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“Hell, there’ll be kids runnin’ all over.” He waved his hand dismissively. “It ain’t like it’s gonna get rowdy.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Better to throw ’em into the deep end right away,” he joked. “Give her a chance to dip her toe and she’ll run screamin’ into the night.”
“She already did that once,” I muttered.
“Don’t think that was her choice,” Gramps replied, lowering his voice. “That girl looked at you like you hung the fuckin’ moon.”
“Things change.”
“That didn’t,” he replied with a scoff.
“Maybe Wednesday?” Grams said, raising her voice a little to interrupt us. “Does that work for you, grandson?”
“What’s on Wednesday?”
“Family dinner.”
I scrubbed my hands over my face. I was still getting used to having Emilia and Rhett back, and it looked like I was going to have to share them. Again.
“That works,” I said, looking to Emilia for confirmation.
“My calendar’s empty,” she joked.
A couple hours later, I found myself driving us back to my place, Emilia tucked in next to me. Rhett hadn’t fallen asleep, probably because he was enjoying the unfamiliar view out the window, but he was tired enough that the truck was quiet.
“I missed your grandparents,” Emilia said softly. “Sometimes, I used to play out entire conversations with Callie in my head.”
“Oh yeah?” I cleared my throat. “About what?”
“Everything,” she said with a quiet chuckle. “How Rhett was doing. How cute he was. How scaredIwas.”
“You coulda called her,” I murmured. “Hell, she probably wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“I didn’t want to put her in that position,” Emilia replied ruefully. “Stupid, right?” She sighed.
“You coulda come home at any time, Em,” I reminded her. “You knew that.”
“You can think you know something and still not believe it,” she said, reaching out to run her fingers through Rhett’s hair. His head was nodding forward as he fell asleep.
It only took us a few more minutes to get home, but that’s all it took for the familiar edge of frustration to start scratching underneath my skin. Counting backward didn’t help. Telling myself that getting angry didn’t fix shit and never had didn’t help either. She’d known she could come back. My family had never been anything but good to her. Supportive to a fault. Even now, even after the shit she’d pulled, they’d welcomed her in with open arms.
Even if I could believe that she’d been unsure of me—and I couldn’t figure out how that was possible—she’d known that my family would take her in. They’d never let her struggle if they could help it, and Rhett only added to that surety.
I let Emilia carry Rhett inside because she seemed to need to. As she wrapped her arms around him and he clung to her like a baby koala, she pressed her nose to his hair, cuddling him close.
She found me in the kitchen a little while later, her eyes wary and tired.
“You’re mad again,” she said tentatively, leaning against the island.
“Think I’ve earned it,” I muttered.
“Yeah, you have,” she conceded. “How can I fix it?”
“Get a fuckin’ time machine?”
“What else?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
