That night, when I got home, I opened my email to find a letter from an insider whose name seemed very familiar to me.
The title of the email read: “Just In Case You Need This.”
Hey Oliver,
I’m not sure if you remember me, but we met at the farmer’s market. I was the asshole following you and taking your picture. Well, I was also the asshole who saw you when you were having a conversation with Cam at the outdoor diner, and I was able to record it. The clip is attached above, and I wanted to let you know that I can pass it on to media outlets. It might help clear your name.
I know you might be against this, or not trust me, but again, a lot of us are your supporters. I won’t share it, unless you ask me to do so. I don’t want to cause you any more struggles.
—Charlie Parks
I sat back a bit, completely baffled by the email sitting in my inbox. My mind raced back and forth as I tried to figure out the best thing that I could do with the information he’d given me. I didn’t care about clearing my name as much as I cared about making life easier for Emery, and maybe having a chance to have her come back to me.
So, I hit reply.
Dear Charlie,
Please send the video out.
—OS
38
EMERY
“I miss Mr. Mith,” Reese stated for the fifty millionth time in the past two weeks. Every time she said it, I felt like an awful mother. I’d brought Oliver into her life, only to have him ripped away from her days after she was questioning if he was going to be her father. I hated the guilt that was building up inside of me every single day, yet what I hated most was how much I missed him too.
I missed him to my core. At night, he’d show up in my dreams, and come morning he’d live in my thoughts. Even though I knew I was making the right choice for my daughter, it didn’t make things any easier. I wished I could’ve figured out a way to make our love work. I wished I could’ve been able to keep him by my side during my hardest days, but I didn’t see any way that it was possible.
“I know, baby, I miss him too.” I sighed, rubbing my hands against my eyes. I hadn’t cried in a few days, so I took that as a win. I knew I had to stop my tears from coming when Reese began asking me why I was sad. Hiding my sadness from my little girl was probably the hardest thing for me to do. Appearing strong when I felt weak was harder than anyone could’ve ever believed.
There was a knock at my door, and I hurried over to answer it. Kelly was standing there with two bottles in her hand. One was red wine, and the other was sparkling grape juice.
I cocked an eyebrow. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s good to see you too,” she joked, barging into the apartment without an official invitation inside; not that she needed one. “I figured tonight was a great night for a girls’ night out!” she exclaimed. “Reese! Do you want to have a girls’ night out?”
“Yes!” my daughter shouted, making me shake my head.
“No,” I said back. I didn’t have the energy to get up and go out. Most days, I was just trying to make it from morning to night. I didn’t have an ounce of extra energy to put anywhere else but within my daughter.
“Oh, gosh. Don’t be a party pooper, Emery,” Kelly said.
“Yeah, don’t be a party pooper, Mama,” Reese echoed. I gave her a stern look, and her eyes widened as she whispered, “Is ‘pooper’ a bad word?”
I couldn’t even hold my smirk in from her comment. But she wasn’t the one I was supposed to be scolding in that moment. Therefore, I turned back to Kelly. “I can’t go out tonight. I have to keep trying to find a job.”
“Jobs will be there tomorrow. A girls’ night is needed. And I bet you’ll feel even more inspired to job search tomorrow after a great time. You were there for me when I needed a girls’ day, so let me be there for you when you need one. Please, Emery?”
“Yeah, pleeeeeeease, Mama?”
I wanted to say no, go crawl into bed, and surrender to my sadness, but the spark of hope in Reese’s eyes wasn’t something that I could let fade away. Ever since Oliver had stopped coming around, I’d noticed how sad Reese was about it. If me going out for a girls’ night would make her smile, I’d do it.
“Okay. What do you have in mind?”
“It’s a surprise. Just go get dressed, something cute! I’ll help Reese pick out something to wear. Meet out here in about twenty minutes, okay?”
I snickered. “I don’t need twenty minutes to get ready.”
Kelly scanned me up and down with her blue eyes. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m sorry to say, but you do need twenty minutes to get ready. You’ve been running around looking like a zombie for the past few days.”
“She’s right, Mama. You look like a zombie with fifty billion bags under your eyes,” Reese agreed. Then the two of them began walking around the living room like zombies.
Well then.
That felt like the confidence boost I was searching for.
Before I could reply, Kelly was patting me on my behind, shooing me in the direction of my room.
“And wear a nice pair of heels!” she shouted.
Heels? Yeah, right. She was going to get a pair of sneakers, and she was going to like it too.
It took me fifteen minutes to get dressed and do my makeup, but I hung out in my bedroom for those extra five minutes, giving myself a pep talk. I needed to put on my superhero cape in order for the girls to not notice how sad I felt. From zombie to superwoman in twenty minutes or less.
“There our lady is!” Kelly cheered as I emerged from my bedroom as a butterfly. Well, maybe more like a moth, but they were getting what I had to give that night.
Reese was wearing an adorable pink dress that flared at the bottom, and her kiddie heels. Her wild curly hair was tamed and pulled back into a perfect bun. I had no clue how Kelly had managed to do that in less than thirty minutes. It normally took me five hours to tame my daughter’s hair.
“You look beautiful, Mama,” Reese gasped, looking my way. “Like a princess.”
When my girl was sweet, she was the sweetest. “You look like a princess, too, sweetheart.”
Kelly poured two glasses of wine, and one of sparkling grape juice, and handed them out to both Reese and me. Then she held her glass in the air. “A toast to Emery Rose Taylor. The best mother and friend that a person could ever have. We’re better with you, Emery. And nothing is ever going to keep us apart.”
Reese hadn’t a clue how important and meaningful my friend’s words were to me, but I needed to hear them. To hear that my life as Reese’s mother wasn’t going to come to a standstill. I’d been overthinking it all. How would I explain to her the truth about what had happened? How I wasn’t her biological mother? How her real mother had abandoned her?
I couldn’t answer those questions at that time, so I went ahead and pushed them to the back of my mind the best I could.
We finished our drinks—well, after another glass of wine each—and we headed downstairs to the Uber that Kelly had called for us. I still had no idea where we were going, but she wouldn’t give me any clues at all. “Just enjoy the ride,” she said, smirking.
When we pulled up in front of an arena with a massively long line wrapped around the building, I cocked an eyebrow. “What in the world . . . ?” I muttered, climbing out of the car.