The pair hadn’t managed more than a yearly visit since their grandkids were born. Why the sudden desire to rip them from everything they knew? Especially now, when they’d already had the two most important people in their lives torn from them.
“While Asher was named in both wills, we also have this…” Cole pressed a few buttons on his laptop before turning the screen toward me and the Haywards.
On the laptop, a shaky, vertical video, obviously recorded on a phone, played. The picture quality was dark and fuzzy, but there was no mistaking it was me on the screen. I reclined in a bed, the cookie-cutter furnishings and bland wall hangings obviously the mark of a hotel room.
“Okay, one more.” Aubrey’s voice sounded in the too-small conference room, and I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t been prepared to hear her voice just yet. Didn’t know how it had gone from something that had once settled me to something that tore through my insides as sharp as a blade, but I was blinking back tears all the same.
Past Me groaned on screen, rolling my head to face the camera. “Seriously, Aubrey? No more questions. Why won’t you just go to sleep? Is this to get back at me from when I was eight and wouldn’t leave you alone?”
She laughed. “I’m not that mean.”
“Right now, I’d beg to differ. We’ve got five showings lined up tomorrow, and the first one is comin’ in just a few hours.”
I vaguely recalled this now. It was when I’d first moved to Nashville five years ago, when Aubrey had been about four months pregnant. She’d insisted on tagging along to help me apartment hunt, and she’d taken this video on our first night there.
After our earlier showings in the day, we’d gone out and bounced from one open mic night to the next as she’d dragged me all around the city, forcing me to sing again and again.
We’d stumbled back to our hotel room well after midnight, and our first showing the following day had been scheduled for bright and early at eight a.m.
“C’mon, last one. I promise.”
“Fine,” Past Me said. “But this is it. I mean it.”
“Then I better make it a good one.”
“Can’t wait to hear this…” Past Me said through a yawn.
“Will you take the baby?”
There was a moment of stunned silence before Past Me barked out a shocked, “What?” My voice pure, stark terror. “What’s wrong? What aren’t you tellin’ me?”
I now recalled exactly how scared I’d been then—it’d been about six months after my dad had passed away from a stroke, a year and a half since my momma had lost her battle with cancer. Thinking I was going to lose my sister, too, had filled me with a dread I’d never known.
She laughed, and the sound, even diluted as it was through the recording, settled over me like a blanket, soothing me in a way I hadn’t realized I’d needed. “Relax. I’m just sayin’. If anything happens…like, ever, at any point—not that it will, but if it does—will you take the baby? It’s just you and me now, Asher. And Nathan’s parents…well…”
Past Me stared just beyond the lens, to where Aubrey would’ve been sitting. “Holy shit, you’re actually serious.Thisis what you’ve kept me up for? Your crazy what-if scenarios?”
She laughed and tossed a pillow at me, which I batted away without missing a beat. “If you’d just answer already, I’ll shut up.”
Past Me groaned and scrubbed my hands over my face. “Fine. Yes, I agree. Now go to sleep, you weirdo.”
“Love you, too,” she said through laughter before the screen went black.
Cole closed the laptop and cleared his throat, folding his hands on top of the conference room table. “There’ll be a hearing, of course, but in the meantime, they’ll be stayin’ with Asher. As long as he’s okay with that.”
Three sets of eyes swiveled to me, and I swallowed down my apprehension. What the hell did I know about taking care of two kids? Nothing.
Okay, so maybe one percent above nothing, but that had been hard earned in the past five days, and it was mostly thanks to the help I’d gotten from others. The Havens, Nash, Nat… But who knew how long she’d stay.
And while the Havens were as much a part of this town as the very streets that ran through it, I couldn’t expect them to drop everything just to help show me the way.
But it didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter that my life was about to be flipped upside down, irrevocably changed. It didn’t matter that I had no idea what I was doing. It didn’t matter that, eventually, I’d have to figure this out all on my own.
All that mattered was making good on my promise to my sister—one I hadn’t even remembered making, no doubt thanks to a haze of exhaustion and excitement—and taking care of June and Owen since she was no longer able to. Those two kids werethe only family I had left, and I was going to do everything in my power to make sure they were as happy as possible after devastation.
CHAPTER FIVE
