Page 39 of Always Be My Baby

“You know damn well what brought me to Lake Shores.”

“How did Lachlan even know about the Bible, if you didn’t remember you left it here?”

“I don’t know. I think he heard about it from my sister.”

Lee gasped and quickly recovered. “Your… Sister? I didn’t even know you had a sister. I don’t remember ever meeting any of your family. I just assumed you didn’t have any.”

“Yeah, she hated your mother. Told me not to get mixed up with her. Told me not to marry her. But did I listen? No. After graduation, the whole family moved down to Florida. And like an idiot, I stayed up here with your mother. Knocked her up three times before I got my head out of my ass.”

She grabbed my hand under the table and squeezed until I began to lose the feeling in my fingers. “And you thought—” She spoke in short, brisk, broken sentences. “It was fine—” She wore her pain in the narrowing of her eyes and the thinning of her lips. He might not have noticed, but I sure as hell did. “To leave yourthree kidswith a woman who couldn’t function?”

“Well, I’d already met Debbie by that time. And she sure as hell didn’t want to raise somebody else’s kids.”

When the tears began to rim her eyes, I shook off her hand gripping mine to take hers to comfort her and, if I were being honest, to keep me from reaching over the table and choking the life out of him. “We weren’tsomebody else’skids.” One solitary tear rolled down her cheek. “We wereyourkids.” She shook her head once, gaining control of her emotions and I envied the kind of strength she showed.

“I needed to start over. So I took Debbie and Lach down to Florida. My family agreed that cutting ties with the lot of you was the best thing to do. Last thing I needed was any more connection to your mother.”

Marilee’s body grew tight next to me. Her posture became rigid, her eyes glassy again, but this time out of anger, and I knew she was about a second and a half away from laying that guy out flat. “What do you want? Did you come here simply to hurt me?”

“I want my money. You give me money, I leave. We never have to see each other again.”

“I’m not giving you money.”

“Fine, be a bitch. If you’re not going to give me the money then at least you can drop the charges against Lach.”

“Iam notgiving you any money andLachcan rot in jail for however long they give him. But you Darren... you aregoing to leave. Like it or not, I’m still your daughter, if only by biology. You left that Bible with us twenty years ago. You paid no child support, you didn’t call, you didn’t write, you didn’t give us the time of day. All you left us was that damn Biblefor twenty years. It’s mine, it’s Tess’s, it’s Jimmy’s. And I can promise you will never get anything that was in that Bible back. Anything that might’ve been in it worth any money is long,longgone.”

The man’s face pinched and I’d swear that he snarled. In that moment I knew this wasn’t going to be the last we heard from him. He had trouble written all over him. I doubted it would be now. He showed up here because he lacked anything more than intimidation to try and force Marilee’s hand. A man like him, he could’ve never imagined the tenacity his abandonment fostered in her. He could never fathom the lengths I’d be willing to go to in order to spare her the pain from the trouble he had written all over him.

A man who’d so easily thrown his daughter aside had no idea the kind of loyalty she inspired.

“It’s time for you to go,” I said. “Lee and I are leaving now, and we better never hear from you again.”

“Go back to yourfamily,” Lee said. As the waitress approached, Marilee put her hand up and waved her away, shaking her headno. The waitress turned and left to go to another table as Lee and I stood, leaving that asshole, Darren Bell, sitting alone and fuming.

I held her hand as we walked back to the truck. “I’m fairly confident he has no legal recourse, but I think we should talk to an attorney just the same.”

“I agree.” This was said softly and she wouldn’t look me in the eye. “I’m sorry to bring you into my family drama yet again.”

I was tired of her apologizing and thus didn’t even give it a response. We had the Diagnostic Technologies party to prep for, and that was where my head space needed to be.

After work, I found a voicemail from Officer Dombrowski on my phone. He said Darren had paid the bail for Lachlan and they’d left. I was pretty sure that meant Lachlan wasn’t going to end up doing any time for the destruction of my house because I was more than pretty sure that he’d just become smoke on the wind. While Sawyer ran the kitchen for me for lunch and dinner service, and Lena continued on with her duties, Lee and I had time to start the preparation for the office party.

They’d specifically asked for our pork and lamb meatloaf, the quail stroganoff made with white pepper and chanterelle mushrooms, and our stuffed vegetable dumplings. It was an eclectic menu to say the least, but that was what they’d asked for.

By the time that Saturday night rolled around, Lee had the party room looking Oscar-ready. Golden glitz and glamour and everything you’d want an office party to be.

We brought Polk in as one of the servers for the party because everybody agreed he needed it the most—that, and he was a damn good server. Then we put Serena, and another server, Jay, on the floor too. In the events past, it would’ve been Lena, Serena, and Polk. But with Lena’s promotion, Lee had to give it to the next person in line.

And thank God for that because the party kept her busy enough to keep her mind off her father. We definitely needed a break from him.

Marilee

I’d been putting off talking about my father and Lachlan with Girard for a while now. I knew it irritated him every time I apologized, but I couldn’t help apologizing. They were in our lives because of me. How was I supposed to make up for that?

On the drive back to the bistro from Pearl’s Diner, Girard made a call to the restaurant’s attorney, Andrew Atherton. All businesses needed an attorney if only for contracts and the like, but restaurants especially needed one on retainer. We ran a clean, safe, upscale establishment, but even we weren’t totally safe from people attempting to swindle us out of our hard-earned cash by faking an accident and suing.

And anyway, Andrew was one of Girard’s poker buddies, which meant unless he was in a meeting, he’d take Girard’s call. Aside from contracts and lawsuits, he also dealt with estates and probates. So he had a fairly good idea of the ownership laws concerning that Bible. Andrew was a handy friend to have on call.

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