“Don’t even go there,” I said. “Danny still gets cranky when you buy groceries.”
Miller rolled his eyes. “Fair. But seriously, if you need anything for Gracie, you have my number. Where is she anyway?”
“She’s with Cassidy’s folks. We decided we could get around the whole church thing by sending her on a Friday night and collecting her Sunday morning.”
“Smart thinking,” Miller said. “They dropping her off?”
“Hell, no.” I didn’t need Cassidy’s parents poking around my living situation. I could only imagine what they’d have to say about their precious granddaughter sharing a run-down house that had one bathroom with four—sometimes five—grown men. I was grateful as hell to Danny and his grandma for taking me in, but I wasn’t blind. I knew the situation wasn’t ideal. But Cassidy and I had agreed that it was best for Gracie to live with at least one of her parents.
“Well, I dunno what time you’re meant to pick her up, but it’s almost ten,” Miller said.
Pickup was meant to be at nine thirty.Shit.
I grabbed my keys off the counter and bolted for the door.
I pulled into the driveway at the Moores’ at seven minutes to ten. Service didn’t start until ten and it was a three-minute drive, so I took a minute to catch my breath before walking up the path.
When I knocked the door flew open and Mrs. Moore said, “You’relate,” through clenched teeth.
“Sorry,” I said. “Slept in.”
“Daddy!” Gracie came bouncing out the door. She was wearing new shoes and a purple dress with frills on the sleeves that I’d never seen before. “Grandma took me shopping! I got lots of new stuff!”
“That’s great, sweet pea. Did you make sure and thank Grandma?”
Gracie nodded, and I swallowed down the sour taste in my throat. The Moores going shopping with Gracie shouldn’t have stung the way it did. Grandparents did it all the time. Except coming from them, the new clothes felt like an accusation.
But I’d been raised right—at least for the first seventeen years of my life—so I said, “I appreciate you doing that for Gracie.”
I sounded about as sincere as I felt.
We stood there awkwardly for a second before I scooped Gracie up and beat a hasty retreat to my truck. I buckled her into her car seat, stashed her bag, and we got the hell out of there.
Gracie was quiet on the drive home, which was unlike her.
“You okay, chicken?”
She nodded silently, but the way she was biting at her bottom lip told me something was bothering her. It was a trait she shared with her mom. And just like her mom, there was no point pushing. She’d tell me when she was ready.
And hey, she was five. How big a deal could it be?
Pretty fucking big, as I found out when I pulled up to the house. I lifted her out of the car and she took one look at the front porch, saw the half-finished repair job I’d done on the steps, and burst into tears. Like, real end-of-the world crying, big ugly sobs like her heart was breaking.
I scooped her back up and held her close, my heart beating out of my chest. “Gracie! What is it? Did something happen at Grandma’s?”
“Why do we live somewhere sougly?” The words burst out of her, and she sobbed harder. “I hate it here!” Her breath hitched, and it just about covered the sound of my heart shattering.
Because she wasn’t wrong, if you cared about shit like howmany bathrooms there were, or if the place had seen a new coat of paint in the last forty years, or whether the backyard had a gazebo like the Moores’ place. But this was my home, and the guys were the best family I’d ever had.
I kept my tone calm when I said, “I thought you liked living here.”
She’d been enthusiastically on board with the idea when Cassidy and I had explained it to her. Hadn’t even had any wobbles the first night, when maybe it would have struck her that the house she lived in and the one she occasionally slept over at had flipped places.
And she’d stayed over at the Moores’ before with no problem, so I didn’t know what the hell had happened. The mean-spirited part of me wanted to blame them for maybe whispering in her ear, but I knew better than that. They were uptight, judgmental assholes, but they played fair when it came to Gracie. Cassidy must have threatened them before she left for college because they’d never said a word out of place when Grace was around.
As she clung to my neck and cried, I ran a soothing hand down her back and wondered what the hell I was meant to do now. Instead of calming down, she was getting louder, and?—
“Hey, Gracie.”
