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Chapter 1
Bryce Weatherford examined the pull-ups section of the grocery aisle, baffled by how much information you needed to buy a kid diapers.
She glanced over at her twelve-year-old niece. “June, how much does Addie weigh? She’s not fifty pounds yet, is she?”
June snorted, her face buried in her phone. “How would I know? That’s a question for a responsibleparent. Why don’t you go find one?”
Bryce gritted her teeth and beckoned Addison closer. Her five-year-old niece was flitting from black square to beige square on the grocery store floor, the yellow, glittery wings vibrating on the harness around her back as she jumped, singing something under her breath.
“C’mere, Addie-bell. Let me pick you up.”
Trying to remember what it felt like to haul in those fifty-pound bags of rice at Chez Pierre—a lifetime ago when she’d been their sauté chef and completely in control of her kitchen and her life—Bryce hefted her youngest niece, who shrieked and giggled.
“I’m flyin’, Aunt Beamer! See me?”
Bryce grunted, holding the little girl up by the armpits. Her gold-glitter-glued sneakers dangled a foot from the floor.
“Oof. You’re flying, all right. All thirty-five pounds of you. Maybe forty, but you get medium-sized pull-ups.” Bryce set her down. “Don’t run, Addie-bell, and stay in this aisle where I can see you.”
Addison grinned at her, her blond hair and pixie-like face all sweet innocence. “Only, fairies like to run, an’ I’m the fastest fairy runner in all the worllllldddd!”
And like a hummingbird, she was off, dashing from one side of the aisle to the other, snatching at low-hanging packages of baby toys, squeezing three of them to see if they squeaked, then trying and failing to re-hook them onto the strip where they’d dangled, tantalizingly, just for grabby hands like hers. With a backward grin at her aunt, she tossed the baby toys atop a shelf of formula and twirled away before Bryce could decide whether this was what the counselor would label “a scolding event.” Probably not.
Nothing was broken. Addie got so much joy from playing fairy, and Lord knew these girls had experienced little of that lately. Bryce figured any responsible mother figure wouldn’t get uptight about Addison ruining a baby toy display.
Right?
Selecting the proper pull-ups, Bryce winced at the price. Addison had been wetting the bed at night for the past six months. Initially it had worried Bryce, yet the court-required therapist assured her that regression was common in grieving children. While she’d rather be spending this same amount on a really good Roquefort, the pull-ups—and not being woken at 2 a.m. to change the sheets—beat the cheese.
Yet she weighed the package in her hand, debating. Dry sheets? Or an aged blue cheese to go with her last bottle of sauternes wine? The debate she’d never anticipated having seesawed in her sleep-deprived brain as she pushed the grocery cart down to the end of the aisle.
“Aunt Beamer, you’re missing a kid,” June said, interrupting the mental conundrum. Her tween niece wore a pair of black jeans, zombie-killer boots, and a black long-sleeved tee that saidIt’s a beautiful day to leave me alone.Her long brown hair was tied in a low ponytail. She rolled her eyes, lowering her phone just enough to gesture with her chin behind them.
Following the chin-point, Bryce groaned, tossing the toddler pull-ups into the cart as she spotted her third niece sprawled on the floor trying to reach something under the bottom shelf of the baby food aisle.
“Cecily! Stop messing around and get out from there,” she hissed, bending to tug on the dirty ankles of her eight-year-old niece. Cecily had refused to wear weather-appropriate clothes for the cold, drizzly day that passed for spring in Western New York, insisting that her long basketball shorts were as warm as jeans. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I dropped my lucky rock, and it rolled under,” came Cecily’s muffled voice from beneath the shelving unit. “I had to reach really far to get it, and now I’m stuck. But you wouldn’t believe how much change is under here. How much is two dimes and a quarter?”
“Forty-five cents,” Bryce answered, belatedly realizing she should’ve let the girl figure out the math on her own. Another caregiver fail, and she was about to commit one more parenting sin: bribery. “Let go of the change and the rock so I can pull you out, and I’ll give you a dollar.”
“Two dollars,” bargained her niece, “and I get to pick out the cookies this week.”
“Done,” she muttered, flipping her braid over the other shoulder as she knelt down to peer under the lowest metal shelf, her palms on the store’s dirty floor and her cheek perilously close to the same. “Now let go so I can unstick you.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a tall man with a baby in his cart pull into the aisle. She levered herself onto one hand, snapping her finger at Addison, who was currently twirling in circles close to the approaching stranger, oblivious to everything as she sang and stared at the lights overhead.
“Addison, stop twirling and come here! You’re going to knock something over.” Then she turned to Cecily, tugging on her shoulder, but the girl was either resisting or was really stuck. Bryce figured it for the former and sighed in exasperation. “C’mon, Cici! The manager is going to kick us out if you guys can’t behave.”
“You know, we all identify as female in this family, and calling us ‘guys’ is sexist and promotes the toxic belief in male superiority.” June speared her with a green-eyed glare. “And before you resort to ‘girls,’ keep in mind society uses that term for groups of females as a pre—a per…prerogative.”
“Pejorative,” Bryce corrected, clenching her jaw against the urge to swear. “And it’s not an insult when the group of girls you’re addressing aren’t yet old enough to vote. As for calling you ‘guys,’ that’s my bad. But you can’t work for eight years in an all-male kitchen and not have sustained testosterone poisoning from it all. Now, can you put your phone down and help me here?”
With the amount of all-suffering, put-upon-ness matched only by biblical martyrs and hormonal teens everywhere, June stuffed her phone into her pocket and shuffled in her black chunky boots to half-heartedly tug on Cecily’s leg.
“Owwww!” Cecily howled.
Bryce closed her eyes, wishing for the millionth time that her brother was here. Bentley would have his daughters sweetly compliant in a heartbeat, his wife and his sister laughing over it later, everyone succumbing to his easygoing charm and ability to put things in perspective. If Bentley were here…Bryce wouldn’t be wrangling her nieces. She’d be over a thousand miles away, standing at her ten-burner Vulcan range as she crafted another soup to complement Pierre’s menu, dreaming of the next starred review for the Tampa restaurant.
