I slide my phone into my pocket. This text message has been Wyatt’s fifth offering to come over tonight. I already told him no four times at the office. I won’t bother responding to this one.
Nia looks at me as she sets the dinner table at her parents' house. This has become a monthly tradition that I’ve come to enjoy. On the third Friday of each month, we drop the kids off at her parents’ for the weekend. Her brother does the same with his boys, and we have dinner together. Dinner is always Chinese takeout. When we pick the kids up on Sunday afternoon, we have dinner together again, but that’s a homemade meal cooked by my mother-in-law.
I wink at her from across the room. She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She’s worried about me, and I don’t want that. It’s my job to worry about and take care of my family, not theother way around. She’s been watching me all week, and I know she’s vented to Wyatt about it, even though he denied it.
I cross the room and help her set the table.
“It’s my job to worry about you, not the other way around,” I whisper to her.
“How did you come up with that?” she asks. “Last time I checked, this marriage thing is a partnership. You don’t have a monopoly on worry, Paradise.” She pokes my chest with her finger for good measure.
I take her hand and kiss the back of it.
The doorbell rings, and moments later, Nia’s father and brother come into the kitchen with two big, brown paper bags with the local Chinese food restaurant logo. As Nathanial Nash puts his bag down, Priya lifts her arms so he will pick her up.
“Dadadadada,” she says when she sees me.
“Papa,” Nia’s father says, correcting her. When he kisses her cheek, she shrieks with joy. He puts her down and she stands on one of his feet and wraps herself around his leg.
“Let’s eat, and the three of you can leave so I can bond with my grandchildren.” He points at Nia, me, and Ray when he says that, but he’s smiling. “And what’s eating him?” he asks, pointing at me. “Did someone kick your dog? They better not touch a hair on my grand dog’s head.” Just as he says it, Pixie barks from the other room. Nia’s parents take the dog on their weekend too because Pixie is their first grand dog, and they won’t exclude her.
Shocked that Nia’s father noticed my mood, I say, “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh. Usually, you’re in here talking nonstop about work or on the phone with that fool talking nonsense. Or worse, you’ll put him on FaceTime with the kids, and he’ll talk to them about vampires or some crap. Remember when they talkedabout flying cockroaches for about an hour? That grossed me out for a week. I don’t know where you found that clown.”
“I’ll be sure to let Wyatt know you think he’s a fool,” I say with a genuine smile. “And that you think about him so much.”
“I’ve told him to his face he’s a fool,” he says. “But what’s wrong?”
I stare at Nia and then look back at him. It’s been a long road for us to go from hostile to cordial. When I blackmailed Nia into marriage, I did it by threatening her father. Not only that, but I also intimated that I would get him fired from his job as a detective and threatened to make sure he lost his pension.
Nia shrugs. Many people know what my father did. Her family knows, as does mine, but only four people know about the video and letter. Nia would not tell anyone, so I know her father only picks up on my mood.
“And for God’s sake,” her father says, “don’t tell me it’s nothing. I might be retiring in a few months, but I’ve been a detective for a long time. I know how to read people, and I can tell when someone is lying.”
“It’s not nothing,” I say, clearing my throat. “It’s something that I need to deal with, but I’d rather not talk about it. At least not yet.”
He looks at me for a few seconds before he nods.
“Fair enough, but I have one question before I let this drop. Will whatever this is negatively affect my daughter and grandchildren?”
I stare into his face as I think of what to say. My first impulse is to tell him to stay out of it and that I can handle my family, but my family is his too. We’ve come a long way, but for years, he stepped up and did what I was supposed to do for Nia and Carter. I understand how he feels about them. If the same thing happened to Priya, I wouldn’t be as gracious as Mr. Nash.
“Never,” I say. “I would never let anything affect my family negatively, and I hope you would have learned that about me by now. They will be fine.”
“Does my daughter know whatever this is?”
“That’s two questions,” I say with a laugh. When all he does is give me a blank stare, I say, “Of course she does. I don’t keep secrets from her. We’ve had too much between us.” That’s one thing we don’t do. We tell each other everything, regardless of what it is. The other thing that we never do is fight. We did enough fighting in the first month of our marriage to last ten lifetimes.
“Good.” He taps my shoulder. “Let’s eat.”
Chapter 6
Drake
It’s late when we get home. After dinner, the boys put on a movie, and Carter wanted us to stay. The kids had their sleeping bags in the living room, and Priya stayed on her grandfather’s chest until she fell asleep.
Instead of going to the family home, we do what we always do when the kids are with Nia’s parents for the weekend. We go to our old penthouse. This is the house we spent most of our time in when we were together all those years ago. After we got married, we came here to live.