Forevermore (21 page)

Her head tilted back with even more pride because she knew she was the influence behind Caleb’s interest in running. Nothing like an Olympic bronze medalist in the heptathlon to inspire a young man’s mind. Especially when he worshipped her to begin with. “When are the next events? I called Bri about it, but she couldn’t find the schedule when we talked.”

I tried not to let my surprise show. “You want to go?”

“Sure. It’s no secret we like your kids.” She leaned down with a teasing smile and looked like she might bump my shoulder. I almost took a step back but didn’t need to because this was Jessie. Once when she’d been my personal trainer, she tried to correct my form by placing her hands on my shoulder and side. I flinched so hard she jumped back a foot. She never tried touching me again.

“Saturday morning for soccer and Caleb’s running Tuesday night. I’ll text you the times and places.” The kids would be thrilled to see Jessie at their activities. I was again amazed by how good a friend she could be when most of the friends gave her a hard time for being casual about so many things.

A minute after Jessie left to teach her spinning class, Willa showed up. A gym bag dangled from one elbow as she finished slipping her other arm through a light blazer. “Ready?”

We’d just spent an hour on various weight machines. It used to be free weights, but we’d have to spot each other. Now we preferred the machines so we could work out together and not worry about adding and subtracting weights along the way.

I nodded and fell into step with her. “Do you have time for coffee before work?”

She glanced at me as we exited. Her eyes shot back to the door. She was probably wondering why I waited until we’d left before proposing coffee. We could have gotten it at the little stand inside. “Sure, Caroline’s?”

“Uh,” I hesitated and thought about how busy Caroline’s deli would be right now. “Someplace a little quieter.”

She came to a full stop and turned. Her brown eyes swept over me briefly before nodding. “Want to grab a coffee and head back to my house?” She read my mind and added, “Quinn’s off to work already.”

“Your place, yes.”

We got into my car, stopped at a drive thru coffee place, and made the short drive back to her house where I’d picked her up earlier. She chatted about Quinn’s best recruit this year, somehow knowing I wasn’t ready to start the conversation I’d asked for.

When she let us inside, she followed me toward her living room. “Please say you’re not moving?”

I pushed out a relieved breath. “Not moving.”

“Oh, good.” She turned and dropped onto the sofa with a sigh. “You had me scared there.”

Her words warmed my heart. She was such a good friend to me. From the moment we met at her office when I brought my first operations class to see how her company worked, through the years of hanging out with just each other, to being forced to become part of her group when I met Briony, Willa had been the best friend I’d ever had. That she’d be upset if I moved was a wonderful and very welcome thing.

She took a sip of her latte and waited me out. She almost never rushed me.

“As long as nothing goes wrong with the home study, Olivia’s adoption could finalize in a few months, maybe sooner.”

She nodded like I hadn’t already told her this. When I didn’t offer more, she encouraged, “That’s great.”

“Yeah.” Amazing and more than I could have hoped for in my life. “She’s taking my name.”

Willa popped forward in her seat. “M, that’s great. Really great. I thought with her birth mom and everything that she’d want to keep her last name.”

“Me, too, but I guess her mom wasn’t too fond of the name to begin with and with her grandparents being…”

“Pig-headed dicks?” Willa guessed with a smirk.

“Pretty much, so I guess that was part of it, but she really wants to be part of the family.”

A frown creased her forehead. “But Caleb has Briony’s name.”

“She thinks it’ll combine us all even more.”

“She’s smart, that one.”

“She’s the best.”

“Olivia Desiderius,” she mused. A smile appeared as her thumb tapped her chin twice. “Sounds just right. Congratulations, M. I said it before, but you’ve done a wonderful thing here, and it’s all the better because she’s just as wonderful.”

I tucked my chin against my chest. “Anyway, that will make her officially ours and with that…” I tried to piece together what I wanted to say. I’d rehearsed it, but it wasn’t coming out smoothly. I should have let Briony come with me, but I thought it might add too much pressure on Willa. I needed her to give me an honest answer not a pressured one. “I wanted to ask you…”

“Yes?” She sat forward, her eyes earnest.

“This is harder than I thought.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

I tried to keep from scoffing in disbelief. “You can’t know that.”

“What did I tell you about personal favors for friends?”

That she’d always do them. “But this is more than just a favor.”

“I know you’d never ask me for something I can’t or won’t give. I’d never do that you to either.”

“This is,” I didn’t finish. I needed to shut up and stop convincing her that she’ll decline. “Since Olivia will be ours legally, I don’t want her to worry about…that is, Briony says her parents would, but if Caleb is with one of his aunts and Briony’s parents are older, and Olivia doesn’t really know them yet, and what if it happened before she did?” Now I was just talking in circles. This wasn’t any better.

“M?” she waited for me to focus on her. “That sounds like you’re talking about guardianship. Are you asking me to be Olivia’s guardian if something happens to you and Briony?”

“Yes, I am. We are,” I corrected because Briony was worried, too. Caleb’s guardianship was settled, but with Olivia barely knowing Briony’s parents right now, we had to think what might work best for her. “Olivia’s only met Briony’s parents once. They’ll be down for the adoption signing and we’ll be back at Christmas, but if something happened to us before she really got to know them…” I looked up to catch Willa’s understanding nod. “I want her to have a choice.”

Willa pulled in on her bottom lip, a sign she was thinking. Nothing in her expression told me she wanted me to leave right now after making such an outrageous request.

“It’s just, I can’t allow for her not to have someone. I can’t leave that up in the air. And please know that you don’t have to agree. This is a major decision. I want her to have an option besides Briony’s parents. I can’t let her go through this ever again. I had to—” I cut myself off before I told her too much. I’d never told anyone but Briony about being in foster care. Willa might have guessed, especially since I didn’t talk about what it was like for me growing up. Sure, she could have guessed, but I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it.

“You don’t want her to be relegated to foster care again. I don’t either,” she agreed quietly, looking off through the French doors to her pool deck. It was one of the reasons I was asking her to be Olivia’s guardian rather than Briony’s suggestion of Jessie. Sure, Jessie hung out with the kids, was basically a big playmate for Caleb, and obviously adored them. But Willa loved the kids, Olivia specifically. I could see it in the way she talked to them. In the way she walked with them, always making sure she knew exactly where they were whenever we were out together. How it mattered what they were doing, if they were having fun, and if they were getting everything they needed to be happy.

“Just, if you could consider it, please. You obviously have to talk to Quinn, but consider it.”

She let out a long breath. “I don’t need to. I’d be honored to take care of her if the worst happened.”

Just like that? This wasn’t Briony I was talking to. Willa considered things. Took time. Didn’t have kids for a reason. Then again, she knew exactly what she’d be getting with Olivia. Maybe it was that easy. It certainly had been for me. “That’s…thank you, but I know you need to talk to Quinn.”

“Do I?” she asked with a grin. “Would you have to ask Briony?”

Would I? No. If I wanted to take on the guardianship of another child, she wouldn’t stop me. Should I? Yes, but again, it wouldn’t be necessary. Briony was like that. Apparently Quinn was, too.

“M, you don’t need to worry about Olivia. She will always have options and family. If you and Briony are sure about this, I’d like to meet her parents again. If something were to happen, we’d need to work together for Olivia’s sake. She can stay temporarily or permanently, whatever she wants. She’ll never be without a choice or a home again.”

God, I wanted to hug her. I’d never wanted to hug anyone other than Briony and the kids, but now I wanted to hug my friend. My best friend, who listened to my greatest fear and made it go away. I felt tears push heavily against my eyes.

“If we did take over guardianship, don’t worry on my end. If something happens before she’s out on her own and Briony’s parents aren’t in a position to take her in, she’ll have my sister or my mom, and as a last resort, my lame-ass brother, who’s only a lame-ass as a brother, but a great father to my nephew.”

I really wanted to hug her. This friend of mine. Everything I’d thought about, wanted to go through with her, for the security of Olivia’s future, she just talked through.

“Thank you, Willa.”

My hand reached out on its own. It was a full second before my brain caught up and yanked it back. The space between us seemed to stretch for miles but wasn’t more than a few feet. I could do this. I should do this. It wasn’t enough to just thank her. With both brain and hand working together, I reached out again. My fingers curled over the top of her hand, palm resting flat. The initial static shock pulsed through leaving a slight tingling in my fingers, but I forced my hand to remain gripping hers. I waited for the next sensation of pain, like badly scraped palms, but it never came. Amazing.

“M,” Willa said softly and squeezed my hand in return. This was the first time I consciously touched my friend, and bless her; she didn’t make a big deal about it.

“You’re a good friend,” I told her. “Always so good to me.”

“Same here, the best, actually.” She smiled.

I pulled my hand back, setting it on my thigh. “Talk to Quinn, even if you don’t have to, please do. We’d like to have Lauren re-do our wills as soon as the adoption goes through.”

“I will. Tonight. No need to worry. She adores Olivia as much as I do.”

I stood and she did the same. The conversation went exactly as I’d hoped. Better than I thought it would. As amazing as my life had been over the last few years, I shouldn’t be surprised when things worked out better than I expected anymore.

M’s EPILOGUE

Two Months Later

The alarm on my laptop beeped. I glanced at the clock, amazed that it was almost time for dinner. I had one more paper to grade, but I didn’t care. Before I would have plowed through, would have worked until I’d forgotten to eat, until my eyes closed from exhaustion. I’d fallen asleep at my desk many nights before Briony came into my life. I didn’t need to keep working. I would get the paper done tomorrow before my first class. I didn’t let anything get in the way of spending time with Briony and the kids.

Shutting down the laptop, I stretched and popped out of the chair. I straightened up the desk in case Briony needed to get some work done later. When we moved into this place, we had two separate offices, but once Olivia came to live with us, we started sharing the den downstairs. I wasn’t sure I could do that, but Briony mostly gets her work done in the living room and rarely needs to use the office when I need to.

I headed upstairs to check on the kids. Caleb was lounging on the loveseat in the bonus room at the top of the stairs. He was fidgeting and tapping his pencil on the pad of paper that sat on the coffee table. He had a desk in his room, but he usually liked to do his homework out here.

“I hate algebra!” he declared as soon as he saw me coming up the stairs. The petulance that had surfaced at times over the summer had vanished. Spending time with his grandparents and cousins had helped, but it was having our family whole again that really brought back the considerate boy I knew and loved. “Don’t say I’m going to need this when I get older, M. I don’t buy it.”

I smiled. That was his mom’s favorite saying when he pushed back on his homework. “Unfortunately, your mom’s right on this one.”

“Will there ever be anything I learn that I won’t need?”

“Geography.”

His eyes popped because I’d actually given him an answer. “Seriously?”

“It’s nice to know countries and locations, but you’ll find it changes over time. Europe has several more countries now than when I studied geography in school. So memorize all you like, but it’ll change by the time you get to my age.”

“Ancient?” he joked.

“Decaying,” I confirmed. “Need help yet?”

He shook his head and sighed dramatically as he looked back at his book.

“Dinner will be ready soon,” I reported and turned to head into Olivia’s bedroom. She preferred to sit at her desk for homework unless she needed help, then she’d bring her books to the dining table. We had a rule that they needed to try to get their homework done on their own at first. “How’s it going in here?”

Olivia looked up from her textbook and smiled. She had two rulers placed on the book to help keep her place when she read. It was a technique I’d done research on when Briony and I recognized some of Olivia’s learning blocks. We hadn’t had her tested for dyslexia yet because we wanted her to settle into this family unit with us. We knew she felt inadequate academically and didn’t want to inflate that notion by making her take a test that would confirm a learning disability. In the seventh grade, it wouldn’t make much difference to have it verified. We’d wait until next year before testing and seeking a specialized tutor.

“Almost done. Just two more pages,” she said. “Did you know that Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times by some of the senators he worked with?”

I walked up behind her and looked down at the world history text she was reading. “I’d heard that, yes. Did you know that we have Julius Caesar to thank for revising the calendar to follow the solar year, not the lunar cycle? And that the first of the year wasn’t always January first?”