“That’s really sweet,” Mena said. “She’s adjusting remarkably well.”
“She really is. She has sad moments, of course. But…I think because Titus immediately was just, like, so full of love for her, it made it easier.”
Mena nodded. “Best possible outcome for a scenario like that.” She nodded at the door of the house, where the foster mother and the two little girls were waving at us. “This? It’s amazing. Those little girls have probably never gotten anything like that in their entire lives.”
“It was all her idea,” I said. “We didn’t, like, try to talk her out of it, obviously, but we didn’t bring it up—she did, all on her own.”
Mena shook her head. “Really amazing.”
“She put it all together herself, that there were kids out there like her who had a lot less, and that she suddenly had a lot, and that she could do this for them.” I glanced down at Isabela. “I’m a pretty proud Mom-la.”
“You should be.” Mena sighed, ruffled Isabela’s hair. “Well, we have a lot of stops to make before all this stuff is given away. You ready for the next house?”
Isabela nodded, jumping up and down and clapping. “Can we do this all the time?” She looked up at Titus. “You’re famous—you probably got a whole lot of money. Couldn’t we give stuff away to people all the time? It’s so much fun to see them so happy!”
Titus blinked, seeming stunned by the suggestion. “You know, Monkey…you might just have a point, there.” He glanced at Jeremy, who watched with a knowing expression on his face. “Jeremy—”
Jeremy held up a hand. “The moment you called me about this, I called a friend who’s a lawyer specializing in nonprofit corporations to start drawing up paperwork to set up a 501(c)3. Just need a name and the funding.”
“Isabela’s Extra Christmas,” Titus said. “Pull whatever funding we need.” He glanced at Mena. “I don’t suppose you have any interest in running a newly founded nonprofit startup, do you?”
Mena bit her lip, grinning. “Wouldn’t you know, that’s been a lifelong dream of mine?”
I arched an eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “I was a foster kid. I’ve been trying to work my way up to management so I could someday get a job running a nonprofit, helping kids like me. There’s not enough out there designed to help fosters. It’s a really hard, thankless job, and they don’t get enough support.”
Titus held out his hand. “Welcome to Isabela’s Extra Christmas. Set it up to make the biggest impact possible on the most amount of people. You’ll have more funding than you know what to do with, I promise.” He looked at me. “Can you get your crew in on this?”
I was already on the phone. “Way ahead of you, babe,” Lizzy answered, then. “Lizzy, hey. Is Braun with you? Good, put me on speaker. Oh, you’re with Autumn and Seven, even better! So, we’re starting a nonprofit for foster parents and kids. Providing toys, clothes, food, I don’t even know—everything you can think of. No, like we just had the idea right now, we’re getting it all worked out. But I want to know if you guys are in. Financing, obviously, because we’re gonna need funding to get the ball rolling, but just…. involvement in general…yeah. Yeah. Good, great, I knew you guys would be in. Okay, cool. I’ll put you in contact with our point person, Mena. Yeah, I’m calling Kat next.”
I hung up, and grinned. “Well, Lizzy and Braun and Autumn and Seven are in.”
Titus laughed. “Between Braun, Seven, and me alone, that’s, like, two-and-half billion dollars in financial power behind this.”
Mena’s eyes bugged out of her head, and she coughed around a shocked laugh. “What, what?”
I just laughed. “Two of my best friends are married to Braun Bennet and Seven St. John. And I’m married to this guy.” I jerked a thumb at Titus. “That’s a lot of money. And my girls and I are obviously not hurting ourselves. This is gonna be huge, Mena.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, this went from zero to sixty in a hurry—Toy giveaway inspired a six-year-old, to a fully funded nonprofit.” She shook her hands and grinned. “Let’s get these toys given away, and we’ll tackle the rest as we go. I have cases, still, obviously, so it’s gonna take a few months before I can transition to running it full time. Just so we’re all on the same page.”
I had Kat on the line. “Hey, Kat. You got a minute?”
She paused, and I heard the audio quality shift as she switched it from speaker to headset. “Yeah, what’s up, Laur?”
“How would you feel about helping us run a nonprofit we’re starting?”
She sighed. “I mean, my schedule is pretty full, you know that. What’s it about?”
“Well, we took Isabela shopping to celebrate us getting married this morning, and she decided, after helping us buy out half the mall in clothes and toys, that she wanted to give the toys away to other foster kids.”
Her breath caught. “Oh. Um. Yeah. I…yeah.”
“That’s not the whole story, though,” I said. “It sort of just…snowballed, you know? And now, suddenly, we’re starting a whole nonprofit corporation, called Isabela’s Extra Christmas, and we want you to be part of it. I guess, partly just as one of my best friends, but also I figured because it’s something I assumed would be…close to your heart.”
“This was all Isabela’s idea?”
“It started with giving away toys and Jeremy and Titus sort of…ran with it. But it was her idea to start with, yeah.”
“That little girl is…” She swallowed hard. “She’s something else.”
“Reminds you of someone, doesn’t she?”
Kat didn’t answer right away. “How can I help?”
“That’s up to you, babe. You decide the level of your involvement.”
“It’s gonna help foster kids?”
“Yeah.”
“I…” She sighed, a soft, shuddery sound. “Anything and everything. I’m in, Laur. All the fucking way. If I can help other kids not go through the hell I went through…? I’ll do it. I’ll do it all.”
“I know, honey. That’s why I called you.” A thought occurred to me. I beckoned to Mena and whispered a request for the address of the next stop, and relayed it to Kat. “Meet us there. You can help us with the toys, to start.”
“On the way. I’m close anyway, I was showing a condo downtown.”
“Okay.” We were in the car, then. “Kat…this is all you. Take this and run with it, okay?”
Kat laughed. “Oh, honey, this is gonna get the full-octane Katja Spears treatment, believe me. I think I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”
“I know you have, Kat. I’ll see you soon.” I paused, and then went for it: “Love you, babe.”
She inhaled sharply; we’d never said that between us two before. “Love you, too, Laur.”
“Was that Auntie Kat?” Isabela asked, after I’d put my phone into my purse. “Is she gonna help us give stuff to people?”
“She sure is,” I said. “She was one of those kids who grew up with not-all-the-time parents. Foster parents, they’re called.”
“I think she needs more hugs. She seems sad, sometimes.”
Oh, from the mouths of the young. “Isa-belly, you are exactly right. She needs a lot more hugs. I bet if you gave her all the hugs you can, it would help her be happy more.”
A sigh, as if taking on the weight of the world. “Okay, but I’m not sure if I can give her enough hugs. I think you guys might have to help.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. The problem is, Auntie Kat doesn’t always like hugs, especially from adults. She might be more willing to allow herself to be hugged if they came from you.” I huffed a sad laugh. “I’m not sure she even understands how badly she just needs a hug, sometimes.”
“Can’t you just tell her?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.”
“Adults are weird.”
“We sure are,” Titus said. “We make things way
more complicated than they need to be a large majority of the time.”
Late morning turned to early afternoon, and then finally around four we dropped off the last of the toys. We were supposed to be at home already, getting ready for the party, which was supposed to start at 4:30. We finally trooped inside at 4:15, and nothing was ready.
We hadn’t even had time to straighten the house, much less do any other party preparations, but none of that mattered. We collapsed together onto the couch, me in the corner with Titus beside me, and Isabela across both of our laps, her head on Titus’s, her feet on mine.
Titus squeezed her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Isabela. You did a really mature and amazing thing today. You inspire me to be a better person, you know that?”
She snuggled closer to his chest. “It was really fun. Watching people get presents and be all excited is almost more fun than getting presents for me.”
“Well there is a saying about that you know,” Titus said. “’Tis better to give than to receive.”
“What’s ’tis mean?”
“It is. Kind of like an old contraction we don’t really use anymore.”
“What’s a contraction?”
“Like it’s instead of it is, or can’t instead of cannot, like that.”
“Oh.”
“So we just use it’s instead of ’tis?”
Titus laughed. “I guess? You’re sort of swinging above my pay grade here, babe.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds not true. You make a lot of money.”
Titus laughed even harder. “You’re funny, kiddo. I just mean you’re asking questions I don’t really have solid answers to.”
“’Cause you didn’t finish school?”
“Right-o.”
“Why don’t you just finish school now?”
“Because there’s no point. There’s nothing I want to do with my life that I need a diploma or degrees for. Anything else I need to know, I can teach myself or learn other ways.”
“So can I quit school, then?”
“You may not,” Titus said. “You still have lots to learn. School is good for you. I shouldn’t have quit. I wish, looking back, that I’d had someone make me stay in school. It worked out for me okay, but there were some times that I wished I’d had something to fall back on, you know? Like, I was committed to music, and at a certain point I was locked into it. I had no choice but to make it. You’re just a kid, and you have your whole future ahead of you, and by god you’re going to get the education I didn’t.”
“But what if I want to be a rock star like you?”
“I’ll support you and help you along the way, honey, but you’ll be a rock star with a high school diploma at very least. If you graduate high school and you know without a single doubt that all you want to do with your whole life is to be a touring musician, we can talk about it then. Until then, though, you’re going to go to school and get the best grades because you’re such a smart young lady.”
“I teached myself to read before I was in kindergarten. Mommy didn’t believe me, so we went to the library and she picked a book I hadn’t read before and I read it to her so she could know I wasn’t just saying a book I already knew all the words to.”
“Like I said, smarty-pants. And maybe you’re gonna be the CEO of a big company. Or the president of the whole country. But you need an education to do that stuff. So you gotta stay in school.”
“Can a girl even be president?”
“Sure, of course,” Titus answered. “There hasn’t been a girl president yet, but there will be, someday. And maybe it’ll be you. You can do anything you put your mind to, Isabela. And Mom-la and I will help you get there.”
The doorbell rang, then, the first of our friends showing up for a party we weren’t in any way ready for.
But as I got up to answer the door, I discovered our friends had brought the party to us. Teddy had managed to get a last-minute catering order put together by some sort of miracle, and Jeremy had the bouncy castle getting put together, and Zoe and Autumn were putting up decorations in the backyard while Braun and Seven hauled in cases of soda and beer and wine…
And just like that, the house was buzzing with friends.
Family, really.
Sabrina was couch surfing, her chunky little knees bouncing as she drooled on herself and chattered, while Violet looked on with the critical stare of an expert.
There was Titus’s friend in the backyard too—who turned out to be Elsworth Callahan, lead singer and guitarist of a country-rock crossover band.
The evening was spent dancing and eating, standing around in big circles of conversation and laughter, the big circles breaking off into smaller ones. The younger kids wore themselves out in the pool and on the bouncy castle and were settled asleep into various bedrooms and air mattresses we’d put out for that purpose, until by the time the stars were out only the adults were left awake, except Manny, who’d taken over Titus’s PS5 and was shouting at online friends as he killed zombies or something.
We were all around our table, sipping wine and talking.
Lizzy was making eyes at Braun—or rather, they were having an entire nonverbal conversation.
I caught her eyes. “Out with it already, Lizzy. I know you’ve got something to say.”
She cleared her throat. “I dunno. Today is about you and Titus.”
I waved a hand. “If we wanted to make the day all about us, we’d have had a more traditional wedding. We’re married, and my last name is Bright, now, and we’re happy.” I sighed, emotion choking me up. “I’m just…I’m glad to have you guys as my…friends isn’t a good enough word. Sisters. As my family. And if you have some sort of news to share, I can’t think of any better time to share it.”
Laurel blinked rapidly. “Okay, well, um. I guess I can say it, then. Braun and I are expecting another baby. I just found out yesterday. I’m ten weeks.”
Autumn laughed, and it sounded like disbelief. “No, no, no. You’re kidding! Ten weeks?”
Lizzy made a well yeah face. “Yes?”
Autumn grabbed Seven’s hand. “Weird coincidence. Because…I’m ten weeks pregnant too. I’ve known for a week, but I wanted to tell everyone at the same time.”
There was a chorus of squealing and congratulations all around, which quieted as everyone noticed that I was markedly silent.
Kat was restraining a grin. “Laurel?”
I’d had it in my pocket all day. Waiting for the perfect moment. I slid the capped pregnancy test from my back pocket and set it on the table. There, in the middle of the window: PREGNANT.
Stunned silence.
“I, um. I don’t know how far along I am since I just took the test this morning, but just going by the math, I’d say ten weeks is about right.” I looked to Titus first. “I was going to tell you separately, when we were alone, but we haven’t had a single second alone all day, and…”
He shot out of his chair so fast it fell over backward, yanked mine away from the table and lifted me clear off my chair in a single scoop, my legs going around his waist as he spun us in circles, laughing in my ear.
“No, no— it’s perfect…absolutely perfect. There’s no other way I’d rather find out than like this, with all of our friends.” He looked over my shoulder at them around our table, as they watched us with joy on their faces. “With our family.”
Lizzy, Autumn, and I hugged, then, a three-way embrace as we laughed.
“Three babies at the same time,” I sniffled. “I’m gonna have a baby.”
Autumn nosed my cheek. “Me too. I can’t quite believe it. We’ve been trying for a while.”
I snorted. “I bet you have.”
She groaned. “You know what I mean.”
Lizzy kissed each of our cheeks. “I really hope we all give birth at the same time. That would be epic.”
“Yeah, except that would leave Teddy, Zoe, and me to run the entire office for two months while you guys are on maternit
y leave,” Kat said.
Teddy waved a hand. “Eh, it’ll be fine. We’ll handle it.” She jumped up and joined the group hug. “I can’t believe all three of you are pregnant at the exact same time.” She sounded choked up too. “I’m so happy for you, Laurel. You too, Autumn.” She squeezed Lizzy’s shoulder. “And you. Mama times two.”
All of a sudden, there were nine people all gathered in a giant group hug, clustered around the core of Autumn, Lizzy, and me. It was suffocating, but delirious.
When the group hug finally disbanded, I found myself sitting on Titus’s lap.
I met his dark gaze. “You’re not mad I didn’t tell you separately, first?”
“Mad? Hell no. I’m happy. That’s news that should be shared.”
“And you’re happy that I’m pregnant?”
He pressed me to his chest. “Beyond happy. I can’t think of anything that would make me happier.”
“We have to tell Isabela tomorrow,” I said.
“Yeah.” He caressed my hair. “You’re gonna be such an amazing mommy.” A pause. “Take that back—you already are.”
“I never thought I could be, or would be.” I met Teddy’s eyes. “I guess I just needed a little nudge.”
Teddy smiled at me, sighing deeply. But I noticed her eyes went to Zoe, who was watching everything with a reserved, neutral expression. Autumn noticed it, too.
The three of us exchanged glances.
If there was going to be another version of The Ad, we knew who the next victim would be.
Victim—ha. The next lucky recipient of the incredible fortune Autumn, Lizzy, and I had known. How else could you look at it, but as fortune? As the greatest, most improbable kind of luck? I mean, how many times can the same trick work?
Three more times, I hoped.
I wanted to see the rest of my friends find the kind of delirious happiness I knew, to be overflowing with joy, with love, with everything I never thought I wanted, much less could ever really have.
Yet, there I was—on the lap of the man I loved, with a baby growing in my womb, and a lovely, sweet, smart little girl upstairs who called me Mom-la.
Laurel's Bright Idea (Billionaire Baby Club Book 3) Page 27