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“Don’t cry because that will make me cry and I can’t do that unless it’s over a kid ruining one of my purses,” she demanded, her voice hard but eyes soft. She reached over to squeeze my hand. “But you need to realize that you’re giving about as good as you’re getting. Maybe better. I need more mom friends. Lucy, Polly, and I are pretty new at this, and it’s like the blind leading the blind. I don’t have a mom to call.” She screwed up her face. “I’m not really sure if I want to take Mia’s advice on everything. ‘Cause yeah, she raised a rock star and all around amazing human being, but those two new ones are a question mark.” She squeezed my hand once more before letting go. “You’re a good mom. You’re the mom I hope that I’m gonna be. You’ve got a great kid. I want to learn from you. So I’m basically bribing you with a few clothes and accessories for a lifetime of mom advice and you picking up the phone at three in the morning to listen to my kid’s cough and make sure it’s not pneumonia.”
I smiled. It was real. Not the tight, painful ones I’d been forcing lately for my son’s sake. “I will take your call at any time, and give you any advice that I can. But I’m also not a doctor, and unable to diagnose pneumonia over the phone, I feel like I need to say that for legal reasons.”
She laughed. “Okay, it’s a deal.” There was a pause. “You can also call me whenever. You know if you need someone to listen to all the ways you feel like killing Lance. I could give you some ideas.”
I bit back tears. Not that that was a change.
“Men attached to Greenstone Security are different,” she continued. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that. And I don’t mean just by the fact they’re all disturbingly good looking and have impossible physiques for the kind of food they consume.” She grinned quickly and the grin disappeared just as quickly.
“But they’re intense,” she said, voice quieter. “They all have wounds. Different ones. Deep ones. Ones that won’t ever heal. Ones that cause them to make stupid decisions like Lance walking away from you because they think they’re doing the right thing.”
She paused for the longest I’d ever seen Rosie pause in a sentence. This was not a woman who paused. But she did.
“These men will cut themselves deeper than they’ve ever known to protect the women they love from hurt,” she said finally, eyes meeting mine. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not just maniacs with emotional knives, cutting all over the place because the world has warped their vision. Lance has many more scars than most. He’s cut himself deep for you. I know you didn’t want that. Trust me, I know. More because I’ve been the one holding the emotional knife in the past. I was the bastard that walked away. That let my wounds, let my fear make decisions for me.”
Another pause.
“What I did wasn’t right,” she whispered, her eyes on me but far away at the same time. “I wasn’t thinking about what was right for me. I was thinking about what was right for the person I loved more than most anything in this world. None of this makes it any easier, I know. But maybe it makes it easier to understand.” She squinted. “Or maybe I’m just drunk and being too much of a girl. What I’m trying to say is I’m here. We’re here. And we will be long after we nail that dickhead’s nuts to the wall. The Greenstone Security men are all well and good for eye candy and orgasms. But the Greenstone women are where it’s at. We won’t go anywhere. We’ve got your back, in all the ways men getting in their own way don’t.”
There was a promise I had complete faith in trusting.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Just as quickly and smoothly as he was gone, Lance returned.
It was so ordinary I would have laughed, if, you know, my heart wasn’t shattered into a million pieces by the man waiting outside the house I was well toward making a home for Nathan and me.
But he had, broken my heart, that was.
After only one single week as… whatever we were.
But that wasn’t true. We were something from the start. I knew that. I could torture myself trying to argue that fact, trying to convince myself it was all in my head and I was making it into something more than it was because of my past or the situation that I’d found myself in in the present.
I didn’t do that.
I tried to tell the truth, whether it was ugly or not. To my son. To my friends. Family. Most importantly, to myself. It was something I promised myself to do about a year after I left Robert. A year of sorting through the mess of feelings and trauma that he’d left me with. Lying to people was bad. Depending on the lie, and the person you’re telling it to, it could be soul destroying. Lying to yourself was worse. Ultimately, there was no one else in the world who could take care of you better than you. You had to tend to your garden, make it beautiful. Even if it was sometimes using ugly truths.
