Roman tilts his head. “What’s a secret smile?”
“It’s a smile you share with only one person,” Chase responds.
Roman hums in his seat, and then his eyes light up. “Like the one Erin gives to you?”
This time it’s me who sputters out coffee.
Brax folds his arms onto the table and arches his brow. “And how do you know what kind of smiles Erin gives to your uncle?”
“Erin smiles a lot, but when she smiles at Uncle Chasey, she gets a line right here,” he says and then stabs his cheek with his tiny pointer finger. “I’ve never seen it happen with anyone else other than him.”
I avert my eyes because I know Chase is really smug right about now, and I don’t need to look at him to know his lips are pulling into a smirk.
“Your Uncle Chasey and I have some grown up stuff to do soon, Roman. Do you want to show Erin your stuff before she gets too busy?”
Roman jumps off the chair and races to his room. A few moments later, he comes back with a book cradled in his hands.
He lays it open in front of me, and I take in the hand drawn family tree across two blank pages. I pick up the loose pictures.There’s one of Roman as a baby, Brax, Emma—his mom—and Dex—Emma’s fiancé. I laugh at one of Roman, Brodie, and Bella together with matching mohawks. I flick to the next one of Roman on Chase’s shoulders. The final one is Roman sitting in the goalie net with Austin. Oliver, Hayes, Rudy, and Jack are around them.
“I need your picture,” Roman says, and my head snaps to look at him and the camera in his hands.
My breath catches, and the page blurs for half a second.
“My picture?”
“You’re Uncle Chasey’s girlfriend so that makes you my family, which means you need a spot on my tree.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, you do,” Brax says, smiling gently.
A scrape of chair legs catches my attention. Chase pushes out of his seat and walks over to me. He takes my hand, pulls me out of mine, sits back down, then tugs me onto his lap, holding me closely to him.
“Smile, baby,” he says.
I look at Roman and pull my lips into a smile. As the flash goes off, a single thought enters my head.
They consider me family.
After breakfast, Roman disappears to play video games. Chase, Brax, and I gather around a laptop to watch the footage from Bakes by the Lakes that Elena pulled for Brax this morning. I’d asked if he could get it, but he’d already asked for it. As if he knew watching it would give me peace of mind.
Even though I heard my mother’s voice clear as day at the café, I have to see her. Maybe it’s absurd. Maybe it’s the part of me that wants to understand why she couldn’t love me, why I wasn’t worthy of anything other than her anger and spite. I’d heard her voice for years, thought I’d finally put her behind me,and then yesterday happened. Now I need to know why she’s really here.
I clutch a cushion to my stomach, regretting eating the waffles, even if they were delicious.
“Are you doing okay? You look a little pale,” Chase asks, taking my hand and pressing a kiss to my knuckles.
“Fine,” I say and turn to face the laptop screen.
The footage crackles to life, and the second her voice fills the room, my body goes ice cold. Her face appears next, and I take it in. She’s older, her features more defined but still unbearably familiar.
My skin prickles, the air thinning around me. For a moment, I forget how to breathe.
You can’t see my face in the footage, just my back, but it’s obvious I’m rooted in place. My back is stiff. Brax steps in and lifts me away a moment later as if it’s a regular thing for a six-foot-six man to appear out of nowhere and carry a damsel in distress away.
And then it ends, but the unsettling sickness in my stomach lingers long after the footage stops playing.
Despite the meltdown I was having at the far end of the bar and that man complaining without any reservations, she didn’t even glance my way.
