words he was hinting at, but he didn’t have to. I knew him well enough to understand what he was implying.
She hadn’t called back to check thirty-one years ago. She hadn’t known about me. She hadn’t cared to know about me. She hadn’t come here to get to know me. He hadn’t wanted me to go to the gym because he’d wanted to spare me from meeting someone who should have cared I’d existed… and hadn’t.
It didn’t hurt my feelings. Or surprise me.
“Lenny, you had nothing to do with her not being around. It’s me she couldn’t stand to see again, do you understand?”
I nodded and clamped those words somewhere else. “There was a voice mail at the Maio House this morning.” I made a face as I finally stood up, making my way toward the sink so I could rinse out my bowl and set it in the dishwasher. “Well, hopefully me telling her I’ll see her again in thirty years got across to her because I have about 0 percent interest in ever seeing her again.”
“You’re not the only one,” he muttered, still sounding strained. “It’s been thirty-eight years for me, and I could go another thirty-eight again.”
I turned around as I wiped my hands on a towel. “You haven’t seen her since Marcus”—that had been my biological dad’s name—“was eighteen?”
Grandpa nodded, eyeing Mo for a moment before blowing a bunch of kisses at her. The little nut cooed, calling him “Baba.” He didn’t bother looking at me as he answered, “Not since his high school graduation.”
“She didn’t go to his funeral?”
He made a sharp, bitter noise in his throat. “No.”
What a bitch.
“She said she couldn’t get away, but that he was in her heart,” he whimpered sarcastically, even bringing up his hands over his heart. Grandpa rolled his eyes. “Marcus wouldn’t have cared, kiddo. I didn’t raise him to be anti his mom. He never liked her in the first place, and I’m not putting that blame on myself. I never said a bad word about her. I didn’t give him a reason to think that I didn’t like her. It was my fault she left, and I made sure he knew that. We shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place, but I thought I could be someone else,” he said carefully, shifting his gaze toward me. “I took years of her life away by not being upfront. I can’t hold too many grudges. I ended up with him, and then you, and now I’ve got my new best friend right here. Life is good.”
Life was good.
Even if I didn’t know or trust this person who had reappeared. This person who had still, after so long, not given enough of a fuck to see me, but had only come around for business purposes. The kind of woman who wouldn’t go to her own son’s funeral because he was in her fucking heart like that meant anything. It was one thing if she didn’t have money to travel or had been too sick to or something, but that bullshit wasn’t an excuse or an equivalent.
Bitch.
Just as I opened my mouth to ask him another question about her, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it. You wipe her off. I’ll change her shirt in a minute,” Grandpa said, already up on his feet before I could get the door myself.
By the time I had dampened the towel I’d used to wipe my hands off on and scrubbed it over my girl’s face as she tried to get away and fight me with her fists—showing she was her great-grandfather’s granddaughter, the door to the kitchen swung open again. Except this time, it wasn’t just Grandpa Gus. There was someone behind him. That someone being eight inches taller, a whole hell of a lot broader, and nicer. But still an asshole.
It was Jonah.
“I wanted to call,” he stated like Grandpa wasn’t scowling at the world in general in front of him. “But I can’t reach your mobile number, and Peter’s went straight to voice mail.”
He—
Jonah kept going as he stood there in the kitchen, one long arm loose at his side, the other… was holding a children’s book? I was pretty sure it had an illustrated cover. “I was hoping to spend some time with Mo. Start some of my lessons if that’s all right with you.”
Did he have to give me that small, shy smile as he asked that fucking question?