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“This is gonna be fun,” Scotty said, excited to hang with his cousins, too. Technically, Nick’s brothers were his uncles, but he thought of them more as cousins since he was older than them.
He ran up the stairs to grab his stuff.
It was time to get this show on the road.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sam wanted this taken care of before the kids arrived, so she’d asked Avery to set up the call with Nick’s mother for noon. This was the last freaking thing she wanted to deal with any day, let alone when she was down to her final hours alone with Nick before the rest of the family joined them.
Nick was next door, attending his last meeting of the day, and even though they couldn’t wait to see the kids, they were looking forward to a quiet afternoon before the chaos.
She sat on a barstool in the kitchen, staring at her phone, waiting for it to ring with a call from the last person on earth she wanted to talk to.
When the 216 area code popped up on her screen five minutes past the appointed time, Sam let it ring a few times before she picked it up. “This is Sam.”
“It’s me. Nicoletta.”
Sam loved that the woman sounded nervous. Good. She should be. “What can I do for you?”
“I, um… I was hoping to talk to Nick.”
“About what?”
“That’s between my son and me.”
“I’m afraid that’s not how this is going to go. If you want to get to him, you have to go through me. You’ll tell me what you want with him, and I’ll decide whether that conversation happens or not.”
“Does he know you’re acting as his gatekeeper?” Nicoletta asked in a testy tone.
“He sure does. He said it was up to me, so make your case, and I’ll decide.”
After a long silence—so long, Sam wondered if she was still there—Nicoletta said, “I want to make amends.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“For everything! For all the heartache I’ve caused him from the time he was born.”
Sam had to admit she was surprised to hear Nicoletta admit she’d caused him heartache his entire life. “And how do you plan to do that?”
“I’d like the chance to apologize to him and to ask for a fresh start. I’d… I’d like to be in his life.”
“What caused this sudden change of heart?”
“He’s my son, and I love him.”
Sam couldn’t contain her snort of laughter. “You have a strange way of demonstrating your so-called love for him.”
“I should’ve known you’d be like this,” she said bitterly.
“Like what? Protective of the man I love? And when I say I love him, I show him that every day of his life, so he knows the difference between your kind of love and mine.”
“Never mind.”
“You’re giving up kind of easily, aren’t you?”
“What’s the point? You’ll never let me near him, so why bother wasting the time to convince you?”
“Why bother? Hasn’t that been your motto all along? If you want things to change, you need to convince me you’re for real, and that’ll take some doing in light of the way you’ve treated him since the day he was born.”
