I lift my brow.
“Call your sister,” he says. “You miss her, and you want to speak to her. When the sheriff has tossed your POS ex in jail, your sister and her family can come stay with us for a couple of days. We have more than enough space to host them.”
My eyes fill with tears. “Really?”
“Really.” He tucks the phone into my hand and kisses me. Then he turns to his door and shouts. “Get your ass back in here, Gallo!”
I grin when Elias reappears, frowning. “What?”
“You’re eating with us,” Knox declares.
Elias bounces his gaze between us. “I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”
Knox tosses him the maple syrup. “Don’t be an idiot. You’re pack. Sit and eat.”
I dig into breakfast with Knox and Elias, and our laughter draws Hunter and Wyatt upstairs with their plates.
I never had a pack or a big family before, but if I did, I can’t imagine it being any better than this.
Chapter 22
Maisie
My fingers sweat around Knox’s cell phone as it rings.
I stare out into the distance from my perch on the back porch step. Metal rings out from Wyatt’s workshop, and the distant hum of music drifts from the house where I left Elias, Hunter, and Knox hanging out in the living room.
The phone clicks.
“Hello?”
My heart hammers against my chest, and I curl my bare toes on the wooden porch steps. I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t think of what to say.
“Hello? Who is this?”
Missy’s voice is the same. I don’t know why I thought it would be different. Still a little husky and slightly impatient. When our parents died, and Grandma followed a year later, Missy became a mother to me, and I turned my back on her.
“It’s me,” I say quietly.
I’d have believed she hung up if it weren’t for the lack of a dial tone blaring in my ear.
“Maisie?” Her voice is soft, trembling slightly.
The impatience is gone as if it never existed. This is the voice of someone holding their breath, too scared to hope for a thing they desperately want.
“Yeah.” My eyes fill with tears. I’ve barely said a word, and I’m already two seconds away from falling apart. Clearing my throat, I stare down at a patch of dirt at the bottom of the porch steps. “I know I disappeared on you when I said I’d call. But it wasn’t because I don’t love you.”
“I thought you were dead. I went to the cops to file a missing person’s report.”
Hot tears slide down my cheeks. My fingers tighten around the cell phone in my hand, and the lump in my throat is so big I choke on it. I swallow and swallow again, but it doesn’t budge.
“Things were…” I flashback to all the beatings in Oregon before Derek went to jail for vehicular manslaughter. After a skip jump, I’m walking into Derek’s fist in my motel room in Nevada. Yet another skip through time and I’m fighting my way out of my smoky apartment after Derek set fire to it. “Things were a bit challenging for a while, and it wasn’t always easy to get to a phone.”
Because I was weak. One phone call to my sister and I’d miss her so much that I’d go see her in Pittsburgh. I couldn’t inflict Derek on her family.
“Bull-fucking-shit,” she snaps.
Startled, I jerk my head up from my listless stare at the ground.
