“Why are you apologizing?”
“She was my cousin. I’m the reason you were dragged into this to start with.”
Loren let out a disgusted sound. “Jeezus, you three are incredible, you know that?” She pointed at the baby. “She is the only one who matters right now. Unless one of you actually snuck out this morning and murdered Sofia without us knowing, it, or one of you suddenly developed magical powers, none of you are to blame. So suck it up, buttercups, and let’s figure out what we need to do next.”
Tilly let out a snort. “Since when did you get so toppy?”
“Since the three of you apparently decided wallowing in self-pity was a valid option. Yes, this sucks. It sucks big hairy donkey balls. It’s not right. It’s damn sure not fair. And you have every right to mourn your loss. But it is what it is, the hand we’ve been dealt. So we need to play those cards and figure out the next step, because Katie needs you to be strong for her.”
“I’ll track down my family,” Cris said. “They might have disowned her and me both, but I won’t stoop to their level. They need to know what happened.”
“Be prepared for a legal battle,” Loren said. “They’re going to want that baby.”
“Let them try.” Tilly looked down into Katie’s sleeping face. Innocence. Blissful ignorance to the drama unfolding around her new life. “They’ll wish they’d never heard of me if they try.”
“We have a court order,” Landry said, “requested by Sofia, naming us custodial guardians indefinitely. Sofia’s will grants custody to us, and specifically states she does not want anyone else in her family to have custody of Katie. Her family can try to fight that, but it’s doubtful they’ll prevail. Dale Waters even mentioned to me that if we wanted to adopt Katie, as long as Sofia didn’t object, the paperwork we now have in place would make that quite easy to achieve. From what I understand, Dale is the best in the area at what he does.”
“He better be,” Cris grumbled. “We’re paying enough for it.”
Tilly knew Loren was right but it didn’t change how she felt. “Shouldn’t we take time to grieve for her?”
“Of course. Just not right this minute. You need to call Leigh and tell her you’re not coming in right away.”
“Maybe she should go to work,” Landry said. “Perhaps it’s the best thing. There’s nothing to be done that Cris and I can’t handle. You are already behind on work from last week.”
Tilly tried to protest. “But—”
“He’s right, Redbird,” Cris hoarsely said. “You need to keep yourself busy today. I don’t know how my family is going to react, and I don’t want you subjected to their bullshit if they act like assholes.”
Knowing she was going to be overruled, she looked to Loren, who slowly nodded. “I think they’re right. Let’s get you ready for work and get going. I’ll drive you.”
“I’ll call Leigh and tell her why you’re late,” Landry said.
Resistance was futile. Even Tilly wasn’t so stubborn she would try to fight them.
Plus they were right. Wasn’t a damn thing she could do. She had a lot of things that needed to be done at work. With Loren there, she could focus on work and not on Sofia.
The men walked them down to the car and helped them carry their things.
“Call me when you find out something,” Tilly said to Cris. “When you talk to your family.”
“If I talk to them,” he said. “Might take more than a few hours to track them down.”
Tilly gave Loren directions during the drive, but other than that didn’t say very much.
“This isn’t your fault,” Loren insisted. “I don’t care what any of you think. It was a really bad confluence of events, but it wasn’t your fault.”
“My brain hears you but I wish my heart believed that.”
“I don’t expect you to be all happy-happy-joy-joy right now, but you need to accept that fact to be the best parent you can be to Katie. You’re her mom.”
Tilly fought the urge to cringe at that. “Guess that question’s answered now,” she muttered.
“Look at the bright side of this. You have the baby you always wanted. Cris and Landry are going to be great dads. This is the fairytale ending.”
“More like a Grimm kind of tale. Where everyone gets eaten by the witch, but the witch dies of indigestion before she can finish off the rest of the town. Win by default. Doesn’t feel very good.”
Loren fell silent for a couple of miles. “You didn’t rip the baby from her arms,” she said, her tone dark. “Were she any other woman, you’d shrug and say she sort of made her bed, them’s the breaks.”
“She was Cris’ cousin.”
“And that’s the only reason you’re as upset as you are. Because it’s a personal connection. A woman makes a cowardly series of bad, fear-based choices all her life, commits a crime, gets knocked up, and violates her probation instead of doing the responsible thing and asking for help. You said she told you she took the bus to her probation officer visits, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Obviously alone. There were two opportunities she could have said hey, I need help. Please, help me. And she didn’t. Why?”
Tilly didn’t reply because she already suspected where Loren was going with this.
Loren pressed on. “She was involved with a gang. Kudos to her for finally reaching out, but she only did so after getting the crap beaten out of her for what you said she indicated wasn’t the first time. Only because she feared for the baby. Why didn’t she fear for her baby before she was born, huh?”
Tilly hunkered down in her seat.
“I’m going to pull a you and point out a few flaws here. I know you want to believe Sofia’s story, even more so now that she’s dead. But it does not add up to me. Okay, she says she was clean. Hopefully, that’s the truth. But you don’t know what she was doing before then. Maybe she was turning tricks. How’d she survive all these years with no marketable skills, huh? She was involved in a gang. I’ll admit I’m not the most street-savvy person out there, but I’d be willing to bet money she was no fucking angel.”
Tilly stared out the passenger window.
“Believing Sofia was completely telling the truth about everything means ignoring a past history that runs contradictory to everything you know about her of a factual nature. I find it hard to believe the welfare scheme was her first crime. You said she lived in a shit-hole and had her clothes in a couple of garbage bags. You’re telling me she couldn’t grab the baby and just walk away in the middle of the night? Go phone 911? She had a fucking burner cell phone, right? How was she paying for that if her boyfriend wasn’t giving her any money?”
Tilly closed her eyes and fought the urge to cry.
“You’re getting tough love from me because I damn well know you’d be giving it to me if our positions were reversed. Sofia was pretty damned eager to give up that baby to you guys. Altruistically it’s wonderful to believe it’s because she wanted to do the right thing. Realistically, her past would lead me to think she wanted the baby safely out of her way so she could get on with living. No guilt, because she’d handed her off to someone she suspected could take care of her. Or what if it was Monroe’s plan all along to try to get in touch with her cousin and finger him for money? He never counted on you. Maybe you farked their plans by stepping in. Assholes like Monroe think they can walk all over women and get away with it without burning for it later.”
Something about Loren’s tone made Tilly look at her.
The woman wore a dark, hard expression that she’d never seen on her friend’s face before.
“Katie didn’t lose her mother, Tilly, because you are her mother. Cris and Landry are her dads. This way, you can lie to Katie and tell her that her mom was a good person who got mixed up with bad people. She’ll never have to know the truth, that her mom was little more than a dirtbag.”
“Okay,” Tilly quietly said. “I get it.”
“Do you? Do you really? Becau
se my Tilly wouldn’t have let this get under her skin. My Tilly would be fighting mad right now and not feeling sorry for herself. My Tilly damn sure wouldn’t accept blame that wasn’t hers to carry. Not your circus, not your monkeys. Isn’t that one of your mantras?”
Tilly took a deep breath and nodded.
“Then nut up, baby. The ride’s going to get bumpy. I’m going to be here for you all the way. You can lean on me, as much and as long as you need to, but you’ve got to understand I am going to call bullshit where I see it. I know you wouldn’t want me to ignore it, because you wouldn’t ignore it. Right?”
“Right.” Tilly took another deep breath and pointed. “There’s our parking lot, right there.”
Loren turned in and headed for Tilly’s reserved space. Their office was located in a three-story building with about fifteen other tenants. While their parking lot was marked for tenants and clients only and had posted no trespassing signs, there were no actual barriers to keep someone out who wanted to walk right in. When Tilly got out, she was startled to find a camera suddenly shoved in her face, the shutter sound of burst-shots firing off in rapid succession.
“Tilly Cardinal. How’d you wreck your car? Why were you named in a custody lawsuit filed last week?”
Before she could take a swing at the guy, Loren appeared there, between her and Archie Lounds, shoving the diaper bag and laptop case into Tilly’s hands and spinning her around, pushing her toward the building.
“Go,” Loren told her.
The guy was pinned between the vehicles, blocked in by Loren. “Is that the baby?” the man asked, followed by the sound of more shutter clicks.
Tilly glanced over her shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Loren said, opening the back passenger door so hard and fast that it knocked the camera out of the guy’s hand where it shattered on the ground. “Oops. Sorry about that, dude.”
“You did that on purpose!” Archie Lounds yelled.
“Nope. You got in my way. My apologies.”
“You’ll pay for that—”
That was all Tilly heard as the side door swung shut on the confrontation. Her heart pounded in her chest, pulse racing, until Loren came through the door a few minutes later with the baby carrier in her hands.
She handed the carrier off to Tilly. “Go. Now.”
“What happened?”
“I called 911 and reported an attack by the guy.”
“What?”
“Just go. Upstairs. Now. And stay up there until I get up there.”
Tilly didn’t even wait for the elevator. She bolted up the stairs and emerged on the third floor, trembling and out of breath.
When she walked into the reception area of their office, Leigh met her there. “What the hell’s going on, Tilly? I got Landry’s call, and then I looked outside, is that Loren fighting with a guy?”
Without even setting the baby carrier down, Tilly pushed past Leigh and into her office, which overlooked the parking lot. Loren leaned against the trunk of Tilly’s car, Archie Lounds apparently ranting and raving at her. Loren had her cell phone up, recording everything if Tilly had to guess from the way Loren held it.
A marked cruiser arrived a few minutes later. Archie Lounds waved his hands, pointing at Loren and holding up the mangled remains of his camera while Loren seemed to serenely talk to the cop.
Then, Loren showed him her phone.
The cop watched for a moment.
Next thing Tilly knew, Archie Lounds was face down over the front of the squad car, getting his wrists cuffed behind him. From the way his mouth was moving, Tilly suspected he was running it a mile a minute.
“Holy fuck,” Leigh muttered. “She’s more devious than you.”
“Where do you think I learned it from? Ross is a master tactician. Cris is no slouch himself, and he learned from Landry.”
“Remind me never to piss her or Ross off. Or you, for that matter.”
Katie started fussing in her carrier.
“I’ll take her,” Leigh said. “You keep watching.”
About ten minutes later, the cop pulled out and Loren headed upstairs. Tilly was waiting for her in the reception area when she walked in, a pleased smile on her face.
“What the hell, Lor?”
Loren grinned. “I remembered you telling me about an annoying guy. When we pulled in, I spotted a guy standing there, like he was waiting, and I’d already turned on my phone’s camera. His mistake was thinking he could say something like, ‘I’m going to make you pay for that, bitch,’ and assuming he wasn’t being filmed. Oh, and I had a baby carrier in my hands when he said it.”
“Holy shit. He really said that?”
“Yep. And from the angle I filmed him, it looks like he stepped into the door deliberately when I opened it. The cop arrested him for trespassing and attempted battery and child endangerment.”
“Child endangerment?”
“I had a baby right there.” She smiled. “Good thing you guys already had the trespass warrant out for him. That helped.”
“Unless Martians land in the middle of the Hollywood Bowl or something by dinnertime, I’m officially declaring this the weirdest day of my freaking life. Not even in a good way.”
“I’ve got to e-mail the footage to the cop,” she said. “Let me get my laptop set up.”
“I’ll call Clark,” Leigh said from the doorway. She had Katie in her arms. “And Lucas.”
“Now that was fun,” Loren said. “Why didn’t you tell me this would be so much fun? I haven’t had that much fun in a while.”
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means, Lor,” Tilly said.
“Maybe we should just take a vacation week,” Leigh suggested. “I’m not even kidding. All we need now is a damn earthquake to make this day perfect.”
Chapter Seventeen
Cris fought the really tempting urge to belt back a shot of something strong enough to burn a hole in his intestinal tract before starting the search for his family. The easiest way was to look up the property tax records.
Sure enough, both his mother, and his aunt and uncle, still resided at the same addresses.
When he searched his parents’ old phone number online, it came back with his mother’s address.
Okay, then.
Landry had offered to be the bearer of bad tidings, but Cris declined the offer. And he absolutely did not want to tell his mother the news before he told his aunt and uncle. He knew she would call them immediately and tell them, and he wanted to do it himself, in person.
He owed Sofia that much. If he wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror about this matter, he needed to break the news himself.
Landry went in to work to deal with everything there. Cris had just pulled onto the freeway when Tilly called him. He hit the hands-free button to answer it.
“Hello, Redbird. Are you at work?”
“Um, yeah. Heh, funny thing happened.”
Cris did his best not to scream swear words when he listened to the story. Tilly might not understand he wasn’t swearing at her or even at Loren, but at the situation.
What a bad fucking day to pile shit on top of shit.
“Okay. Call Lan and tell him what happened. Are you guys all right?”
“Yeah, we’re fine,” Tilly said. “But I think there’s now a bull’s-eye in the middle of my forehead.”
“Probably. Maybe you should take the baby and go to Florida. Today.”
“I can’t. She has a doctor’s appointment on Thursday.”
“Cancel it and get one in Florida with Leigh’s pediatrician there.”
“No. I’m not running. I’m too damn worn out to run. And I’m too far behind now with work.”
That makes two of us.
But he didn’t say that. “Can you work from home today?”
“I’m not going back home. I’m already here. We’ve got meetings this afternoon.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.” He reined in his
frustration. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you and check on you when I finish this.”
“Okay,” she softly said. “I’m sorry.”
She sounded hurt, which seared his soul. Tilly never sounded hurt. When one of them got snippy with her, which was rare, she got snarky right back.
“No, sweetheart, don’t be sorry. You were right, you needed to call me. I…I just can’t fix this for you, and I’m sorry for that.”
“Do you think this will have any impact when we move to adopt her?”
“No, baby. It’s just a jerk from the paparazzi doing what they do. It means nothing. So Loren took him out with a car door, huh?”
“Oh, my god. It was incredible. Looked totally accidental, too.”
He chuckled. “I want to see that footage when I get home. Let me get off here. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
He ended the call and tried to yank his mind back on the task at hand. If he found no one home when he got there, he wasn’t sure what he’d do. He could leave them a note to call him, but who knew if they’d ever do that?
Nearly an hour later, he made a familiar turn into their neighborhood. While the houses still mostly looked well-kept, there were a few more bars on some of the houses’ windows, and taller, fuller trees than he remembered.
He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed when he approached their house and spotted two cars parked in the driveway. He was tempted to keep driving past, then found himself pulling up to the curb and parking in front of their house.
I’d rather take another gut-punch from Ross than do this.
He’d had no contact with his aunt and uncle, other than exchanging ugly glares with them at the hospital when he went to visit his father, since moving out of their house. He didn’t consider it being ungrateful when he could still remember the sound and feel of his uncle’s fists landing on his body this many years later.
One of the reasons Cris had signed up for karate in college and had worked his ass off, even continuing his studies when he moved to Florida, becoming a black belt.
The warm air hit him when he stepped out. He noticed he spent a lot less time outdoors when he was back here versus home in Florida. The climate was similar to Florida in some ways, drastically different in others.
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