“And I didn’t hear anything at all about Phillip’s junk.” He shudders.

“Even better.” I look up at him. “I’m sorry you heard all that.”

“I’m not,” he says, and he suddenly looks like a young adult. “I’m glad I heard it.”

“Well, I’m not. I’ll try to be quieter next time.”

He sits down on the edge of my bed. “I’ve been really worried,” he admits.

I sit down beside him. “Me, too.”

“But I’m thinking that since we don’t have a mom and you don’t have a family, we can make this work.” He doesn’t look at me, and I sense a little tremor in his voice.

“I think we can make it work, too.”

He puts his arm around my shoulders. “I have one question for you.”

I assume he wants my resume, which is wholly inadequate, particularly since Phillip thinks he just put me on leave. It will be a cold day in hell… “What?” I ask.

“Did you mean it when you said you wanted to teach me to drive?” He grins down at me.

I laugh. It feels good to laugh with Seth. “Yeah, I meant it.” I bump his shoulder with mine. “Our groundskeeper taught me.”

“That’s sad,” he says, his eyes narrowing.

“Yeah.” I nod. “It kind of is.”

Matt

I wake up the next morning knowing that I have to apologize to Paul. I was way out of line last night, and I can’t just let it go. I wait around for him to wake up. He usually goes to the tattoo parlor before I do, but his bedroom door is still closed. He doesn’t have Hayley, his five-year-old daughter, this week. She’s with Kelly, her mom. He sometimes sleeps in when he doesn’t have to get up with her. She rises with the sun, and although it’s a-fucking-dorable to see her padding around in her jammies, a man needs some sleep sometimes. We work really late at the shop, so we don’t always get eight hours.

Looks like Paul is making up for lost time.

Logan lives with Emily, Pete lives with Reagan, and Sam went back to college late last night on the bus, so it’s just Paul and me in the apartment now. It seems quiet. Too quiet sometimes. I’m used to the TV blaring because Logan doesn’t know it’s turned up too loud—he’s deaf—and Sam and Pete, the twins, throwing one another all over the furniture. Now it’s just me and Paul, two old guys, and a whole lot of quiet. I don’t think I like it.

I hear Paul’s door open and then the splash of him going to the bathroom. We’re guys. We don’t have to close the door when there are no girls here. He comes into the kitchen then, his blond hair sticking out in one hundred different directions, and he scratches his belly, his flannel pajama bottoms showing off the tattoo of Kelly’s name. I am well acquainted with it since I put it on him. And it’s a damn fine tattoo, if I do say so myself. Me, I don’t have any women’s names on me anywhere, and I’m pretty sure I never will.

“’Morning,” Paul mutters, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“’Morning,” I say back. I open the paper and stare down at it, but I can’t see the words on the page. I can feel Paul’s need to dump his bowl of Honey Graham Oh’s over my head. Hell, I deserve it.

“Sorry about last night,” I mutter.

He doesn’t look up from his cereal. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I was an ass.”

“I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“I should have agreed with you. You were right. It’s not done.”

He talks around a mouthful of food. “If it was done, you wouldn’t have been acting like that dickwad punched you in the gut.”

“Yeah.”

“What does she see in him?” he asks.

“He wasn’t dying?” I guess.

He finally looks up at me. “No excuse.”

No, there’s no excuse to cheat.

“And you were right about me and Kelly.” He keeps eating, not looking up at me.

“I don’t want to be right about that.”

“Too bad. I didn’t know you guys knew that we still do that.”

I shake my head. “Nobody knows but me.”

“I hope we aren’t too obvious.” He winces.

“No, I saw you two together when Logan was in the hospital. The way she looks at you…” I watch his face. “And the way you look at her.”

He finally lifts his gaze. “We just keep falling into bed together. That’s all.” He shrugs. He looks really uncomfortable, and that’s not usually how I think of Paul. “It’s easy. And comfortable.”

I wouldn’t know what that’s like. I laugh to myself.

“What?” he asks.

“You talk about sex with Kelly like it’s your foot sliding into an old shoe.”

He snuffles.

“But just like an old shoe, exes can be comfortable but fail to support you the way you need.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” he cries, like he’s ringing a bell in the air.

“Huh?” I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Did I ever tell you why we split up?”

He never did, but I have a pretty good idea. I shake my head anyway.

“She didn’t want you guys.”

“What?” Now that was the last thing I expected.

“She was pregnant with Hayley, and I was almost twenty-one. Mom and Dad were gone, and she didn’t want you guys. I wanted to marry her. But she didn’t want my family.”

“She made you choose?”

He gets up and slams his bowl into the sink a little too hard. “There wasn’t a f**king choice. You guys were my life, and I was all you had. No choice.”

Paul stepped into fatherhood the way some people step into college, into a job after school. He gave it everything he had. We’re only a year apart, but I never could have done what he did. He gave up everything, even his own happily ever after, for us. God. Now I feel awful. We ruined his life.

“I couldn’t have raised them without you,” he says. “Where I was weak, you were strong. And where I was strong, you were weak.” He’s right. We did complement each other.

“You gave up full time with Hayley for us.” Now I’m pissed.

“I am Hayley’s father, and I always will be. I have her half the time, and it works out well for the two of us.”

It does. It really does.

“What about now that they’re all out of the house?”

“What about it?”

“Now that everyone is taken care of, why don’t you take care of yourself? Go get yourself a real life. You and Kelly keep falling together. Why not make it permanent?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t love her.”

“But—”

“I like her. We’re friends. But that’s it.” He shrugs. “And she’s seeing someone. It’s getting pretty serious.”

“When was the last time you guys…?”

He grins. “Yesterday.”

I roll my eyes. “Then it can’t be very serious with this other guy.”

“Just the fact that there’s another guy means it’s not serious with me.” He heaves a sigh. “And I don’t love her. That’s one thing I’m sure of. Because the thought of the woman I love sleeping with another man should tear me up inside, but it doesn’t. There’s something wrong with that.”

“Okay.” I don’t know what else to say to him.

“So, about April,” he says.

“I don’t want to talk about April.”

He glares at me. “Too bad.”

This is Paul. This is what he does. “What do you suggest?”

“She’s getting married, man. It’s time to get over her.”

I throw up my hands. “I’m trying.”

“You should go to the wedding. Get it all out of your system. Take a hot chick with you.”

“Where am I going to get one of those?”

He looks at me like I’ve gone apeshit. “Dude, you can find tail anywhere.”

Maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong places.

Skylar

I spend all day on Monday working out my employment issues. I had a meeting with my immediate supervisor, who rushed to assure me that my job was not in jeopardy, that my situation was discussed during the meeting, but only to the extent that they all wanted to know if there was anything they could do to support me through this transition. What an asshat Phillip is. And what’s worse is that I almost believed him.

I couldn’t be happier that this situation forced me to cut my ties with him, particularly when I walk around the corner and find him by the water cooler standing much too close to another one of the first years. She looks a little frazzled when she sees me, and she very quickly walks in the other direction.

Phillip starts toward me but I wave him away. “Don’t even think about it,” I warn. I keep walking.

He follows me all the way to my car without saying a word. He doesn’t speak until after he watches me fumble with a box of papers and my trunk. He doesn’t offer to help me. Not once. Would Matt stand there and watch me while I struggled with a box? Something tells me he wouldn’t. I really shouldn’t compare anyone to Matt, though, since I truly don’t know him.

“You’re going through with it, aren’t you?” Phillip asks, folding his arms across his chest.

“Going through with what?” I ask, blowing my hair from my face.

“Those kids,” he spits out. “You’re keeping them.”

I laugh. “They’re keeping me, actually,” I say.

“I never took you for stupid.”

I snort. His face turns red. “The only stupid thing I ever did was pick you. Asshole,” I say under my breath as I get in my car. I pull out while he stands there watching me. It’s all I can do not to put the window down and stick my middle finger out it to flip him off. But I’m a mom now. Moms don’t make public spectacles of themselves, do they? Probably not. I settle for doing it in my head. It’ll do for now, too, because he looks pissed.

I turn the radio up loud as I drive across town. I should feel bad about our breakup, but I’m not heavyhearted. Not at all. Not like I should be. I actually feel free. And I have to admit that I feel a little bit hopeful. I have a feeling Matthew Reed has something to do with that.

Heck, I just broke up with someone I thought I was in love with. I shouldn’t be having feelings for Matt. It’s too soon. Plus, I have too much going on in my life to add a new boyfriend to it. What man in his right mind would want me and my three kids? I snort to myself as I walk into the day care to get the girls. One of the other moms scrunches her nose up at me and ushers her kid by me quickly, taking a wide berth. I guess moms aren’t supposed to snort out loud, either.

Seth told Joey and Mellie that I would be picking them up from school today, but I’m not completely sure they know what’s going on when I walk in the door. Joey hides behind her teacher’s skirt, and Mellie sticks her thumb in her mouth. I drop down to their level and say, “Hi, girls,” with a soft voice. A soft voice won’t scare them, will it? Crap. I am terrible at this mom stuff.

“Mrs. Morgan?” the teacher asks. I called her last week and talked with her on the phone about our situation. She was very nice and really understanding.

I stick out my hand. “Miss,” I say to correct her. I’m definitely not married, and it doesn’t look like I ever will be now.

She shakes my hand and steps to the side to get Joey out from behind her. Both the girls are still in day care, and they combine the classes at the end of the day on the playground. The girls apparently stick to one another like glue. Is that normal? Heck, normal is just a setting on the dryer, right? I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me on the butt.

“Miss Morgan, if I can make a suggestion…” The teacher grimaces.

I look up at her. Joey and Mellie still aren’t coming toward me. I live in the same house with them. Joey pulls on her teacher’s skirt and says quietly, “Is my mommy coming to get me?”

Pain slices through me. I don’t know how to explain death to the little ones. Seth doesn’t either, apparently.

The teacher squats down and says, “Now we talked about this, didn’t we, Josephine?”

Heck, I didn’t even know that Joey’s real name is Josephine. What kind of a mother am I?

Joey just blinks up at her.

“Mommy’s gone, and she’s not coming back,” the teacher says.

Joey’s eyes fill with tears, and I step around the teacher to pick her up. She comes to me, heavy and limp like a wet dishrag when I lift her. She lays her head on my shoulder and snuggles in. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss their mother with them,” I bite out. I’m sure the teacher has good intentions. But, God, she was a little cold, in my opinion.

“They need to understand that she’s gone,” the teacher says.

I hold up a finger. “Shh,” I breathe in a crisp warning. The teacher purses her lips.

“Mommy wouldn’t leave,” Mellie says. She comes forward and takes my hand, her fingers wet from where they were just stuck in her mouth, but I don’t care. She’s touching me of her own free will. It’s me and the girls against the world.

“That’s right,” I say to her. “Mommy would never leave you on purpose.”

“Don’t give them hope that she’s coming back,” the teacher warns.