Page 30 of Hero for the Holidays

Lila’s stare cut right through him. “So you’ve been mad at her all this time?”

“Yes. But with this also... I felt like she didn’t give me a choice. So I didn’t give her one. And I’m sorry. Because that was a game that I put you in the middle of. I guess that kind of proves Fia’s point. In some ways I’m still not ready to be a dad.”

“You’ve been doing okay,” said Lila.

“You’re handling this well,” Landry said.

“What did you think I was going to do? Freak out? I mean, it’s surprising, but at the same time I always knew that I was adopted. I knew that you guys were out there. You were just theoretical. Because I didn’t need you.”

He tried to remember what Lila had said about that. He tried to remember the way she had accepted it, the way that it hadn’t offended her. It still made his chest burn a bit.

“I think maybe if I hadn’t known that I was adopted I would feel shocked and overemotional to meet my birth mother. But mostly, this is all just kind of surreal. But I...” He knew. She didn’t need to say it.

The shock had been finding out that both of her parents were dead. The shock had been going from the stable life she had to cycling through foster care. And on some level, some of this must still feel to her like she was just rotating through foster homes. What was Fia but yet one more woman offering to take care of her for a time? It was going to take time for her to really feel like this was permanent. It was going to take time for all of this to really sink in.

Maybe they would be able to become some kind of family. Maybe they wouldn’t. It was really hard to know. What he knew was that he was committed. And after tonight he knew Fia was too. So they just had to figure this out. And not kill each other in the process. For Lila’s sake.

CHAPTER SIX

FIAHADTOtalk to her sisters and it couldn’t wait.

She was... She was still in a state of shock. Her entire body felt raw and hollowed out. She’d done her crying. At least for today. She’d managed to go and talk to Lila, and say all the things that she turned over inside of herself for all of these years. When she had imagined explaining to her child exactly why she had made the choice she did, those were the words.I wasn’t looking for you.

It was both healing and wounding to hear that.

But that, in her experience, was adoption.

Knowing that she had been able to give her baby a better life had made her feel good. She’d been so anxious about how she was going to care for a child, about what she was going to do, and once she’d made the decision to find a couple who really wanted her, and were ready, all of it had gone away. But there was still a part of herself that was missing. And that she carried. She hadn’t talked to other women about their experiences, because she had kept it a secret. She had decided that reading about experiences or trying to find out what other people thought on message boards online and things like that was probably a futile exercise.

The truth was, she had figured out a way to carry around the love that she felt for Lila without feeling sad all the time. At first, Lila’s birthday had been difficult. And at a certain point, it had been a day that she marked within herself in the morning when she woke up, but it didn’t create sadness.

The thought of it now did, though, because Lila had turned thirteen in foster care. Without her parents.

She had become a teenager in this weird space where she had no place to call home, and no one to call a caregiver in a permanent sense.

She and Landry should fix that.

She and Landry.

It really was unavoidable. They were linked now. Inextricably. There was quite literally no way out of this. She texted each of her sisters, and asked if they could meet her at the farmhouse. They all lived within minutes of the place. Gideon and Rory were the farthest afield, about fifteen minutes off the ranch and down the road.

But she signed the text offurgent, and they came. Quickly.

“What’s going on?” Quinn asked as soon as they were seated in the living room.

“I have... I have something to tell you. And I don’t know how any of you are going to react to it. I... I don’t how to say this.”

“The suspense is quite literally killing us,” said Alaina.

“It’s notliterallykilling you, Alaina,” said Rory. “Or you would be quieter.”

“Sorry. I hate that. I hate when people do that. I’m really not trying to preface this with a lot of words, but is just... Well, you always wanted to know what happened between me and Landry.”

“Oh my gosh,” said Quinn.“Did you bang him?”

“Fourteen years ago. Yes.”

“Holy shit,” said Alaina. “That’s... You werebabies.”

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