Chapter 19

Nobody told me being a mother was just being a tiny person’s snack bitch.

-Meme

Mina

I opened the car door of my SUV and grinned at my girl.

“Hey, baby,” I called to her. “How was your day?”

She pursed her lips. “It was okay. Evidence is not my favorite thing in the world to search for. I just wish we could give the death sentence to people that we know did wrong things.”

I stifled a laugh.

“What about if that person isn’t guilty?” I questioned her.

She shrugged.

Just like her father.

“What’s for dinner?” she pressed, ignoring my question.

“I was thinking a sandwich,” I said. “Sound okay?”

She shrugged. “I’d rather the leftovers from last night.”

I didn’t offer those because Tunnel and I had finished the rest of the enchiladas that I’d made for dinner last night during round one of reunion sex and round two.

“You can help me make some tamales when we get home,” I offered. “But I ate the leftovers for lunch.”

She huffed into a groan of disappointment. “I don’t like tamales.”

But your father does.

I couldn’t say that either, though.

Not yet.

We’d discussed it earlier, and we’d both agreed that we couldn’t tell Sienna about Tunnel until the threat of the truth getting to someone else was gone or this entire thing was over.

And right now, the case against Tunnel’s parents was still very much a large problem for us, and we weren’t going to expose our daughter to that. Hopefully not at all.

The moment I pulled into our driveway, five minutes later, I wasn’t surprised to find Tunnel sitting on the dirt outside of his trailer, holding a beer.

“Mommy, that’s our neighbor,” Sienna said confidently. “He’s very nice. I like him.”

That made my heart happy.

She didn’t know the significance of her liking him, but I did.

See, Sienna was picky when it came to people she was around. If you weren’t a member of the club or a teacher of hers, then this girl probably wasn’t going to like you.

She seriously detested all new people, and Josh had been no different.

I made a little finger wave at him before I got out of the car, and his lips twitched.

“You should invite him over for dinner,” she said authoritatively. “He always eats sandwiches.”

I knew that.

I’d watched him, too.

That was why I wanted to make him some tamales.

I hated the fact that he had to eat a sandwich.

See, the thing about Tunnel, was that he’s an absolute terror in the kitchen. My man, he tried to cook, but the inevitable always came true. He burned dinner. Or ruined it by adding too much salt. Or something distracted him, he forgot he was supposed to do something, and he never did it.

Unless it came to cooking on the grill—and he was a master at that. But only when it pertained to the grill, and the grill only.

People with ADHD got distracted easily.

Since it frustrated him beyond belief, I’d always done the cooking, even when I’d come home from a twelve-hour shift. Why? Because I didn’t want to see my man upset. If it made life easier for me to do the cooking, I would do it.

And knowing he was left to his own devices for six years left a hole in my heart the size of Texas.

“You should invite him to dinner,” Sienna repeated. “I like that he calls me Dee.”

My heart felt happy.

Sienna DeeAnn, my baby girl, didn’t know what she was offering Tunnel, or Ghost to her, by asking him over for dinner.

“Why don’t you go ask him while I go inside?” I said. “Tamales take a while to get prepared, and I have to lug all of these groceries in.”

Groceries that I knew would drive Tunnel insane to watch me carry inside the house while he was watching.

He always hated when I’d go to the store by myself. Especially when we lived in our apartment complex in Benton and I had to lug them up two flights of stairs.

My cat, Taco, twirled around my legs the minute I stepped out of the car, and immediately launched herself into my seat before I could close the door.

I just rolled my eyes and went to the back hatch, opening it easily and grabbing three bags in each hand.

“You better get out of my car before I get back or I’m leaving you in there,” I lied to the cat.

The cat eyed me from the dash, where she liked to lay, and flicked her tail in what I assumed was feline amusement.

Normally, the cat got out when she felt like it, but with the weather pushing eighty degrees right now, I didn’t want to lock her up in there and accidentally forget about her.

Turns out, after dropping the groceries inside, I didn’t need to worry about the cat, because she was outside, hissing at Tunnel, as he brought groceries in.

All of the groceries.

How did men do that?

I wished I had the capability to hold ten bags with one hand. And, three of those bags contained gallons of milk.

Chocolate milk to be exact.

My daughter loved her chocolate milk and wouldn’t drink the normal stuff.

Why? Because her father, the man currently staring at me with so much love in his eyes, didn’t like it either. He liked chocolate milk and only a certain type. Hence the reason our daughter loved only that certain kind, too.

“Uh, thank you,” I said, holding the door open when I got there.

Tunnel walked right in, Sienna trailing behind him with a bag of her own and the cat.

“Did you get the hatch closed?” I questioned as I looked back outside.

It was, indeed, closed.

I shook my head in amazement.

“Yeah,” Tunnel said. “Got it closed and got your cat out. She’s going to die, one of these days, of heat exhaustion if she’s not careful about getting in there.”

See, Tunnel and I were always on the same page.

“I know,” I said softly as I watched him move around the kitchen and start putting stuff away. “I tell her that all the time.”

Tunnel gave me a wistful look.

I knew that look.

Tunnel hated this cat and always had, since the day that the cat started hating him.

It was amusing to me, since the cat had no problem with me, but the moment that Tunnel came anywhere near Taco, the cat started to go nuts.

Tunnel opened the pantry up and started to put away items, being sure to leave all of the ingredients I would need for the tamales out.

I hadn’t told him I was making them, but once he saw all of the ingredients I would need to make them in the bags, he decided on his own that I would be making them tonight.

I started to giggle. “You’re terrible.”

He shrugged unrepentantly.

So that was how I ended up making tamales and getting my little girl to eat them when she’d always sworn she hated them, and I got to do it while I watched as my daughter fell for Tunnel all over again.