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They wanted her to lose her cool. They wanted her to do something that would give them a reason to further their gossip, and she wouldn’t put it past Curtis’ grandmother to call child protective services if she gave them the slightest bit of ammunition.
According to Curtis’ grandmother, she could “make all the suspicions go away” by taking Theo for a paternity test, but the woman would go to hell waiting for the results.
Did they not understand how much she loved Curtis? To her, he was perfect. There would never be another Curtis, and while they’d wasted their time snubbing her and asking him to walk away from their relationship, she’d been writing the names of all the future children she wanted to have with him in her journal.
“Maybe Theo’s better off not being enrolled here,” she hissed. “I don’t want him educated by someone who can’t even do basic math.”
She turned to leave, closing her ears to any response the wretched woman might have tossed her way, and exited the house-turned-child care center. It wasn’t even the nicest house in the area.
When she reached the SUV, she went to set Theo down to open the door, but he fussed and clung tighter. Frustrated and beyond embarrassed, she crouched, peeled him off her body, and set him on his feet. His bottom lip trembled, and his head rocked as he sniffed.
“Mama.” He raised his arms. “Up.”
“Theo, you can stand here for a few seconds while Mama opens the car door, right?”
He wiggled his arms. “Mama, up,peas?”
Her heart gave a hard tug.
There went another thing that was her fault—Theo thinking “please” was a magic word to get people to do whatever he wanted. Curtis had trusted her with the care of his children, but some days, she felt like a fucking joke. If he’d lived, he probably would have left her.
Hardening her emotions, she opened the door. Only then did she pick Theo up to set him in his car seat, and he continued to sniff, his cries sputtering like someone starting a lawnmower.
She got in, pushed to start the engine, and looped around to the end of the daycare’s circular driveway.
Then the wailing began.
And she let him wail.
Despite having to continuously wipe tears from her eyes to see the road, she let him wail.
Her son wasn’t “bad.”
A child took a toy he’d been playing with, and he shrieked, scratched them, and followed his scratch with a bite—his third strike. But that didn’t mean he was inherently bad. Ever since he was kicked out of the first childcare center, he’d had a target on his little back.
Theo was being unfairly blamed for something he had no control over. She was the one who’d watched “Surprise My Husband” videos on the internet. She was the one who’d thought it would have been “so sweet” to surprise Curtis and record his reaction, withholding his pending fatherhood from him for another week.
Like an idiot.
For a while after Curtis’ death, she’d feared losing her mind. Had it not been for Josiah and Theo, maybe she would have.
For a moment.
Although she’d pushed them away, Gage, Dez, Mike, Giorgio, and Julien would have come back into her life, picking her up from where they would have found her walking, barefoot and hair unwashed for months, along Route 380.
She’d stressed while pregnant.
Grieved while pregnant.
At first, she had Curtis’ extended family, but when they found out she was pregnant, they fell off one by one, and it never mattered how far along she said she was. To Curtis’ grandmother, Theo had always been “another man’s baby.”
All that stress, grief, and isolation had affected her and the child growing in her body. He’d inherited his stress response from her during one of the most trying periods of her life. Had she leaned on the guys earlier, she might have coped better.
But she shut them out.
She shut out the men she’d called her brothers. The men who’d loved Curtis like all six of them had grown up calling the same people “Mom” and “Dad.”
People called Giorgio a beast.
