hanging open, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
…
“Well?” I asked Ada as I crammed another peanut butter cookie in my mouth. Colt and Maisie were asleep in our cabin, and Hailey was keeping watch while I reverted back to my childhood and spilled my guts to Ada.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked, taking another tray out of the commercial oven and setting it to cool.
“Your thoughts? Opinions, anything.” Because I needed someone else to tell me that I wasn’t psycho.
“I think an extremely handsome man offered you a way to save your daughter.” She leaned back against the opposite counter, wiping her hands clean on her apron.
“What? So I’m the one who’s wrong here? He asked me to marry him, Ada. That gives a veritable stranger rights over my kids for the sake of insurance. Insurance that he can revoke anytime he feels like filing for divorce. Hell, rights over Solitude.”
“Only if you let it. You’re telling me you couldn’t draft a prenup or something that limits his rights? The same as you’d do with Jeff if he walked back through those doors?”
“Jeff isn’t coming back.”
“Exactly.”
“What if he’s a serial killer?” I asked, reaching for another cookie.
“He was Ryan’s best friend.”
“So he says,” I muttered with my mouth full. Well, so the letter said. Ryan had never shared personal details about the guys he served with. He barely told me anything about Chaos when he asked me to be his pen pal, just that a guy in his unit needed mail. I missed my brother. I wanted my brother. I needed to hear his opinion, why he’d never talked about Beckett if they’d been best friends.
I missed Chaos, too.
Chaos. If he’d shown up at my door in January, everything would be different. I knew it in my soul. Maybe I was the psycho one. After all, I’d fallen for two different men in the span of what? Eight months? Pregnancy lasted longer than that.
But Chaos was dead. Ryan was dead. Mom and Dad were dead. Grandma? Dead, too.
Was I really going to add my daughter to that list?
“Didn’t he have Ryan’s letter?”
“Yeah,” I begrudgingly admitted. “Maybe if there was a picture of them, or something. Anything.”
“Did you ask?” She tilted her head and stared at me like I was ten all over again.
“Well. No.”
“Huh. Seems like you already believed him, then, doesn’t it?”
“Ugh.” I let my head roll back and sighed my exasperation to whoever wanted to take my side. “You’re on his side.”
“I’m on Maisie’s side. And that side looks a lot better when she’s living.”
Well, when you put it like that…
“I don’t know what to do. I can’t marry him, Ada. It’s only a matter of time before he gets bored. Guys like Beckett don’t play house.”
“He’s not your father. He’s not Ryan. He’s not Jeff. You have got to stop convicting him of their crimes.”
She was right, and yet my heart still wouldn’t accept it, my head wouldn’t surrender. “Even if he sticks around long enough to get Maisie through treatment, eventually he’s going to check the ‘saved Ryan’s sister’ box and move on.”
“And that’s bad because…”
“Because it will break the kids’ hearts.”
“Funny thing about broken hearts—only the living have them.”
I shot her a glare. “Yeah, I get it. At least she’d be alive to have a broken heart, right? But what if he walks out midtreatment? What if the insurance cancels and the hospital ceases her therapy?”
“Then she will have had more treatments than she’s getting now, and we’ll cross that bridge if we ever get there. Sometimes you just have to show a little faith, even if he is a veritable stranger.”
“I don’t know how to trust him with my kids.” I reached for another cookie and broke it in half.
“That’s a load of crap.” She wagged her finger in my direction. “You already trust him with the twins. He takes Colt to soccer, and he’s stayed with Maisie in the hospital with the privileges you gave him over her care.”
I shoved another piece of cookie in my mouth and chewed slowly. Ugh, she was right. Hadn’t I already admitted to Beckett that I knew he’d do anything for the kids?
“You know what I think?” Ada asked, taking advantage of my full mouth. “You’re not scared to trust him with the kids. You’re scared to trust him with you.”
The cookie scraped my throat as I forced a quick swallow.