I snorted.
At some point this year she’d started doing that—the “yes, sir” thing—and I was beyond confident that it was a joke.
I grabbed my own waffle, pulled up the stool at the end of the bar, then we ate in silence for a minute. Her feet swung, kicking the counter. She ate close to the whole thing, then started pushing the last of her waffle around the plate, sobering.
“Something wrong, bug?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose.
“If something happens at a sleepover,” she started, “does it stay at the sleepover?”
Alarm bells immediately rang in my head. Fuck me…she’d been atClaire’s, for fuck’s sake. What could have happened? Why was she applying Vegas rules to spending time with her cousins?
I somehow maintained composure. “Depends what it is,” I said, very much like a normal person.
She pushed her waffle in a circle.
“Like.” Another circle. “Like if something sad happened. Does it have to stay there or can I tell you?”
Okay. Sad, not scary. I could literally feel my blood pressure come back down.
“You can always tell me anything,” I said. “Always. That’s the rule. And thenI’llkeep the secret between us if we need to, okay?’
She peered over at me like she wasn’t sure if I was a trustworthy confidante. I gave absolutely nothing away, certainly not the fact that I was ready to drive over to Claire and Andy’s place right after I dropped Nell off and start some serious shit.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s just. Sadie was talking about her mommy.”
I let out a long breath.
It was a bit of a cluster, the whole relationship…but Sadie was my ex’s kid. My ex, Amy—she’d married a great guy, had a whole bunch of kids, lived the perfect life after moving back home. We’d been close, more like family at this point than former lovers.
Then she’d died last year driving to the twins’ hockey game. Black ice.
Husband, a teenage daughter, middle school twins, and little Sadie left behind.
“I didn’t know Sadie was coming to the sleepover,” I murmured.
“Sadie is my friend and we had fun,” Nell clarified. “But she—she told a scary story about dangerous ice. She said Aunt Amy was so hurt from the ice that they didn’t get to see her…her body.”
I reached over to take Nell’s little hand in mine, squeezing it. She was being strong. The nightmares last night proved she hadn’t felt that strong at all…and she shouldn’t have had to.
“That must have been really hard to hear,” I said.
Nell’s chin wobbled. “It made me cry and then I felt bad because Sadie was crying and then we all cried.”
Yeah, I was going to need to have a conversation with Claire. And Amy’s widower, Reid. And Claire’s husband, Andy.
This was the part I really, really didn’t like.
“It’s always okay to cry when something sad happens,” I said. “No one’s judging you.”
“I don’t care about that,” Nell said, then she looked up at me with watery eyes.
The tears were on their way.
I braced for it—because I always had to brace for it, because seeing my little girl cry was maybe the hardest thing I’d ever had to do.
“You’re not going to have an ice crash, are you?” she asked.
