With me.
This was…beyond anything I could’ve ever hoped to imagine.
Sure, she didn’t want to have a relationship.
But that was something I could work with.
I could make this work.
We could make this work.
She stood up and walked to the hall where she’d left her stuff, gathering it all up and standing at the door as she turned to look back at me.
We stared at each other for a long moment before she said, “And Boone?”
I swallowed hard. “Yes?”
“I don’t want your mother having any part in our baby’s life.” She backed up toward the door. “Not to hold her. Not to know anything about her. I want her nowhere near, or I’ll use every single cent I have in savings to fight you for her. Your mother comes anywhere near here, and you’ll regret it.”
With that announcement, she backed out of the house and shut the door.
My shoulders sank.
She would ask that.
The impossible.
Four
She’s really pleasant to be around unless she’s hungry, tired, hot, cold, thirsty, she can’t find her phone, or she’s otherwise slightly uncomfortable.
—Boone’s secret thoughts
Boone
“What do I do?” I asked my father.
He leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled over his expensive Armani tie.
“You have a few options,” he offered. “We push the plan forward and see what we can accomplish early, or we continue on with the long-term version of the plan. And you try to explain to Nettie what you’re trying to make happen, and hope that she works with you.”
Work with my mother?
Never.
It’d taken me a while, but eventually I’d caught my mother in her lie.
She had had something to do with Nettie’s miscarriage.
It wasn’t like I didn’t believe Nettie when she’d told me what she suspected.
I had.
I mean, if anyone could do something so evil, it would be her.
However, that wasn’t where her evil had stopped.
My mother’s evil had been leaps and bounds worse than her interference into my life—though that didn’t stop me from hating her for what she’d done to Nettie and me. When Dad and I had started digging into her life, we’d been appalled by what we’d found.
