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He hugged me loosely from behind in bed and silence settled around us, but I knew he was still wide awake.
“Think it’ll be okay?” he asked in a forced, strangled voice which told me he was close to breaking down.
I patted his arm around my waist. “Yes, I do.”
He was quiet for a beat. “And if it’s not?”
“Then you’ll keep fighting, right?”
“Yeah. I won’t stop.”
“No, you won’t,” I said with conviction. “And that’s how I know it’ll be okay. Stevie knows too. I can tell. She has confidence in you.”
He nodded against me and pulled me closer to him. The only reason I knew he was crying was because a tear dripped on me, but I didn’t call attention to it. I knew he’d prefer it that way.
A few minutes later he whispered, “You still up?”
I nodded and turned in his arms. I traced his scruffy jaw with my finger. I missed his lightness, but through these past few weeks, I’d fallen even more in love with him. His determination to fight for the ones he loved made him even more attractive.
His throat bobbed with a hard swallow, and he stared at the ceiling. “I just keep turning everything over in my mind. I just still feel like I’m missing something. Fiona wanted Stevie to be with me, right?” His voice sounded so hurt, so unsure of himself, and it broke my heart.
I held his chin and stared at him in the dark. “Yes, Tyler. I’m sure she’d want her to be with you.”
He rolled further on his back and rested his arm over his forehead. “I just wish I had proof, ya know? I didn’t even know she existed until a few weeks ago. It doesn’t look good.”
“When did her grandparents find out about her?”
He shrugged. “I guess they found out when she was young. Maybe three, four? Fi ran into them in the grocery store.”
I mulled that over for a minute. I couldn’t imagine my parents not knowing I had a child. How would I even hide the pregnancy? And Fiona was even younger than me when she had Stevie.
“So they had no clue Fiona was pregnant? How was that possible? Wasn’t she still in high school?”
Tyler sighed. “Yeah. Supposed to be her senior year. Guess Stevie has two drop-out parents.”
I shook my head. “No, I’m not saying anything about that. I just mean… did she run away?”
He cut his eyes to mine like it was obvious. “Well, yeah.”
I sat straight up in the bed. “She ran away,” I whispered.
Tyler held my waist. “Yeah… What about it?”
I turned to him. “That’show you prove Fiona didn’t want Stevie to be with them.”
His eyebrows drew down. “But isn’t that hearsay or whatever it’s called?”
I shook my head. “Not if there was a police report. Not if there was an Amber Alert.”
His eyes widened, then he scrambled out of my bed and ran for my laptop. “Babe, I think you might be a genius.”
53. Josie
The morning of the custody hearing, I sat in the second row next to Casey and his twin boys, who were dressed in little suits for the occasion. Tyler’s teammates couldn’t make it because they were on the way to the airport for an away game when we left the loft.
“Addie’s so upset she couldn’t make it,” Casey whispered to me ruefully. His hair was neatly combed back today, and he’d shaved his beard, making him look younger and more like Tyler.
“It’s okay, she needs to stay healthy. This is too stressful.” I could practically feel the nerves coursing through my body. I took a quick sip of water to steady myself, but my hand was practically shaking.
