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He let out a long sigh and gave a firm nod. “She knew you were going to be upset. She told me they left school today early and decided to skip a couple of classes and come downtown to a local coffee shop and do a little shopping together.”
I couldn’t even manage to be upset about the damn skipping. It paled in comparison to the absolute clusterfuck that was everything else.
“Okay,” I said, not knowing what I was supposed to do. How I was supposed to act. I could have never in a million years predicted that she would have skipped school. My girl was always all As. She’d loved school her whole life.
I felt like sometimes I didn’t even know her anymore. I felt heartbroken over the whole thing more than angry.
West reached out, laying his hand on my shoulder. “Go easy on her, Slugger. She’s had a hard day. Skipping school is a normal teenage thing.”
I shrugged him off, irrationally angry. Angry he’d been there first. Angry he hadn’t told me he was a damn fireman for the Columbia Fire Department. Even angrier he was defending my child against me.
I was her mother. I’d been raising her these past five years just fucking fine, thank you.
He thought one little drive around the block and he could tell me how to do the only job I’d ever truly loved and been good at.
Fuck him.
I backed away from him and turned toward the door. “Thanks for everything today, Weston. But I’ve got it from here on out.”
He studied me, his mouth a flat line. And I could tell he knew, I wasn’t just talking about today.
“Emily,” he called out to me.
“I’m sure you need to get back to work. You should go.” I didn’t even turn around, keeping my back to him as I entered Parker’s room.
I couldn’t think about Weston now. I had bigger problems. Mom problems.
“Mom!” Parker called from the living room couch where she’d set up shop for the last couple of days while she was recuperating.
I raced into the room, worried she’d try and get up and try to find me, which wasn’t an unnecessary worry. The crazy girl had done so twice already over the last two days.
She knew she wasn’t supposed to, but lately, she’d been doing a whole lot of shit that was against the rules.
It turned out that her ankle had been more than broken. She’d had to have emergency surgery the morning after the wreck to repair it. She now had a nice sized rod in her ankle and a plate on the outside of her ankle bone, holding everything together.
The doctor had told us she wasn’t to bear any weight on it for a while and right now she wasn’t even allowed to move it for a bit. So she’d been sitting on my couch with her ankle propped up on a pillow in a soft cast and taking around-the-clock pain medication.
I’d managed to get as much of her school assignments as I could so she wouldn’t get behind, but the girl was bored out of her mind, anyway. And she was driving me batshit crazy.
Unfortunately, Prisha hadn’t talked to her much since the accident and I thought maybe it was because she’d been in trouble for skipping school. She’d had a minor concussion, but they had sent her home the day of the accident with her parents.
I guessed that Prisha was in big trouble and probably on restriction. I’d decided to opt out of punishing Parker.
I figured this whole crushed ankle thing was punishment enough. Besides, it seemed like not talking to Prisha was its own kind of hell for Parker. She’d been pouting about it all day.
Hell, it was punishment for me, too, because the child was bored and ultimately her boredom meant she expected me to entertain her.
I’d managed to reschedule most of my cuts the last two days, but I was actually looking forward to leaving her for a few hours to go in and do a few clients this afternoon.
“What’s up, girlfriend?” I said, standing next to the couch. “You need something to drink?”
“No, but I was thinking.”
Oh, Lord, nothing good came from this child’s thinking. Not a damn thing.
Still, I was a good mom, so I asked, “What were you thinking?” I plopped down on the other side of our sectional so I didn’t jostle her leg.
“I want to thank Weston.”
