“Can I sleep on the balcony?” Cutter asked as he opened the sliding door. He let in the hot, sticky air.
“It’s not safe,” I told him as I stood next to him. My phone pinged in my hand. I looked at the notification and my heart sank. We’d waited, for what felt like an eternity, for the adoption to be final. The judge assigned to the case had suggested I reach out to the kids’ father at his last known address. I’d sent a letter, which had gone unanswered, probably because his last known address was the house he’d lived in when he was seventeen, and his father no longer lived there.
Miri’s parents were still asking for visitation, which I suspected they would get. Cutter, speaking on behalf of his sister as well, had informed the GAL that he wasn’t ready to have a relationship with them. The Vaughns were upset, and rightly so, but they’d had years to fix their relationship with Miri and had chosen not to.
I opened the email from the clerk and read, reread, and reread again.
“What’s wrong?”
I shook my head and looked at him with watery eyes. “The judge approved my petition for adoption. You and Nova are officially mine.”
Cutter pulled me into his strong arms and held me tightly. We both cried, happy tears, and shared our news with Weston when he came onto the balcony.
“So, are you going to be Cutter Bernardi?” Weston asked.
We both shook our heads, and I looked at Cutter to answer. With a small lift of his lip in a shy smile, he said, “Nova and I are going to keep Vaughn to honor our mom. But Toni is now M—”
He couldn’t say the word, and that was okay.
I gave him a slight jab in the ribs. “You can still call me Toni.”
Cutter sighed happily and hugged me again. “Thank you for being our person.”
Being his and Nova’s person was going to be the best damn thing I had ever done in my life.
Epilogue
Weston
One year later
Antonia and I dropped Cutter off at the University of Richmond. The current senior class helped us carry all his things to the third floor. Antonia made Cutter’s bed while he and I unpacked his belongings. She hadn’t said much on the trip, and I figured it was because her heart was breaking. For over a year now, he’d been her rock, and I expected he didn’t even know it.
While she had Nova, who was Miriam’s spitting image, Cutter was Antonia’s first true love, she had once told me. She’d been there from the second Miriam had found out she was pregnant, through her pregnancy, and in the delivery room when Cutter was born.
What I didn’t know until after we’d started touring colleges was that Antonia had never lived in the dorms at Boston University, because of Cutter. She didn’t want Miriam to struggle raising her son, so they had an off-campus apartment together. It wasn’t until Miriam had bought the house in Grove Hill that they all stopped living together.
I had wondered how it was so easy for Antonia to become the guardian of her friends’ kids, but once I heard the entire story, it allmade sense. There was no one else more capable of raising Miriam’s children than Antonia.
“Do you want to raise your bed?” she asked Cutter, her voice pulling me from my inner musings.
“Should I?” He looked at both of us for the answer.
“Let’s try it and see.”
Antonia finished putting the bottom sheet on the bed and then stepped back so I could raise the bed. The mechanism was something we had asked for before school started and allowed Cutter to have his bed at three different heights. The tallest would give him a ton of storage space under his bed and allow for a beanbag chair or one of those small dorm room couches.
Once I had the platform spring in place, Cutter and I slipped the mattress back on. He had to heave himself up there, which wasn’t much of a challenge, considering he’d grown another two inches this year. As soon as he was up there, though, I knew this would be a no-go. He was going to smack his head on the ceiling.
“Let’s try the next level, bud. I’m afraid you’re going to knock yourself out.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
The mid-level seemed to be the winner. He still had ample storage underneath and could easily sit on his bed. Antonia went back to making it even though we all knew he’d leave it a mess by the morning. She had focused on a lot of the milestones a teenager needed to hit but rarely worried about those of a mother. This was one of them.
After we’d unpacked and put everything away, we drove Cutter to the nearest box store and stocked him up on snacks. Because he had a full athletic scholarship to pitch, he could go to the cafeteria and eat whatever, but the boy was growing and had all but eaten us out of a home this past year. He was liable to eat a tree on his walk to the café if he didn’t have something to snack on.
Back at campus, we parked and walked him to his dorm, even though he’d been here plenty of times to meet with his coaching staff. We paused at his dorm, and I watched Antonia struggle.
