“You have to train them,” my mom told me teasingly. “But they eventually learn.”
My dad scoffed and turned toward Mark. “You got any coffee?”
I sat back and let their conversation flow around me. For the first time in almost twenty-four hours, I felt like everything might be okay. Not that I’d make it okay, or I’d figure it out, but that it actually was going to be okay.
“I’m chafing like you would not believe,” Cam said as he came into the room.
“Keep your swamp ass away from me,” I replied, trying to dodge his hand as he reached for me. “You better have washed your hands!”
“Of course I did,” he said, flicking water in my face.
“Ew,” I groaned. “Why didn’t you use a towel?”
“I heard something about breakfast and I was in a hurry,” he replied, chuckling.
“Help me clear the table,” my mom ordered Cam. “We can set this stuff on the counter.”
“I can grab that,” Mark said apologetically.
“No biggie.” My mom waved him off.
I watched as she and Cam cleared the table while Mark grabbed supplies out of the fridge and spoke quietly to my dad. Shit just kept getting weirder and weirder.
“You haven’t had any water since you got here,” Mark said as he set a glass of ice water down in front of me. “Didn’t you say you were supposed to be drinking a lot of it?”
“I’ve been a little preoccupied,” I replied. I tilted my head back to meet his eyes. “Thank you.”
“Why are you supposed to be drinking water?” my mom asked, watching us in confusion.
When I didn’t answer right away, Mark did it for me.
“Because of the breastfeeding.”
“The breastfeeding?” my mom replied. Her eyes shot to the baby.
“It’s not what you’re thinking—” I said, shaking my head.
“You told us that you had your friend’s baby with you,” my dad said, his voice low and angry.
“Yeah, about that,” Mark waded in, pointing at my dad. “You could have filled me in.”
“She is my friend’s baby,” I said at the same time. God, this wasn’t how I wanted to tell them. My parents were staring at me like they wanted to throttle me, and I couldn’t really blame them. I hadn’t given them the full story when I’d called them, and now they were having this huge bomb dropped in their lap with no warning.
I looked at Mark, whose face had lost all expression while he waited for me to explain what the hell was happening. I hadn’t exactly been straight with him, either.
I looked down at the baby’s sleeping face and took a deep breath before lifting my head again.
“I was a surrogate.”
Chapter 6
Mark
“You were a surrogate,” Cecilia’s mom Farrah said, dropping into a chair at the table.
“Yes,” Cecilia confirmed. “I carried her, but she was never supposed to be mine.”
“The fuck?” Cam muttered.
“She’s not genetically linked to me,” Cecilia said, her voice strained. “I was just the gestational carrier. I just, you know, grew her because Liv couldn’t.”
“And Liv’s the friend who was gunned down at her house last night?” her dad asked. Casper looked like he was ready to hit something, but he also oddly looked like he wanted to hug his daughter.
“Yeah,” Cecilia said. Her fingers started pulling at her bottom lip.
“So—” Farrah started to speak, then seemed to lose her train of thought. She shook her head and ran a hand down her face. “So, she belongs to your friends. Do they have any family? Where is she gonna go?”
If I hadn’t known Cecilia so well once upon a time, and maybe if I hadn’t been watching her so closely, I wouldn’t have seen the way her arms tightened around the baby. She lifted her chin.
“She stays with me,” Cecilia announced.
“Don’t think it works that way,” Cam said, disbelief threading his words. “You can’t just take her if she’s got family.”
“The only family she has is gone,” Cecilia shot back. “Cane has a grown son, but Liv was afraid of him. She’s not going to him.”
“Wait, how old was your friend’s husband?” Cam asked.
“You don’t get in the middle of family shit, Cecilia,” Casper said at the same time.
“Jesus,” Farrah muttered.
“Stop,” Cecilia snapped, smacking her hand on the table. “None of you have any say in this.”
“The hell we don’t,” Casper replied darkly.
Cecilia rose from the table. “If you wanna go rounds with me,” she said softly, staring unflinchingly into her dad’s angry eyes, “I’m all for it. But you don’t make my decisions for me, and you haven’t in a long ass time.”
“What you’re doin’ is wrong,” Casper replied slowly.
“That’s a little like the pot calling out the kettle, isn’t it?” she shot back. Then she turned and left the room.
We all stood silently, digesting everything we’d heard. I didn’t know what to fucking think. She’d carried the baby and I knew she loved her, but if baby girl belonged to someone else, it wasn’t any kind of right for her to keep her.
“What a godawful mess,” Farrah said, running her fingers through her hair the exact same way Cecilia had done the night before. “She can’t be serious about keeping that baby.”
“I feel for her,” Cam said, leaning back in his chair. “She was havin’ that baby for a couple that’s dead now. She wasn’t growin’ her for some relative to raise.”
“You and Trix had a surrogate and somethin’ happened, that woman would sure as fuck not be keepin’ my grandkid,” Casper said through his teeth.
“I’ve got no skin in the game,” I waded in cautiously. “But I’d give her a minute. Cecilia isn’t stupid. She always has a reason for the things she does.”
“She’s not stupid, but she’s selfish as fuck,” Cam muttered.
I waited a second for her parents to tell him to watch his mouth and my stomach soured when they didn’t.
“Keep your bullshit opinions to yourself,” I said, filling in the silence. “You say another word about your sister and you can get the fuck out of my house.”
“You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Cam asked, straightening.
“Enough,” Casper snapped, pointing at his son.
“I’m gonna check on her,” I announced. “Coffee’s about done. Mugs are in the cabinet to the left of the sink.”
I walked away before I said what I wanted to. Fucking Cameron. Their whole fucking family. I wanted to shake them. It was the same old shit that Cecilia had dealt with when we were young. It was like they thought she was inherently bad or something, like she was just selfish and mean and they just had to deal with it. Never, not once, had they tried to get to the root of the shit she said and did.
Cecilia could be a bitch. Hell, she could be the biggest bitch you’d ever meet—but there was always a reason, even if it didn’t make sense to anyone but her. She had never gone around trying to piss people off.