He’s my son. I will fight for him. You don’t even know his name. You abandoned him, you couldn’t even give him a name!
The words were scrawled and messy, nothing like my normal careful handwriting. A tear dripped onto the page, making the ink in that spot bleed.
I slammed the notebook closed and got up from the little desk in the corner of my room. I fisted Shayla’s letter in my hand and looked around the space. I couldn’t let Tucker find this. I needed to talk to my parents first and figure out a plan; then I would be honest with him. He had to come first in all of this though. Tuck was my priority. And a small part of me, a completely selfish part, wanted a little more time just as things were. I wasn’t ready to tell him, and that was the fucking truth.
“Mom! Come on! I’m hungry.”
His tennis shoes squeaked against the polished wood as he came down the hall, getting closer to my room. My heart caught in my throat. “Shit,” I whispered.
He was only a couple of steps away now. I picked up the edge of the mattress and shoved the letter under it. I sat on the edge of the bed, scrubbing my face of any lingering tears before bending over to put on my shoes. Tuck opened the bedroom door without knocking. I’d been trying to teach him to knock for years, but he barged right in whenever he wanted. “You have to knock, Tuck.”
He rolled his eyes. Long gone was the sweet dimple-cheeked four-year-old boy, and in his place was my eight-year-old son, who would be shooting past me in height way sooner than I would be ready for. He backed out of the room and knocked in an exaggerated manner. I wanted to teach him about respecting boundaries and privacy. I usually changed in my closet though, and the thought of having a man over was laughable. Eligible single guys in a small town were slim pickins and my brother had scared off most of them anyway. “Come in,” I called. My cheek rose as one side of my mouth turned up in a smirky smile.
“What are you doing? Why are you taking so long? I’m going to starve to death. And then what would you do? Get cats?”
I raised an eyebrow and glared at him. He chuckled. Yeah, that four-year-old boy was definitely gone. “I’m putting my shoes on. I’m starting to think a cat would be better company than you though. A lot less smelly. My laundry would be cut in half. A cat wouldn’t eat as much as you. You know, the more I think about it, a cat sounds like the better deal. What do you think? Want to live with Grams and Gramps? I’ll get a cat and live a happy life?”
His grin grew and my heart ached in my chest. The corner of the mattress felt like it was burning underneath me with the threats his birth mother—my cousin, and someone I’d thought was my best friend—had hurled at me. Tucker didn’t know that I wasn’t his biological mom. I knew I’d have to tell him one day, and I would; I’d be honest. I’d tell him the good and the bad about his birth mom. But not yet. And not in this way.
Just...a little more time.
I tied my shoe, clapped my hands, and stood. “Let’s go get you some food.”
I wrapped my arm around his neck and kissed the top of his head, which was getting far too close to the top of mine. I didn’t know how my eight-year-old was so quickly gaining on me in height, but I knew by the time he was ten, he’d be taller than me.
“Can I drive?”
“No,” I said and plucked the golf-cart keys off the hook. Tucker and I lived at the edge of the Castle Rock Inn’s property. My parents did too, but they lived on the other side and we couldn’t see their house from here. Our cottage was mixed in with the others, which were available to rent.
“Hop on.”
Tuck sat on the back seat stretching out his legs. I turned on the cart, shaped like a vintage muscle car, and headed toward my parents’ place.
The minute I’d graduated from high school, they’d set their sights on the hill country and buying an inn and living out the rest of their years working on it. I’d been in culinary school for six months when Shayla came home pregnant, still addicted to drugs and in need of help. I transferred closer to home so I could live with my parents and Shayla, helping her along the way, driving her to NA and AA meetings, and finding her every time she fell off the wagon.
I’d wondered how she was going to be able to handle her baby, but my parents and I were committed to helping her. I never imagined that I would leave her hospital room to get her some pudding only to come back to her empty bed, while Tuck lay crying in the crib next to it. I sat on her empty hospital bed for hours—holding and rocking a crying Tuck—while my own tears streamed down my face as I stared at the door, wondering if she would ever walk back through it. After several hours I knew she had left us behind.
My parents’ house was a beacon in the dark night. My mom was standing at the sink as my father held her from behind, their eyes closed, as they swayed to music I couldn’t hear.
Tuck hopped off before I even came to a complete stop and ran inside, leaving the front door wide open. I sauntered in after him, taking a few deep breaths before I entered the kitchen and faced my parents’ eyes, which saw way too much.
Mom stopped in her tracks with a bowl of mashed potatoes in her hands as she stared at me, tilting her head. I shook my head and mouthed, Later.
Somehow, someway, we would solve this.
Chapter 3
Delilah
The whisk scraped against the bottom of the metal mixing bowl in quick succession. Little bubbles surfaced in the mixture, but I didn’t stop. My hand kept flicking it around and around as I stood in the middle of my dream kitchen at the inn.
“If you don’t stop mixing, you’re going to take those eggs from light and fluffy to whipped peaks. Your father tossed and turned all night worried about you.”
I looked down at the bowl in my hands. Mom was right. The eggs were overmixed. I dropped the bowl into the sink, wrapped my hands around it, and let my head hang. My eyes closed as I took three deep breaths before facing her with tears in my eyes.
“Shayla sent me a letter.”
Mom raised a hand to her chest, and the other hand covered her open mouth. Her eyes filled with tears as she stepped forward. “What? Do you know where she is? Is she okay?”
I shook my head. Yesterday, before I’d opened that damn letter, if my mom had told me she’d heard from Shayla, I’d have been demanding answers to those questions too. Now I didn’t know how to feel. I wanted my cousin, the person who’d practically grown up as my sister, to be safe and healthy. I hadn’t heard from her in eight years. But on the other hand, if it meant potentially losing Tucker, I wanted her as far as possible from Hawk Valley.
“I don’t know where she is. Or if she’s okay. If she’s sober. The only thing I do know is that she wants…” I trailed off, looking around for my son. He was somewhere around here, and I didn’t want him overhearing this conversation. I cleared my throat before finishing my sentence in a whisper. “She wants Tucker.”
Mom’s hands dropped to fists on her hips. “What do you mean?”
I took the crumpled sheet of paper from my back pocket, handing it over. She opened the note. The edges of the paper were already fraying from the number of times I’d opened and folded it over the past twelve hours.