Page 71 of Six of Hearts
Twenty-Two
Noah
A Week Later
The past seven days had been the longest of my life. Every morning felt like wading through concrete, trying to maintain some semblance of routine for the boys while everything inside me screamed that something vital was missing.
I'd burned toast, forgotten pickup times, and caught myself staring at my phone more times than I could count, hoping for a message that never came.
"No, Daddy! That's not the way Aria does it!"
Theo's shrill voice piercing my thoughts caused me to drop the bowl in my hand, sending it sailing to the ground and shattering upon impact. I'd been his father for six years, Aria had been his nanny for two months, yet somehow I was making his cereal wrong.
"Well, Aria's not here, is she?" I snapped. Theo recoiled, and I immediately felt terrible. Tears started to gather in the corners of his eyes, and I crouched down and pulled him into a hug.
"I'm sorry, buddy. I got frustrated. That wasn't fair to yell at you."
What Theo didn't know was that I missed Aria just as much as he did, if not more. I hadn't fully explained her prolonged absence to the twins, or any of the children for that matter.
Whenever they asked about her, I just told them that she was taking some time for herself and would be back soon.
I hated telling them that, not just because they didn't really want to accept it as an answer, but because I had no idea if that was true or not. We had no idea where she had gone, and even once we found her, there was no guarantee that she was going to come back to us.
Ronan had kept some pretty huge secrets, and even if we could convince her that he didn't kill his ex-wife, he had kept his real name from her; that kind of thing wasn't easy to forgive.
I allowed Oliver to hand-hold me through doing some things the way Aria would do it to help the boys adjust, but the truth was that they felt what all of us dads had felt; Aria was the one.
She was the link that was missing in our family, and with her being gone, all of us could feel it. The kids were less happy, the dads were less happy, and we were taking it out on one another. Once the kids were off to school, I decided to call an emergency meeting of the dads. We had to figure something out; we needed our cornerstone back.
Gabriel was walking through my kitchen, opening and closing cabinets when he arrived that afternoon.
"What the hell, Noah?"
"What?" I replied.
"Where's all the booze?" he asked, his frustration evident.
"It's 10 o'clock in the morning," Ethan responded.
Gabriel whipped around on his heel.
"Hey Ethan, look at me." He was pointing a pair of fingers towards his eyes. "Look into my eyes."
"I'm looking at you," Ethan replied, shaking his head.
"I don't give a damn what time of day it is. I want a drink," Gabriel said, then turned his gaze to me.
"Well?"
"Aria has been gone for a week. You think I have booze left?" I responded. "I've been drinking it like water."
It was true. I tried to be careful with my alcohol intake, as both my father and my grandfather had developed alcoholism later in life, but I was missing my woman, I needed something to stifle the pain.
"I've been having it delivered daily," Julian said.
"I can't get over it. I've been with dozens of women. Why does this one hurt so bad?"
"Because she was everything," Ronan added, with a thick sadness to his voice. "She was perfect, and I ruined it." His head drooped low. "I'm so sorry—"
