted to hear. I could tell her that we weren’t having ice cream that day, and the only words she would focus on were “ice cream,” and then she’d continue to ask about it all day long.
I hadn’t been around a lot of babies in my life, so I wasn’t sure if her selective hearing was normal, but it seemed like a personality trait to me. I had a feeling it was going to cause quite a ruckus as she got older. It drove me crazy, but a part of me couldn’t help but find her singular focus a bit endearing—probably because she was my own kid and not someone else’s.
“This will have to do for now,” I said as I got to my feet, staring at the faded colors on the wall. “I have to go to work and you have to go to Carmen’s house.”
“Do for now,” Etta said with a shrug, making me bite my cheek in an effort to keep from laughing. I couldn’t let her see how entertaining I thought she was when she was being a pill or she’d continue to act that way.
“You ready to go to Carmen’s?” I asked, picking her up and throwing the wet rag I’d been using in the sink.
“Carmen,” she said, nodding with a small hum.
I was so glad she liked her babysitter. When we’d moved from San Diego to Anaheim, I’d had to put her in a new day care that we’d both hated. Thankfully, only a week later I’d met Carmen when she’d come into the new shop I worked at looking for her boyfriend. She was a stay-at-home mom with a newborn who had a hell of a time finding a sitter and was struggling without the income she usually made as a maid at a local hotel. Her boyfriend, Ray, was a tattoo artist and he made okay money, but they were still sinking.
Thankfully, she’d been so happy to have a little extra cash when we’d discussed her watching Etta for me, she didn’t even ask for much. We had an understanding, Carmen and I. Both of us knew how hard it was to raise a baby on an income that barely paid the rent, so I paid her what I could and she never asked for more, because she trusted that I’d never pay less than I absolutely had to. Some weeks were good and I paid her more, some weeks were lean and I paid her less, but I was always fair and she was always happy for the money that let her stay home with her son. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have managed without her.
The best part of the whole situation was that Etta loved Carmen and baby Sam. They went to the park, played in the backyard, and watched cartoons. It was pretty much a toddler’s version of a vacation every day. The guilt of leaving my daughter to go to work six days a week was eased because I knew she was having an awesome time. It wasn’t gone completely, oh no, especially not when Etta did something new that I missed, or fell down and didn’t have me there to kiss her owies, but it was manageable.
Juggling my purse and Etta’s diaper bag, I carried her outside into the warm morning. I loved the weather in Southern California. The perpetual sunshine always put a bounce in my step. It felt like nature’s way of telling me to have a good day, and it never failed to improve my mood, at least fractionally.
I grabbed the mail from our mailbox as we left, and threw it onto the passenger seat of my old beat-up Focus as we headed across town. There was a ton of envelopes, mostly for Max, and I didn’t even bother going through them yet. Nothing but bills ever came for me, and I wasn’t looking forward to new past-due notices. I tried to keep up on everything, but some months it was just impossible. It was a game of roulette deciding which ones I’d pay and which ones I’d just have to wait to pay until the next paycheck. I hated it.
Choosing which bills to pay reminded me of when I was a kid and I’d have to go through the mail stacked on our kitchen counter, searching for the ones from the utility companies. I’d always nagged my mom to pay those first, because we could live with an eviction notice on our door but we couldn’t live without power during an Oregon winter. My mother hadn’t been horrible, but she hadn’t been good, either. Absent most of the time, and hardly parental when she was there, I rarely thought about her now that I was grown. She’d had a penchant for shitty men, dead-end jobs, and hard drugs. In the end, the drugs had killed her and put me and my sister into the system. Thankfully, that had eventually led us to our dad.
I’d long ago come to terms with my mother’s deficiencies as a parent and the way she’d died, but I was self-aware enough to know that I used her legacy as a guide to how I didn’t want to live or raise my daughter. Etta would never have to worry about having enough food for dinner or her mom not coming home because she was off on a bender.
* * *
After I dropped Etta off and headed to work, I breathed a little sigh of relief. Leaving her for even a few hours always made me feel anxious, but once she was safely where she was supposed to be it got easier.
The shop I worked at wasn’t far from Carmen’s house, and for once in the entire time I’d been working there I was early. I sat back in my seat after glancing at the clock on my dash and shutting off the car. I had ten whole minutes to myself—it was like a freaking miracle.
Grabbing the mail off the passenger seat, I started leisurely flipping through the envelopes. Most of them were for Max, like I’d expected. There were only two bills—thank God—for me, and I shuffled them to the back of the stack so I didn’t have to look at them and stuffed them all in the glove compartment. Something had come for me that I didn’t recognize, but it looked official. I turned it over in my hands for a moment. New notifications were never a good thing in my experience, and I wanted to ignore it like I was doing with the other bills, but I knew that if I didn’t see what it was, it was going to drive me crazy all day, like a bomb ticking away in my car.
My stomach clenched as I opened it up.
At first I didn’t really understand what it said. The language was all very legal sounding and almost impossible to decipher.
Then suddenly what I was looking at became crystal fucking clear.
Life insurance paperwork.
Life insurance paperwork for the father of my child.
And if I was getting life insurance paperwork, that meant only one thing.
“Goddamn it, Henry,” I whispered, dropping my head to
rest on my steering wheel as tears flooded my eyes.
Chapter 3
Trevor
The address I had for Morgan Riley was in an apartment complex in Mira Mesa, one of the neighborhoods in San Diego. I only knew the neighborhood’s name because I’d asked my foster brother Shane’s opinion of the area on one of the many phone calls I’d received during my drive south. It seemed like an okay place, which settled my nerves a little.
I wasn’t real comfortable in large cities. It seemed like the more crowded a place got, the rougher it looked. Mira Mesa wasn’t bad, though. There were a lot of shopping centers and bars, but it didn’t have the feel of people living on top of each other the way I knew a lot of other parts of San Diego did.
My stomach churned as I pulled into the apartment complex a little after five that evening. The parking lot was packed with cars as people came home from work, but I finally found a place half a block from the apartment I was looking for that would actually fit my four-door, long-bed truck. It stuck out like a sore thumb alongside the compact cars that filled the spaces on each side, and I tried to not let it bother me as I shook out the tension in my hands.
I’d forgotten what a nightmare the traffic was down here. I had no idea how Shane and Katie dealt with that bullshit every day. I’d lose my mind if I had to sit on a hot-as-shit freeway for hours just to get to work.
Morgan lived in a second-floor apartment, and I checked the address one last time before I mounted the stairs. I could hear music playing inside the apartment when I reached the door, and for a second I questioned why the hell I’d volunteered to be the one who made contact, but I forced myself to knock anyway.
The guy who answered the door was clearly military of some sort. He wasn’t in uniform, but he had the same haircut, and tan lines around the sides of his head and right above his elbows that my brothers always had in the summer thanks to their uniforms.