“Before any rumors get around, I wanted to tell you all that as of earlier this week, Daisy and I are married.”
For a family who hadn’t been quiet since the moment we walked into the house earlier, their stunned silence hit like a freight train. Harper’s jaw looked like it hit the floor. Jamie and Kit shared a look.
“Married?” George was the first to speak as he looked at his son.
Max met his dad’s pained gaze and nodded slowly. “After what happened a few weeks ago, Todd’s parents have been…threatening toward Daisy, so we decided it was best for her and the baby if we were married until after the baby arrives.”
A collection of gasps and whimpers echoed around the kitchen, but it was hard to tell exactly who they came from.
“Threatening?” Ailene stepped forward, a protective thread of steel stitched to her voice, and my throat tightened. I wasn’t part of her family, yet with a single word, she made me feel like one of her own.
My whirring mind braked hard and reversed back through what Max had said—and what he hadn’t. He hadn’t mentioned anything about needing health insurance. That he’d left what I needed from him out of the equation.That he’d spared me from any negative assumptions that might come my way.
“We have everything under control,” Max assured her with that easy calm of his, but only I could see the crumbs that fell from the cookie onto the counter as he held it a little tighter. “But I wanted to tell you before you heard it from anyone else.”
“When?” George’s salty-gray eyebrows furrowed together.
“At the courthouse on Monday,” Max answered his dad, whose head ducked in response.
He was disappointed, if not angry. I could feel it. The shift in his demeanor was like a chill through the room, and Max felt it too because his hand moved to rest on my back.
“I’m so sorry you’re going through this, Daisy,” Aurora said, tears welling in her eyes as she came over, the first to envelop me in a hug, but not the last.
Over the course of minutes, there was a soft flurry of conversation between Max and his family while Frankie, Lou, Violet, Ailene, and Gigi all came over to hug me in turn.
“I’ll be okay. It’s just for a few months until everything settles down,” I assured them, tugging a quick smile to my cheeks, trying to ignore the growing heat there and the panic in my mind that Max’s dad hated me for this.
“So does this mean you’re moving back out of Dad’s?” Nox chimed in.
Move out of his dad’s?I turned and looked at Max, and he refused to look back at me.What was Nox talking about?
“Nox.” Max’s voice lowered to a tenor I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever heard before. It was hard. Commanding.
Nox just arched his eyebrows, and suddenly it seemed like the entire conversation hinged on the answer to his question.
After a long glare, Max ground out his monosyllabic answer, “No.”
His brother’s mouth wilted, and then with a shake of his head, he muttered something along the lines of, “Good luck with that,” and then headed for the door to the back porch, drink in hand.
“Let him go,” George said in a low voice, echoing the sentiment I’d told Harper earlier.
“What can we do? What can I do?” Wade chimed in, a distraction for everyone except the hamster in my brain that latched onto what just happened with Nox and ran in circles with it.
Does this mean you’re moving back out of Dad’s?Back out. Like he wasn’t living there, but now he is again. And there’s only one most likely reason for that. Me.
“Nothing right now,” Max answered as the pit in my stomach yawned wider. “I’ll let you know if that changes.”
The next twenty minutes passed in a blur of more questions and condolences and tender support. The untempered beat of my pulse strengthened when Max’s dad came over to him, and they talked in hushed voices that I couldn’t hear, not when Ailene and Gigi were talking next to me. And then George stepped away from his son and finally moved to talk to me.
When he stopped in front of me, I felt the wordsI’m sorrycollect on my tongue, but before I could work them out, he reached out and hugged me.
“I’m so sorry, Daisy,” he said gently, and I wanted to cry with relief. “If there is anything we can do…”
“Your son has done more than enough—more than I can ever thank him for.” My throat clogged.
George tipped forward then, surprising me by muttering low, “Take care of him, Daisy. Please.”
Take care of Max? Did he not hear any of this conversation? Max was the one taking care of me…
