“Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Shelby,” he said lightly. “Thanks for not Macing me, or we’d have had even less time to chat.”
“No problem. Guess you’ll just have to talk faster next time.”
He smiled and raked his fingers through his wavy hair. “Next time, huh?” I decided his dimple was dangerous. “Say hi to Shayla from me.”
“I will. Thanks for the escort, Cub Scout. This damsel’s safe and sound.”
He raised a hand in a half wave, pivoted, and took off jogging down the road at a leisurely pace.
Me? I told myself not to be flattered and that I didn’t have time for the likes of Scott Taylor. Then I opened the door to greet the sunshine of my life.
SIX MONTHS EARLIER
Dana held the car door open while I got Shayla out of the backseat. She smelled of soap and sun and felt impossibly small in her oversize jacket and matching pink boots. I felt like Peter Pan introducing Wendy to his world—an emotionally weary Peter Pan with a serious is-this-for-real? buzz going on. Things had moved fast since I’d made my decision. One minute I’d been sitting in Dana’s office trying to pick the right words to change the course of my life, and the next I’d been signing papers in Steve’s office, rushing off to Dream Acres, and then driving extremely carefully back to Trey’s bakery. I wasn’t used to having a pseudo-daughter strapped into the backseat. As it turns out, the words I had used to change my life were “I’ll take her,” which, as life-altering statements go, wasn’t exactly poetic, but it beat “I’m terrified but I can’t help myself” for clarity of purpose.
Everything had gone so fast that Trey didn’t know he was an uncle yet. A pseudo-uncle-half-brother, I supposed. So Dana and I had decided that I should make L’Envie the first stop on my way home. And Dana had come along, I suspected just to get another look at my brother, but her presence in the car had been comforting, especially when Shayla had asked, “Are you taking me to Daddy?” from the backseat. I knew she knew that her daddy was gone, but I guess we all need to ask the tough questions again every so often. Just in case.
Given the difficulty I was still having realizing that this pint-size human being now belonged to me, I didn’t know quite how to introduce her to Trey. Belonged, of course, was an overstatement. Depended was more accurate. This agreement between my dead father and me was a nebulous thing, a tenuous connection I both wanted and despised. The wanted part was Shayla, who had crayoned her way into my future on our very first encounter, all sunshine-yellow and cloud-blue. The despised part was her father, who was mine, too, but only by birth. This man who had punctuated my childhood with emotional whiplash and affective dissension, the sound of which could still be heard in the squeaky hinges of my relational impairments, was now intimately linked to me—and in a permanent, irreversible way. I had tried to distance myself from him all my life, and in recent years successfully. Yet Shayla had brought him back inside my fortified walls with such intimate finality that a part of me—the fragile, damaged part—instinctively braced itself for rejection, aspersion, and pain.
I gazed into Shayla’s eyes after I pulled her from her car seat, and she gazed right back, unwavering and just a little numb. If this new beginning was overflowing my adult capacity for comprehension, I couldn’t imagine the havoc it was wreaking in her uncomplicated world where, until recently, home had simply been Daddy. I asked Dana to watch her while I went inside and prepared Trey for the news.
Trey was handing change back to a classy-looking lady when I entered the bakery. He sent me a wait-a-minute look and finished his business with her, turning his attention to me only as she exited in a fog of Chanel No. 5.
“Shell! What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you too.”
He checked his watch. “Shouldn’t you be teaching?”
“I’m playing hooky.”
“Nice. Add to that ripping off a 7-Eleven and spending your allowance in the arcade, and we’ll have to start calling you Trey.”
“Um . . . I have some news.” I sat down at one of his pretty French tables and, as there were no other customers in the shop, he joined me.
“News?”
“Kinda big news.”
He had a suspicious look about him all of a sudden.