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“Raine’s my mom?” I had to laugh at the idea.
“She’s not?” His brow furrowed.
“She’s my girlfriend,” I corrected.
“Oh.”
The news didn’t seem to faze him at all. He studied the picture for a moment before switching to a purple crayon and adding a shirt to the picture of himself. He made his pants yellow and his shoes blue.
I couldn’t help it—there were some things I just had to know.
“How do you know I’m your dad?” I asked. “We haven’t met before.”
“Raine told me what you looked like.”
It wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but this was all new territory for me. I was having a hard enough time keeping my language clean. I knew what I couldn’t say, just not what I should say.
“I meant, how did you know…or did you know…”
I bit my tongue to stop the natural curse that formed there. It hadn’t been very long since Jillian had been killed, and the last thing I wanted to do was upset the kid at our first meeting. Still, I needed some answers.
“Did you know that your mom’s…your mom’s husband…did you know he wasn’t your dad?”
“Yeah,” Alex said without looking up.
“How did you know that?”
“Mom and Ian yelled at each other a lot,” Alex explained. “When she was mad at him, she’d say he wasn’t my real dad. I didn’t know who my real dad was until Raine told me about you.”
The idea that Jillian had picked fights with her husband didn’t surprise me in the least—that woman could be a hellcat. I was a little pissed she had obviously fought in front of Alex but not necessarily shocked by it.
“What did Raine tell you?” I asked.
“She said you were strong,” Alex said. “She said you had big muscles to always keep us safe. She said even though you weren’t here yet, that’s what you were doing. That’s why we had to stay here, so you could make us safe again.”
I looked Alex over carefully, trying to determine any signs of distress, but I couldn’t see any. His words were matter-of-fact, like he’d practiced saying them or at least had been thinking about them frequently. I couldn’t figure out if he was scared or not, and that bothered me. I wanted him to know that he would be okay.
“That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I said definitively. “Just like Raine said—I’m going to make sure both of you are safe, and then maybe we’ll find a house we can all live in together. What do you think of that?”
“That would be okay,” Alex said. “Raine said we were going to find a house on the internet, but there isn’t a computer here.”
“Well, when we find a house for all of us,” I said, “I’ll make sure you have the best computer out there. You can play games and do your homework on it.”
“Ugh!” Alex cried out, startling me. He arched his back halfway over the chair and splayed out his arms. A couple crayons fell to the floor. “I hate homework!”
I grinned as I looked around the room at the books, action figures, and stuffed animals all over the floor.
“I bet you don’t like cleaning up your toys either, do you?”
He rolled his head to the side, keeping himself bent backwards over the chair.
“Of course not!”
I laughed at his display.
“I bet Raine makes you clean them up though, doesn’t she?”
He took in a big breath and let it out in a huff.
