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A line of three red scratch marks started at the corner of her left eye, stretched to her ear, and ended at the base of her neck.
“Oh, no.” Joel motioned for Ayesha to join them. “That’s not acceptable, Theo.”
Theo rolled his eyes.
“Give that another try,” Joel and Gage said.
“Sorry, Joel.” Theo’s bottom lip quivered. “Sorry, Unco Gage.”
Theo, usually carefree and more mischievous than unkind, had started showing out through loud tantrums and defiance over the last few months. He was also having nightmares and struggled to sleep through the night. Now, it appeared he’d escalated to assault.
They’d chalked it up to the move, that maybe he was having a hard time adjusting to life in Sweden, but they’d been in Fiji for a couple of weeks so far, and the issues continued to increase in intensity.
Ayesha joined them in the kitchen. “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Did something happen?”
Joel motioned to Thandie’s face.
“Theo did that?” She zeroed in on Theo.“Baby, did you hurt Thandie?”
“Auntie, I think it was an accident,” Thandie said.
“Don’t come to his defense.” Ayesha took Theo’s hand. “Come on. We need to talk.”
Joel hung back, but she stopped when she reached the door to her bedroom and nodded, indicating that she wanted him to follow—which made sense. Theodidhave a tendency to listen to him. According to her, it was the timbre of his voice. The rest of the guys called it “Dad voice” and claimed it was a “power” most men didn’t realize they had, whether or not they had children.
Ayesha took a seat on the bed and positioned Theo between her knees. Joel leaned against the wall, watching them, arms folded.
“Now, explain what happened,” she said.
Theo looked over at the room’s glass sliding doors, which framed a picturesque view of the beachfront. “We were playing, and she made me so angry.”
Ayesha placed two fingers beneath his chin and returned his face to hers. “Angry, how?”
“I didn’t want to play her game. Just because she’s older’n me, everybody acts like I’m s’posed to listen to her, but she’s only a little bit older.”
“Baby, even if you don’t want to ‘listen’ to her, you didn’t have to put your hands on her.”
Theo reached into his bag of attitude and pulled out a handful of audacity. “It wasn’t my hands, Mama. It was myfingers.”
Ayesha exhaled longer than their flight from Europe to Fiji and muttered something under her breath. To Joel, it sounded like she was praying, counting, or both.
“Hey,” Joel called.
Tears sprung from Theo’s eyes, and Ayesha looked at him as if to say,“See? Dad voice”before nudging Theo closer.
“You want to tell me what’s been going on with you?” she asked. “Since when do we hurt our family?”
Theo’s head bobbed with each hard sniff. “N-never. W-we don’t hurt the p-people we l-love.”
Joel walked over and crouched next to him. “What made you so upset that you thought the only solution was to scratch Thandie?”
“I d-don’t know.” More tears came, and Theo’s face flushed until he was crimson from his collarbone to his hairline. “Can I go ‘pologizeto Thandie? I’m really s-sorry, and I didn’t mean to h-hurt her.”
Ayesha scanned his tiny body as if searching for clues as to what was causing his changing behavior. “Yes, you can go apologize to Thandie,” she said. “We’ll talk more later.”
“Can I have a hug, Mama? Or are you too angry wiff me?”
She pulled him into her arms, kissing the side of his face. “I love you, baby. I’ll never be too upset to hug you, but you know that when there’s a problem you can’t work out, you get an adult to help you find a solution. I’m very disappointed you did that.”
