“I assume, if this was something I had to worry about, you wouldn’t be so cajz,” I remarked.
“He smiles.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
“And actually laughs.”
My heart stuttered.
“They worry,” Luke continued. “I told them Gabe was smiling and laughing again, so they’d stop worrying. They didn’t come down here to see if you were going to put him through the wringer, like the other two did. They came down to meet the woman who made their son smile and laugh again.”
Ohshitohshitohshit.
I was going to start crying.
“Mike was just fucking with you about that hooked-up-with-another-Ariana shit,” Luke explained. “He’s like that. He shovels shit. But we’d just heard you run that bitch down, as you should, and talk Gabe up, as you should, so that’s where his humor went. You don’t know him, but you’ll learn.”
You’ll learn.
“Okay,” I pushed out.
“We met Denise. Ava was torn up, saying ‘she needs a man just like Gabe, I just wish that man wasn’t actually Gabe.’ That’s how we were all feeling. And in the end, what we felt was right.”
It really was, tragically.
“Okay,” I repeated.
“Didn’t meet Ariana. Ava didn’t either. She didn’t last as long as Denise. Still, Ava would talk with Shelby, and the woman got a nickname in our home. That Bitch.”
Sounded familiar.
Luke kept going.
“Shelby couldn’t stand her, so my wife couldn’t stand her. It took everything Shel had to be nice to her. But I reckon, Gabe needed to work his way through a woman like her so he’d recognize what he was getting when he found a woman like you.”
A woman like you.
My breath left me.
Whoosh.
Gone.
This might seem bad, but my need to concentrate on breathing helped me not burst into tears.
Luke, however, was breathing fine.
“Gabe ripped me a new one this morning for my part in that ambush. I told him he better stop underestimating his woman, or shit was gonna go south. He saw the wisdom of this. That said, he was also right. But they got down here the evening before, and Shelby was wound up about how Gabe would react that they showed, and then, for some fucked-up reason, she decided to go right to you. So Mike called me because he couldn’t talk her out of it. I couldn’t either. But at least someone was there to intervene if things went to shit.”
Oh, I knew the reason she decided to come right to me.
And it wasn’t fucked up.
She knew her son, and he’d have a few things to say about his mom butting into what we were building this soon after we started building it.
But she had to know.
She had to put her mind at ease.
