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“You did amazing, Little Momma.”
Tingles shimmied up my spine. I loved when he called me that. It made me feel special that he had given me a cute nickname. He was always using endearments lately, but this was my favorite.
“Do you know what you are going to name the little guy?” Kace asked.
I felt the ambulance stop and the medic tell us we were at the hospital. I thought about Kace’s question as the doors opened as well as the conversation that Kace and I had the night before. When I had asked his middle name, he had told me the story about where his mother had wanted to live but his dad had settled them somewhere else. So when Kace was born that was what inspired his middle name. If she couldn’t be there then it would be with her always, with him.
“If it’s okay, I would like to name him after you and call him Denver after your middle name?”
His silence had me thinking I had made a mistake, but then I saw the wetness glistening in his eyes.
“Denver,” he said, out loud softly.
“What do you think?” I asked him hesitantly.
“I think it’s amazing. Thank you, sweetheart,” he told me, his voice choked up with emotion.
“Time to get you inside,” the medic said.
I squeezed Kace’s hand, the one he’d been holding the whole time we had been in the ambulance. I didn’t want to let go.
“I’ll be with you two the whole time,” he told me, smiling down at us.
And true to his word, he had been.
ChapterTwenty-One
KACE
Denver James Griggs.
I couldn’t believe she named her baby after me!
I’d thought how I got my middle name Denver was silly as all get out, but my mother had thought it was great and liked to rub it in my dad’s face. It was always a joke between them and a story growing up I liked to hear time and time again.
Thinking about both of them had sadness and anger seeping back into my heart. My parents and I had always been close but when they chose to keep Bridgette’s news and indiscretions from me that was something I couldn’t swallow. My mother had tried reaching out many times and I knew she was struggling, but I hadn’t found a way to forgive them. Even if she was worried it would cause trouble on my deployment and possibly bring me harm, it had been the wrong move.
But I missed them.
“What are you thinking about so hard over there?” Teal’s soft, sleepy voice asked.
Not wanting to take away from her day, I didn’t tell her what had just been on my mind, but instead, I told her what I’d been thinking about all day.
“I was thinking how wonderful and brave you were today.”
It was the truth. She had no pain meds, she was young and on her own, in a new city, and I knew damn well she hadn’t been prepared for how things went down as well as the speed in which they had. But she handled it like a champ.
I was so proud of her.
“I appreciate you saying that, but that wasn’t what you were thinking when I woke up and looked at you.”
Great, now I couldn’t slip anything past her.
“Now who’s the mind-reader?” I chuckled.
She looked over at her baby sleeping in the small bassinet next to her bedside and a wondrous smile flitted across her beautiful face. When she looked back at me an odd look took its place. She seemed lost in thought for a minute and then she shared something I hadn’t been expecting at all.
“Sometimes the people that are supposed to protect us and take care of us are the ones who let us down the most.” She let out a big sigh. “Losing my mother was something I still can’t bear to think about most of the time, but my father changing the minute she was gone was just as hard.” I watched as the words got clogged up in her throat but then she pushed on. “He drank all the time, didn’t take care of me and if I was around him, he would knock me around. So I stayed out of his way as much as possible until I could leave.”
