Now I was alone with them anyway.
I sat at the kitchen table, laptop open, staring at the budget spreadsheet I'd been maintaining since Zoe was born. The numbers glowed in the dim light, neat columns of income and expenses, debits and credits, the mathematical reality of my life laid bare in black and white.
The numbers didn't lie.
Rent: $1,847. Due in four days.
Utilities: $156. Past due.
Groceries: $340, if I was careful. $400 if Zoe needed anything extra.
Childcare: This was where it fell apart. Dani was back from Seattle, thank God, but she couldn't watch Zoe forever. I'd been leaning on her too hard, too long. Eventually, I'd need real childcare. Consistent childcare. The kind that cost money I didn't have.
The emergency fund line showed $200. That was it. Two hundred dollars between me and disaster.
And today, on the drive home from picking up Zoe, the car had made a sound. A grinding, groaning sound from somewhere deep in the engine.
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples.
Xavier's offer would solve everything.
The thought had been circling my mind all day. Every time I pushed it away, it came back. Every time I told myself no, the numbers on my spreadsheet said yes.
But Zoe.
I'd spent my whole life becoming the kind of mother I'd never had.
I didn't know my parents. Not really. I had a photograph somewhere, creased and faded, of a woman with dark hair and tired eyes holding a baby. My mother, supposedly. She'd left me at a fire station when I was three days old. No note. No name. No explanation.
The foster system had been my childhood. Seventeen years of different houses, different schools, different people who were paid to take care of me, and who mostly did the bare minimum. Some of them were kind. Most of them were indifferent. A few were worse.
I'd learned early that the only person I could count on was myself. That love was conditional, temporary, something that could be revoked at any moment. That asking for help meant giving someone power over you, and power always got abused in the end.
When I aged out at eighteen, I had a garbage bag full of clothes, a GED, and two hundred dollars in cash. No family. No safety net. No one who would notice if I disappeared.
I'd spent three nights in a bus station before a shelter had space. I'd worked two jobs, then three. I'd put myself throughcommunity college one class at a time, paying as I went because I didn't qualify for loans and didn't trust debt anyway.
And then I'd met Cole.
Cole, with his easy smile and his big promises. Cole, who made me feel like maybe I'd been wrong about people. Like maybe someone could actually love me.
He'd stayed long enough to get me pregnant. Then he'd vanished, and I'd learned the lesson I should have learned years ago: men said whatever they needed to say to get what they wanted, and when things got hard, they left.
Zoe was the only good thing that came from that mistake. The only thing I'd never regret.
Everything I did was for her. Every exhausting shift, every thankless task, every moment I pushed through when my body screamed for rest. I would not let her grow up the way I did. I would not let her feel unwanted or unloved.
Even if that cost me my pride.
Xavier's face surfaced in my mind. He'd been good with her. I couldn't deny that. Better than I'd expected, better than I'd wanted to admit.
But charming men were dangerous. I knew that better than anyone. They made you believe, made you trust, and then they disappeared when you needed them most.
Cole had been charming, too.
I shoved the thought down hard, closed my laptop, and went to bed.
Just as I was about to drift off to sleep, my phone buzzed. I picked it up, frowning at the unknown number on the screen.
