Page 123 of Scoring Eden

That doesn’t make me feel better.

In fact, it makes me feel much, much worse.

I stare at my sneakers as we walk through the halls to the office, my brain cloudy with questions and my tummy curdling the way it does before I throw up. It seems to go on forever. We pass the lockers, and the gym, and about ninety-six other classrooms with their doors open, and all the kids inside gape at me as we walk by.

But by the time we finally get to the office, I freeze. I don’t want to go in there. I don’t want to know if something bad has happened to my mom. I want to stay here in the hallway, where it’s safe and I can pretend that everything is okay. That Dad isn’t forcing me to live with him forever. That I get to go home, see Uncle Alex, and cuddle my mom.

“Macon?” Miss Levine asks gently. “Are you okay?”

Tears burn my eyes, and it hurts too much to hold them back, so I let them fall. If Dad’s in there, he’ll yell at me for crying like a little girl. But I can’t stop them. Even when I rub them with the sleeve of my sweater, more keep coming.

“Is my mom okay?” I whisper.

I just need to know. I’d rather Miss Levine tell me than Dad, anyway. At least she’d give me a hug afterward and let me be upset for a while.

Her eyes go soft, and the corners of her mouth curve upward in a little smile. She curls her fingers around the door handle and opens it. “Why don’t you see for yourself?”

All at once, the butterflies in my stomach go back to sleep. My tears stop, only for a second, before they start falling again, but this time for a different reason.

A happy reason.

Mom.

A small gasp leaves her mouth, and she runs over to me with her arms open wide. I let out a sob and lunge for her, nearly knocking her backward as I jump into her arms. She doesn’t mind, though. She laughs. And cries. She does both at the same time, and until now, I didn’t think that was possible for a person to do, but I’m doing it too.

I know it’s only been a day since I last saw her, but I never want to do it again. Not if I don’t know whether or not I’ll get to see her again at the end of it.

“What’s going on, Mom?”

She nuzzles her face into my hair and squeezes me. “I’m here to bring you home.”

THIRTY-SIX

EDEN

“I can’t believe you guys went full James Bond.” I sit forward on the sofa in Alex’s apartment, watching Macon build a replica of the Seattle Strikers soccer ball on the rug in front of me. Since Aspen and I brought him home from school two hours ago, I haven’t been able to keep my eyes off of him. “And to think that it was all unnecessary.”

It was my phone that woke me up this morning. It was Zora, calling to say that when she couldn’t find any evidence of the emergency order in the court system, she’d gone straight to the signing judge himself, who, evidently, had never set eyes on the motion at all.

My ex-husband appears to have found himself in the hottest of waters as a result.

Zora is confident that he won’t even be able to get visitation rights with Macon after this. And not only is he staring down the barrel of losing his license to practice law, but he’s also facing jail time for forgery and kidnapping. Karma can be a real bitch sometimes.

“Yes, well…”—Aspen clears her throat—“I think I’ll leave that part out when I retell the story at parties.”

“You seriously broke into his office?”

She grins and pumps her head. “Honestly, E, I was so badass. I even did a ninja roll.”

I’m equal parts furious that they would do something so risky behind my back and touched by the extremes they were willing to go for me. But I’m so relieved to have my son back where he belongs that I can’t find it in myself to chew her ass out for it. Or Alex’s.

Not that he’s here for me to have the opportunity.

And honestly, I don’t want to, anyway. I can’t get past what they were prepared to do for me and my son. If it had all gone to hell, not only would my custody case have been in an even worse position, but they could have faced criminal charges.

My sister’s motives, I can understand. She’s never been one to shy away from doing the hard shit. In fact, it’s a personality trait of hers to find the most difficult solution to any problem and throw herself full force into it.

But Alex…