“Where else would he be?”Gabrielle replied.
“Can we bake?”Honor asked, directing her question to Gabrielle, since the girls loved to bake together but did so in Gabrielle’s kitchen as it was the biggest.
“Yeah, but I need my oven by five,” Gabrielle said, nodding.“And leave it on.I’ve got a spinach and gruyere quiche I need to put in for dinner.”
The girls agreed, then headed off to go get their bake on.
“I’m going to go practice my Hacky Sack,” Austin said, pulling out one of hismanyHacky Sacks from his pocket.
“Do you have homework?”I asked.
His face fell.“Can I do it after dinner?I want to practice while it’s still light out.”
“How much homework?”
“Like four pages of math and three questions for social studies.But they shouldn’t take me more than an hour.”He gave me his very best puppy dog eyes.Eyes that I’d always struggled to resist.Thankfully, both my children had inherited what seemed like ninety-nine percent of my looks.So it was easy to melt when they looked back at me with my own eyes, rather than the sadistic, sociopathic pale-blue gaze of their father.I was sure I would have learned to deal with it, but if Austin had looked like his dad, I know it would have been a haunting reminder of an extremely dark time in my life.A time I worked hard to forget.A time where I’d nearly ended it all—for everyone.
Gabrielle snickered behind me.
I gave my watch a quick peek.“Hacky Sack for an hour, then inside for homework.”
“Deal.”He tossed his floppy, multi-cowlick hair off his eyes, but all it did was lift into the air, then fall back over his forehead as he tossed me a big, accomplished smile and headed out the door.
We waited until the door was fully shut and my son was out of view before I spun around to face my cousin.She already had her phone out and her brows bunched.
“What’s going on?”I asked.
“I can’t find an age for him.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.I can see what high school he attended and everything, but the graduation year has been redacted.”
“Redacted?”
She met my gaze.“Redacted.”
“Red flag?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly.“Maybe?”
“I mean, hedoeslook young.But he might just be one of those guys that looks young even though they’re … not?”I wasn’t sure why I phrased that like a question.“Maybe he had his daughter at like eighteen or nineteen.If he had her at eighteen with his high school girlfriend, that would put him at thirty-one.Even if he had her at sixteen—which can and does happen—that would put him at twenty-nine.And he could totally be twenty-nine.”
Gabrielle nodded in a non-committal way.Her brows had pinched together even tighter, and her fingers were just flying across the screen.“He looks as young, or younger than Maverick,” she muttered.
“And Maverick is what?Twenty-six?”
She nodded.“Mm-hmm.”
“But that would mean he had his daughter at … thirteen.”
Gabrielle looked up at me.“That’s fucked up.”
“God, we sound like Jolene Dandy.We’re speculating a whole hell of a lot right now, with our only fact being that he has a thirteen-year-old daughter.She might not even be his biologically.Maybe his best friend or older brother died, or went to war, or prison, and he became her legal guardian.Maybe it’s just temporary.”
Gabrielle lifted one brow and glanced up at me, skepticism burning in her gaze.“War?”
“There are still wars going on,” I said.“Many.Maybe her father is part of an elite black ops team that is deep in the jungle hunting a drug cartel, and until he’s home, Lennox has offered to watch over her?”
