wish we could,” he answered before leaving me to wonder just how far she had managed to get with my body before I crawled out from under the stupor her drugs had dragged me into. I knew it was more than just something to get my dick going to because that old itch had already settled in and I didn’t have a way to scratch it.
Chapter 23
No More Holidays
Ever
Christmas was right around the corner and I didn’t know what I was going to tell my children. Archer wouldn’t care. He was too young to even know what Christmas was. The girls though, how could I keep the girls from experiencing something their father and I had made special for them every single year of their life, including the last, just before Deck was taken from us?
Just thinking on the fact that we were coming up on the year anniversary of Deck’s disappearance made my stomach tumble. My father had asked me to give him until the end of the year. Actually, he had asked for ‘as long as it takes’ while I had insisted on revisiting his stay away at the end of the year. I had a decision to make soon. One that I wasn’t looking forward to because truth be told, I was running out of hope. I was also running out of excuses to tell my girls and I had finally sat them down and told them that their daddy was taken by bad men and that we had been trying to get him back this whole time.
They already knew. I hadn’t broken any news to them. My girls were smart. Much like Toby, Jay, and myself when we were just a bit older than them, they had been routinely listening in on conversations they were not supposed to overhear. I felt like the world’s biggest failure as a parent that I hadn’t been able to shelter them from what was really happening. Then I remembered my Momma Luce and doing the same thing to her all the time, so I just smiled up to the heavens and asked for her help and guidance in getting through everything with some sort of sanity intact. My kids needed me. They didn’t need a basket-case who couldn’t pull her shit together.
I was trying to figure out what to do about Christmas when I pulled a manilla envelope from my mailbox. My hands started to tremble immediately because I recognized the writing on it. “No, please God, not today,” I hummed to myself as I took it, along with all my other mail, into the house with me. Then I sat down on the couch and opened the damned thing. Yeah, I really wished I hadn’t done that.
Inside were pictures of Deck and the woman. He was obviously asleep, though he appeared much healthier than he had in previous photos we received all those months ago. His hand was on her belly and she was smiling at the camera. Once again, it was obvious that someone else was there taking the picture, which took away from their intimate little love-fest set. Still, He looked healthy, no visible bruising, and his hand rested gently on her very pregnant belly. I dropped the photos and ran to the guest bathroom where I lost everything that I had been able to eat that day.
“Ever?” I heard my sister calling out to me, but I couldn’t respond as I was mid-heave. “Oh my gosh, Sis, are you okay?”
I waved her off, and only moments later, I heard her gasp. I knew, without a doubt, that she had just discovered the pictures that had sent me running in here to be sick. She was immediately on the phone with someone, though I couldn’t make out the words she was saying. It didn’t matter. Pretending he was coming home to us became so much harder now that he didn’t look like he was wasting away and being beaten regularly. My brain and my heart were on the same page before. They knew he wasn’t there of his own free will, but these latest images? They were heartbreaking because he looked healthy. They were devastating because of the implications that he’d moved on, that he was expecting a child with another woman. What would happen if my father did find him? Would he bring her home too? Would he choose to stay? Would I have to introduce my children to their newest sibling? One he had with