“I’m sorry he’s a butthead, Lucas,” Katie tells him.
Zoey claps a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter while Arlo drapes an arm around her shoulders and pulls her in close.
We circle around back to the issue of our family secret.
“Do you want me to call you Mommy and Daddy?” she asks them.
“You can call us whatever you want to, sweetheart,” Arlo tells her. “That’s up to you. We love you like our daughter.”
“The way I love Lucas as if he’s my son,” I add. “We’vealreadybeen a family for years. We just didn’t tell you the labels. So it’s not ‘bad’ secret. It didn’t hurt younotknowing, did it?”
She digests that for a moment before shaking her head. “No, it didn’t hurt me. I like living here. I’m glad we’re not moving. Until we get the new house,” she adds.
We finally get through that, survive dinner, and after Katie’s had a bath and we’ve put her to bed, the three of us sit on the couch, where we pass a small water glass with a couple of fingers of Fireball on the rocks between us, sharing it while we await word from Mike. Lucas sits curled up in a chair, waiting with us and texting with Caine.
Mike texts me at 8:07.
Done. On the way.
We open the garage door to await their arrival. Everything can go in there for tonight. Tomorrow night, we can help Katie organize everything.
Might as well move her into the larger room, too. There’s no reason to keep her in the smaller bedroom with our secret shared with her.
When the three men arrive, Art and Bailey’s pickup trucks full of stuff, Mike walks up to me while Arlo, Zoey, and Lucas help the other two men unload everything.
While they’re doing that, Mike pulls me aside and plays me the video he took of what happened.
He started filming from when he walked up to Jerilyn’s front door and rang the bell. There’s a guy in the condo with her, apparently trying to look mean and imposing. I recognize him as the guy from the pictures on her Facebook profile.
But then Mike offers to show him copies of the videos from today, the first one and the ones from in his office—which Mike has copies of now—and Jerilyn suddenly looks ill and banishes the guy to her bedroom while Mike, Art, and Bailey make quick work of emptying Katie’s bedroom, down to the bare walls.
Mike fast-forwards through the moving part, because apparently Jerilyn wasn’t stupid enough to interfere with the process. Then he picks up right before they leave.
While Mike’s standing outside the front door, he does something magnanimous.“Do you want to arrange a visitation with Katie before you move?”
The sneer that curls her lips looks somewhere between contempt and disgust. I don’t miss how she glances back, presumably to confirm her bedroom door is closed, before she drops her voice.“No. I’m done with them both. I don’t need either of them now. I could’ve lost my job today.”
“You weren’t thinking of Nolan or Arlo’s jobs when you threatened them. Or of Lucas and Caine.”
“Tell Nolan he fucking won. I didn’t want a kid, anyway. Kids are a royal pain in the ass once they’re not cute babies anymore.”
She slams the door in his face.
Mike turns, the video catching the stunned shock on Art and Bailey’s faces.“You both heard all of that, right?”
They both nod.
“Damn, that bitch is fucking cold, man,”Art says.“She didn’t ask about Katie once.”
Bailey’s shock seemingly turns to anger.“What kind of mother does that shit?”
The video ends as they walk down the driveway, to their vehicles, and Mike gets into his car.
Mike looks at me. “I e-mailed you the Dropbox link to download it.”
“Thanks,” I numbly say as I pull out my phone and start downloading the file.
Later, once they’re gone, after Lucas has retired to his room, and we’re now locked behind our bedroom door, I sit on the end of the bed and show the video to Arlo and Zoey.
When it finishes playing, Arlo lays his hand over mine and gently takes the phone from me. “It’sover,” he gently says.
I don’t understand why I burst into tears. I’m not sure if it’s anger or stress or relief or a combination of those emotions, and more. As my husband and wife comfort me, I realize that, for the rest of our lives, we don’t have to lie to our little girl about thisonesimple truth that defines the very core of who we are as a family.
That wearea family.
