“We can find a lawyer there or I can do it. It’s a little more complicated with us being out of state.”
“Come in,” he told me, and I did and sat on the bed. “You have enough to do at work, so you don’t need to take this on. I’ll hire someone.”
“It’s easy enough but…maybe it would be better that way.” I could get the names of some attorneys in Ohio.
“Are things going to slow down for you now that your boss is in the office full-time?”
“I hope so,” I said. “One of the reasons that I wanted to go in-house, rather than trying for a job at a big law firm, is because the hours are generally better. I wanted to have more of a balance than a lot of the people I went to law school with.” When I’d applied for the job, I had been thinking that I’d soon have a family, and I wanted to be able to spend time with my kids. And with Dax, of course.
“Crack down on Octavia and make her ass get into gear,” he recommended, but I only sighed. That was a problem, one that Ididn’t want to deal with today on top of everything else that was going on.
“Want your spot?” Silas patted the empty side of the mattress.
“Is that mine?”
“You fell asleep there before,” he reminded me, and I crawled over his legs to take it again. He had a giant bed, one that hadn’t been in this room during his grandmother’s time. He’d explained that he’d had to upgrade, due to his feet hanging off the end of what she’d had here before. I cuddled into a ball and he pulled the comforter over me. “There you go,” he said, and smoothed down the covers, much as I did for Lyra. “You talked me off the ledge today.”
“What else were you going to do to the basement if I hadn’t come down?”
“Who knows? Maybe I would have taken out the kitchen, too. I’m glad I didn’t so that we still have a stove.”
“Me too. And I meant what I said—I wasn’t just placating you so that you’d stop tearing the house apart,” I told him. “I’m very impressed by what you’ve done for Lyra. Not everybody steps up when a kid needs someone. It doesn’t matter whether you’re blood relatives or not.”
“Do you have any blood relatives left?” he asked.
“I do. Several,” I answered. “My parents both had siblings, so I have aunts, uncles, and cousins. I had grandparents, too, but I guess that none of them are very close with each other. Or with me, obviously.”
I waited, but he didn’t ask anything else and I realized why. “This doesn’t upset me,” I said, and I tried to feel calm and steady so that statement would be true. “I told Lyra a little about my childhood. I wanted her to know that we have similar backgrounds, that she’s not the only one without birth parents around. In case she was feeling abandoned,” I explained further.
Silas sat straight up. “Damn, does she feel that way?”
“I really don’t think so,” I assured him. “It was just in case.”
“Ok. Ok, good.” He slowly leaned back but then turned to look at me. “Did you feel abandoned?”
“Um, no. Well, maybe.”
“Were you actually abandoned? Is that how you ended up with…I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t have to answer any of that.”
“No, I really don’t mind,” I said, and again, I tried not to. “My parents died when I was a baby. They were really young, just teenagers, and they went out to party one night and hit a tree on their way home.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It was tragic because they were so much in love. Their life was like a movie.”
He looked slightly doubtful. “A movie.”
“A good one, a romance like what I tried to make you watch with me before Christmas and you said that you needed to go to the back yard and dig a big hole instead.”
“That was not strictly true,” he admitted, and I nodded.
“I know, the ground was frozen.My parents were next-door neighbors and they went to kindergarten together and every grade after that. But they were only friends until their senior year of high school when they realized that they were in love. Right after they graduated, they got married and then they were so happy together.”
“How do you know this? I thought you weren’t close to your relatives.”
“I did a little research,” I said, but then admitted, “I relentlessly attacked the past. I found their old profiles and posts, I hunted down all their old friends and classmates, and I went to their hometown to interview people.”
“Really?”
