Page 23 of The Single Father Upstairs

“Do you need a lift?” We’d brought the car because we had a huge shopping list, but Miles had only had a small basket when we met in the store.

“No. I have my car.”

My daughter waited in the car while I zigged and zagged around the store, trying to remember what we needed because I’d left the phone with her. I did remember tuna.

With everything in the trunk, I turned on the ignition, but my daughter tugged my sleeve. “Miles has been sitting in his car the whole time you’ve been in the supermarket. Do you think he’s okay?”

But as she spoke, Miles got out of his vehicle and trudged toward the building.

Maybe he was taking the shifter revelation harder than I thought.

My daughter asked me to look at her.

“You like Miles, right?”

I nodded, not wanting to have this conversion here.

“But you like like him?”

I sighed and held up my hands in surrender. “Yeah, I like like him.”

12

MILES

I woke up exhausted. It had taken me forever to get to sleep last night. I kept thinking about what happened since running into them at the grocery store. Every new thing I learned yesterday left me with three more questions, but some things I knew for sure.

Shifters were real.

I lived in a shifter apartment building.

I was the only human.

And the messed-up part was all of that knowledge didn't impact me nearly as much as hearing about Indie's other father. Learning that he left her when she was four months old because he found someone else was a gut punch. If he had been a cheating scumbag it would suck, but that was something I was familiar with and understood. From the sounds of things, he’d been faithful until that day.

His ex had met someone and realized instantly that the person was his. They were destined to be together for the rest of theirlives, and to make it worse, the pull was so powerful that he walked away from his family.

Indie seemed happy with her current life, but that didn’t make abandonment less horrific. Stellan didn't seem upset about Kipp as much as he did about Indie being left. Or possibly that was what I wanted to read into it, but the whole thing was pretty messed up.

I rolled out of bed and put on a pot of coffee, fed Marmalade, and took care of getting ready for the day, trying to fall into my routine. Trying and failing. I kept getting distracted by my own thoughts.

Suddenly, the weirdness of my neighbors made sense. If they were smelling me, it was because they knew I was different, that I was human. I didn’t belong. I had no idea where the process failed and how I landed where I did, but I was here now and I needed to figure out what to do next. Should I leave out of respect? Try and fit in?

Hearing about Kipp was like slamming the door closed and the possibility of being with Stellan, my crush, being thrown away for good. I couldn't risk opening up to someone who could leave me with one sniff of a stranger.

“What do you think, Marmalade?”

She meowed at the cabinet with the treats.

“Yeah, I figured. You think your tummy's empty?” I grabbed a few and gave them to her, and she purred and purred.

A knock on the door startled me. I assumed it was Jon. He’d mentioned something about changing the batteries in thethermostat earlier in the week. When I opened it, Stellan stood in the doorway instead, and he looked nervous.

I stood out of the way and he walked inside, and we stood looking at each other for too long before either of us spoke.

“I was wondering if maybe you wanted to go out again, but like as a date, dinner, or... or a walk. Even coffee would do.”

I wanted to say yes, but the word wouldn't come out.