“Why don’t you get them ready, and I’ll clear some space in the van?” I offer. “I don’t think we have baby seats, exactly, but I can adjust some of the seat belts so they fit a little better…”
“Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Joe.”
“On it,” I reply, and I duck outside to take care of business before she comes out to join me.
There’s something oddly domestic about it, taking care of the car for her like this. I try not to put too much weight into it, not wanting to throw myself off my game. As much as there is plenty to contend with here with her and the quads, we can’t lose sight of why we came to Devin Ridge in the first place—to contain this fire and keep the residents of this small town safe.
As I fix up the car for her, I can’t help but notice the smell in the air—not of the smoke, like I was expecting, but something familiar, something I haven’t been close to for a long time. I might have grown up in this town, but it’s amazing how quickly a place can shift out from underneath you. What was once home takes on an entirely new feel when you’ve been away for so long.
And when the things that tied you here have long-since departed too. My mom started to decline in health after my dad died, and it didn’t take long for her to follow him, growing sick and fading away before I even turned thirty. I stayed in that house I had grown up in for a few more years, before the guys gave me a reason to get out at last, but it had always felt like I was sharing the space with ghosts—if not literal ghosts, then the memory of everything that had been, everything that I wished the two of them were still around to see.
By the time Angelie emerges from the house once more, she’s laden down with two kids, Callum behind her with the other two in his arms.
“You look good playing nanny, Callum,” I tease him, and he shoots me an eye roll that’s meant to remind me that all of us are in this mess together, so I better keep my mouth shut.
“I cleared out the back of the van, should be enough room for all four of them, with the backward-facing seats,” I explain to Angelie, as I pull open the door and gesture for her to put them in.
“Backward, huh?” Angelie asks. “You guys feeling brave enough to go backward?”
“Yes!” Chrissie exclaims. Stephanie, even though she looks a little nervous, is clearly not willing to be left behind, so she goes along with it too. Once they’re all buckled in, the boys are placed opposite them, and Chuck looks a little uncomfortable with the new surroundings.
“I know, honey,” Angelie murmurs to him softly. “But look—how cool is this car? It’s like something out of a movie, right?”
He still doesn’t look convinced. I reach down into the back pocket next to him, pulling out one of the gloves that I have stuffed down there to keep them safe in case I’m called into action while we’re out on the road.
“You think you could hold these for me?” I ask him seriously.
He stares up at me for a moment, confused, but then opens his hand. “I think so…”
“Thanks, bud,” I tell him, and I gently place the glove into his hand before I straighten up and climb into the front once more.
Angelie flashes me a smile as she slips in next to me, clearly impressed at my handling of the situation. “So you’re all good with kids, or what?” she asks playfully, clipping in her seat belt as Callum lifts his hand to wave goodbye as we pull away from the cabin.
“I know how to handle myself,” I reply. I glance into the back of the van and a heavy weight grasps at my chest as I realize that I could be looking at my children right now, all four of them laid out before me like they’ve always belonged there.
“Damn, I could have used you all around when I first had them.” She laughs. “I had no idea what I was doing at first. Well, next to none, anyway.”
“I thought you were training to be a kindergarten teacher,” I remark, furrowing my brow. “You didn’t pick up anything useful there?”
“Oh, you can learn all you want about kids, but when it actually comes to having them, it’s an entirely different story,” she replies, shaking her head. “And try multiplying that by four right off the bat. I had no clue what I was doing. I was just trying tokeep myself from losing my mind the first few months. I think I knew it was going to be that difficult, on some level, because I finished up college early and came back to Devin Ridge when I found out I was pregnant.”
Neither of us are broaching the topic of how she fell pregnant, but that’s fine by me. The truth doesn’t need to come out yet, not until she’s willing to share it.
“That bad, huh?”
“No, not bad,” she replies, shaking her head as she leans her arm on the window, and I take the turn back toward her house. “I loved that first year, I really did. Seeing all of them go from tiny little newborns into toddlers with their own personalities…”
She looks back over her shoulder fondly, a smile lighting up her face as she sees Chuck who’s still holding the glove I gave him.
“It was amazing,” she confesses. “But exhausting too. And it didn’t exactly get any easier after that, because I started work when they were eighteen months?—”
“You work too?” I reply, unable to keep the shock out of my voice.
She cocks an eyebrow at me, like it should have been obvious. “Of course I do,” she replies. “Not like I wanted to sit on my ass doing nothing with the degree I worked so hard to get, right? And I didn’t want to teach the kids that there was no life outside the house. If they didn’t see me working, who would be able to show them that they could go after their own career if they wanted to?”
“So you spent all day at home with a bunch of kids,” I remark, screwing up my face as I try to make sense of it, “and then youstarted working at a place that would leave you around everyoneelse’skids every day?”
“Something like that.” She giggles. “But I don’t see it that way. I went through a crash course in toddlers by raising my own, right? So nothing any of those kids can throw at me comes close to the stress of that first year of being a mom. I was inoculated against it.”
