Page 39 of Hero for the Holidays

“I’m not. It’s different than it was with your sisters. My family already knows I have a kid. And hey, don’t you think it would be fun to absolutely shock my brothers? Especially Denver.”

Fia and Denver had worked together getting the new iteration of the ranch up and running. He remembered feeling jealous about that. And he and Fia had broken up two years earlier. But old habits died hard with her.

He could see she was tempted by that. “You just want to ambush them with me?”

“A lot of people suspect that something happened with us back in the day. It’s not like we were subtle. It’s not like we’ve been subtle a day since.”

“Well,” said Fia, “I haven’t been.”

“True. Mostly, it’s you.”

He looked at her, and he realized maybe for the first time how strange it was. That for a year of his life she had been the only thing he thought about. And that together they had created a situation that had nearly destroyed them as people. And then they’d acted like it hadn’t happened. They’d never spoken about it. They hadn’t talked to each other. They had just stopped being that piece of each other’s life.

It was crazy. It really was crazy.

And now she would be part of it again. A key part.

And that almost felt right.

Even if he couldn’t explain it.

“What time are you going to bring Lila over?”

“Two o’clock?”

“That works for me.”

He nodded. “Then when you come for dinner, you can just bring her with you.”

“I would like that.”

“All right. Hey.” He spread his hands. “Look at us. We had a conversation without having an explosion.”

“Pretty mature of us, I think.”

“Yeah. I would say.”

“All right. I’ll see you later,” she said.

“Yeah. See you.”

He congratulated himself on two things when he left Fia’s house. That he hadn’t yelled. And that he hadn’t kissed her.

He had been more tempted to do one than the other.

FIAFELTNERVOUS. How did you prepare to have your kid at your house for the first time? All of this was just so very strange.

Because of course for Lila, this would never be the same kind of mother-daughter relationship she’d had with Melissa. But it would be all Fia knew. All she understood.

A completely unique experience.

And she really wanted Lila to like the house. She wanted, on some level, for Lila to be impressed by what she had built. So that Lila would understand why Fia had made the choices she did.

And she obsessed about it all day until Landry pulled up in her driveway. She felt like it was kind of a bad precedent that she was back in a space where seeing Landry’s truck caused the whole earthquake inside her body. But at least this was about Lila and not about him. She waited outdoors, twisting her hands. Lila got out of the car, with her phone and another handheld device of some kind in her hand, along with a stuffed animal, and what looked like a plastic, segmented slug.

And Fia suddenly realized that while she had once been a teenage girl, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with a teenage girl at this moment in time.

Landry shut the truck door behind Lila, his movements effortless as he came up behind her. And she had some weird kind of schism. A sensation like they were in a life they might’ve had, but never quite made it to. Not one where they were together. But like they were doing some kind of custody exchange.

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