back in her seat. “Really?”
He laughed and the awkwardness dissolved like sugar in hot tea. “Yeah. Really. You, me, and the girls.”
Arden recognized a fork in the road when she saw it. The choice she made now would determine the path her relationship with Shane would take. Could she know what lay at the end of the road? Nobody ever could. But she couldn’t let that keep her from making the choice her heart told her it wanted. She had to be brave.
“I’d like that,” she told him. “Very much.”
She wasn’t sure what to tell Maeve and Aislin about their dinner plans, so she fudged a little bit. “A friend of mine is taking us out to dinner tonight.”
Maeve looked up from the spelling words she was writing. “Where are we going?”
“Which friend?” Aislin asked from in front of her own homework. “Lida?”
“No.” Arden put her hands in her pockets and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “A friend you’ve never met. His name is Shane.”
The girls exchanged a glance, but didn’t comment. Maeve shrugged and bent back to her spelling, but Aislin scrunched up her face.
“Where’s he taking us? Someplace fancy?”
Arden laughed. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Because Samantha says whenever her mom’s dates take them out, they have to go to someplace fancy that serves gross stuff like snails.”
“Snails!” Maeve sounded horrified. “Gross! No way am I eating snails!”
“Shane will not be taking us to a place that serves snails. I promise.” Arden’s heart filled with a love so strong for her darling girls it almost overflowed. They were so dear. And so funny. She was so proud of them.
“Good,” Aislin said.
“Can we go to McDonald’s?” Maeve questioned hopefully.
Arden pursed her lips. “Uh, no. Someplace nicer than that.”
“Chinese buffet?” Aislin asked.
“Maybe. We’ll see where Shane wants to take us.”
Both girls seemed to accept that answer and bent over their schoolwork again. Arden turned back to the sink to wash a last couple of dishes before going up to get changed.
“Mommy?” Maeve asked.
“Hmm?”
“Is this a date?”
Arden kept her voice neutral. “Yes, Maeve.”
“Told you,” she heard Aislin mutter, and Maeve whispered in reply, “I was just checking.”
“Only if it’s okay with you both, though.” Arden wrung the dishcloth and turned to her daughters.
The girls both shrugged. Aislin rolled her eyes. Maeve scrunched her nose.
“It’s okay with me, as long as he doesn’t make me eat snails,” said Aislin.
“It’d be better if he took us to McDonald’s,” Maeve said, then hastily continued when she saw Arden’s look, “But Chinese buffet is okay, too. It’s okay, Mommy.”
They were amazing, these resilient children. Arden reached out to hug them both and kiss them, and the girls accepted her mothering without squirming.
“You’d better go change, Mommy,” said Aislin matter-of-factly. “Put on some makeup or something. Samantha says her mom always wears a miniskirt on dates.”
“Our mom doesn’t need to wear a miniskirt,” Maeve interjected hotly. “She’s beautiful the way she is!”
“But she’d be more beautiful if she wasn’t wearing sweatpants,” Aislin pointed out to her younger sister.
Arden laughed and squeezed them again. “You’re right. I’m going up to change. You need to have this stuff finished and put away in your bookbags by the time I get down here, okay?”
She got another set of eye-rolling and put-upon sighs for that instruction, but she knew they’d do it. Upstairs, her closet became a jungle of mismatched outfits and ugly shoes. What would she wear?
Funny how she hadn’t spent this much thought on her outfits before, not on any of the other dates she’d gone on. But now, tonight...it all seemed just that much more important.
“Not a miniskirt,” she muttered, yanking down a pair of soft cotton trousers from a hanger and adding a long-sleeved, fitted shirt. She held the pieces up to her. “Oh, brother.”
She did bother with makeup, though, applying it carefully and taking the time to pin up her hair. Her preparations took her longer than she’d thought. When she caught sight of the bedroom clock, it was already fifteen minutes past five.
He must be late, she thought as she took the stairs two at a time to hurtle into the living room.
He wasn’t late. Shane sat on the couch, Maeve on one side and Aislin on the other. Both girls were talking a mile a minute. Maeve held up a book from her favorite series about a group of young girls dedicated to solving mysteries. Aislin waved a feathered pen in front of his face, gesturing at the notepad in which she wrote