Salvatore
ItwaslatewhenI knocked on Bea’s door, but it didn’t take her long to answer. She’d been waiting for me.
She opened it wide, wordlessly stepping aside to allow me in.
I had seen this woman in so many iterations. Angry. Turned on. Amused. Happy.
But this? The utter defeat weighing her down from every angle was brand new, and it wasn’t right. It was unnatural on her. Did not belong.
“How’s Lacey doing?” she asked.
Lacey had pleaded for Bea to stay at the hospital with her, so she had. Through X-rays, talks with a specialist, and casting, Bea had stuck in there. My kids had leaned hard on her, and she’d let them without question. If it had made her uncomfortable, she’d hidden it well.
She’d only been able to break away when we’d arrived home, with promises to check on Lacey soon.
“Better than the rest of us,” I said, fingers already fidgeting with the titanium ring on my index finger, thumb brushing over the ridgedengraving. “She’s excited to show off her cast at school tomorrow.”
Bea had been the first to sign it. Her name, written in curling loops, with a tiny bumblebee doodle beside it. Lacey had made sure none of us had signed within three inches of it.
With a nod, Bea turned and walked toward the kitchen without looking back.
I followed her, stopping in the doorway. She moved mechanically, filling a kettle with water and setting it on the stove, her back ramrod straight.
She turned the burner on, and only then did she face me.
“How could you not tell me?” she whispered.
“I was going to. Tonight. That’s what I was coming over to talk to you about.” I’d planned it. Scripted it. Rehearsed it between brushing Lacey’s hair this morning and tying Tally’s shoes. Between lines of code and meetings with my programming teams.
She reached for the counter, her fingers curling around the edge. “It’s my fault for never asking what had happened to Tia’s kids.” Her eyes flicked to mine. “Would you have told me earlier if I’d asked directly?”
“Yes.” I nodded sharply. “None of this is your fault. It’s mine. I wanted…I didn’t plan for you to get to know them before I told you. I should have stepped in. I made the wrong decision. They liked you, and I’d hoped—”
“To manipulate me?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
I took a step forward, then stopped, fists clenched at my sides to keep myself from touching her. The wrong word, the wrong tone, and I’d lose her. I may have already lost her. But she’d let me inside. She hadn’t told me to go. There was a chance I could fix this.
“Then why?” she asked, almost begging.
She needed me to make it make sense. I should have had the words. I’d had weeks to come up with an explanation far better than 'I'm willing to do anything to keep you,’but that was what it came down to. My plans all had one goal: Beatrice Novak. In my mind, it was simple. But I had to give her more than that.
“I started on my back foot with you and had so much to make up for. I’d wanted us to get right with each other before I threw in complications.”
Bea didn’t move, didn’t speak. She just watched me with a new wariness that cut me to the bone.
“I’m not their father,” I went on. “But I’m everything else. Tia trusted me with them. I don’t know why. Half the time, I’m not sure I’m right for the job, but they’re my world now. We were all drowning when Tia died, and I’ve spent two years clawing us back to the surface.That’swhy I disappeared from your life. I had to focus on them—”
“I would never begrudge you any of that. Of course you had to give them your all.”
Memories rose to the surface of Lacey crying through the night, Talon asking question after question I couldn’t answer, Scarlet having outbursts of anger she had every right to. Because life wasn’t fair and her mother should have been alive. Locking myself in my bedroom and blindly staring at a wall when my own grief and new upside-down world overwhelmed me. The weight of sound. The emotional noise.
Therapy helped, but it was time that healed us. The kids saw they still had me and their grandfather. They could trust we were going to stick. And I’d accepted the changes in my life. Learned how to manage my company and family without going into shutdown mode every day.
“Everything changed. One heartbeat to the next, I became theirs. I had to build our life from the ground up, and we’ve made agoodlife. I was going to come for you. Paul sped up my timeline by a couple months when he hired you unexpectedly, but I’d had it all planned out, with the house—”
“Youdoknow it’s crazy you bought the house across the street from mine, don’t you?” she said, finally showing a flicker of the sassy, sarcastic, blunt Beatrice who routinely cut me off at the knees.
