***
Nine hours later, I was parking my loaded-down Tahoe under the carport of what looked to be a brand-new house. It wasn’t a grand house or anything, but you could tell it was new. There were still stickers on the window denoting the manufacturer. The grass was still in squares where they had taken the sod off of a pallet and rolled them over the dirt of the yard to grow.
Then there was the dumpster that was still on the street. A dumpster that was filled with so much crap that it likely needed to be emptied long before now.
“Mom, why can I see all the way inside that house?” Sienna asked worriedly.
My lips twitched. She was so much like her daddy that it was uncanny.
I saw Tunnel in her every single day, and the more she grew up, the more I saw it.
If I were being honest, it was sad sometimes. It made my heart break to see her do the same things as her daddy.
“Because it doesn’t look like there are any curtains up, yet,” I supplied the answer. “It was likely a very new house, and they just acquired it for us. It’s pretty, isn’t it?
“Yeah, I guess. You could plant some flowers in that flower bed right there,” she pointed to the front walk where there was a flower bed, sans flowers.
“I could,” I agreed, happy that she was semi-on board for this new venture.
Though she hadn’t said as much. She was still upset about leaving her house, where her daddy had made her a bed and painted her room, to be overly excited about this new one.
My stomach clenched at the memory of that bed.
I’d helped with the bed, of course, but only enough as to offer Tunnel help where he needed it.
He’d made her an exact replica of a princess bed.
It had huge columns that represented turrets, and a peak on top of the built-in bookcase that resembled a roof. Then there was the paint—that was a masterpiece in and of itself.
It was painted gray, and Tunnel had painstakingly painted darker gray blocks on the entire expanse of the wood walls of the bed, making it look exactly like a castle would look if you were staring at the exterior.
And the icing on the castle-bed cake was the tiny flagpoles at the top of each bookshelf with pink streamers flying from them that blew in the breeze of the room’s ceiling fan.
“Well, let’s go inside already,” Sienna grumbled under her breath, another thing she did like her father.
“Okay, honey,” I agreed, fishing the keys out of my pocket.
My eyes lit on a tiny dot of pink on the top of the key, and my heart skipped a beat.
That had also been something that Tunnel had done for me.
I had a ton of keys. One to my house. One to my car. One to Tunnel’s truck. One to the storage shed. One to the trailer lock. One to the trailer. And so the list went on.
After about the fortieth time that I’d had to go through all the keys on my key ring—and yes, I was more than aware that they were all different looking—Tunnel had put dots on all of my keys, color coding them to coordinate with the locks.
I still had the colors on my key rings, though I had to refresh them every couple of years since Tunnel had done it.
That had been a heartbreaking moment, and surprisingly, one that had sent me into a tailspin of depression that took a while to climb out of.
If it wasn’t for my daughter, Tunnel’s daughter, I’d be doing a lot worse than I was doing right now.
I heaved myself out of the car and walked up to where Sienna was waiting impatiently by the carport door, looking at me like her father used to: with bemused impatience.
“Sorry, baby,” I apologized, slipping the key into the lock.
It turned easily, and I pushed the door open.
The alarm by the door immediately started to beep, and I typed in a code to turn it off.
“How did you know the code?” Sienna asked as she pushed past me.
“Silas gave that to me along with the keys,” I answered, not willing to admit that the code was another number that was heart stoppingly familiar.
The anniversary of when Tunnel and I met. It was just four numbers, but those four numbers, 0804, would be forever etched in my brain.
Though it was a coincidence, I didn’t wish to examine it any further because it made my heart hurt, so I walked into the living space and stared.
“This house is tiny,” Sienna murmured.
I looked around at the sparse house. It wasn’t bad. She was right, though. It was sort of small. But since it was only her and me, it would be just fine. Especially since it had three bedrooms.
Sienna walked down the hall to explore, and I walked over to the countertops.
They are lovely, I thought, as I ran my hand over them.
A memory assaulted me, too fast for me to brace for it.
“Babe,” Tunnel said, standing in the middle of the cabinet department at Home Depot. “This is your domain, not mine. If you want black fuckin’ countertops, we’ll get you black fuckin’ countertops.”
My mouth dropped open. “Tunnel Angelo Morrison! You did not just say that to me.”
My man grinned, and acted like he hadn’t just committed the biggest faux pas any man could commit.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Minnie. I was just telling you to get what you want, that’s all.” He held up his hands.
I continued to glare, even though I really wanted to laugh instead.
This man of mine, he didn’t care if what he said was considered ‘politically correct.’ All he cared about was getting his point across.
And I cared that Tunnel was my man. I didn’t care that he could be crass and so bluntly honest sometimes that he often came off as an asshole. This man of mine just didn’t sugar-coat things, and frankly, I was glad that he didn’t.
It was important to me that one always be truthful, even if it would hurt less to lie.
Such as right now.
“Tunnel, you’re so freakin’ annoying,” I told him. “Sometimes, I just want to take you to the back of the store and knock some sense into you with my fists.”
He looked at said fists.
“Minnie, you can’t even kill a fly with a fuckin’ fly swatter,” he told me. “How the fuck do you think you’re going to knock around a man who is twice your size and knows how to take a punch?”
I wouldn’t let my mind hang on to the fact that he knew how to take a punch. He was a police officer. He was, indeed, trained to take a punch, but that wasn’t where he learned to take one.
No, he learned to take one from his old man who took delight in beating the shit out of him. When it came down to it, Tunnel would willingly submit to a beating as long as his sister wasn’t touched.
“Can I help you both with anything?”
That came from a timid young woman decked out in jeans, boots, and a bright orange Home Depot vest.
“Yes,” I said, letting my hands smooth down lazily along my hips as not to reach out and show my husband what I could do with my fist. “I want to get these black quartz countertops with the blue flecks in them. How do we go about doing that?”
“Thank fuckin’ Christ,” Tunnel muttered under his breath.
I glared at the man, and he shut up, but his lips continued to twitch as he tried to hold his smile away.
“I can help you with that,” the woman muttered.
“Well, let’s fuckin’ hope so, honey. You do work here.”
I looked at the ceiling. “Tunnel, don’t make me come over there.”
“Come on over, baby. I’d love for you to show me what you’re workin’ with.”
“Mom!” Sienna screeched. “Come look at this room!”
I looked away from the black countertops. The same black countertops that I’d chosen for my own house, but I had never gotten because Tunnel had passed the next week.
“Coming!” I called out, my heart in my throat at the memory.
God, I miss you, Tun.
Sienna was out in the hallway jumping up and down on the tips of her toes. “Hurry!”
Then she walked into the bedroom that I assumed would be hers, and squealed. “It has a princess bed, Mom!”
My heart clenched.
“It does?” I was surprised.
“And games and toys, oh look! A doll like the one Daddy bought me!”
I looked at the doll she was holding up in her hands. It was an American Girl doll, and one of the only things I was ever able to keep nice since Sienna was rough on all of her toys.
But that had been out of necessity on my part. I wanted her to have something from her father that she could look at in twenty years and not be embarrassed to show it to anyone.
“It’s beautiful, baby,” I murmured quietly. “You’ll have to thank them for their generosity.”
She beamed at me. “I love it!”
Then she was doing something in the closet, and I chose to look at the rest of the room.
The club had gone above and beyond when it came to decorating Sienna’s room.
She had everything in here that she could ever want or need.
This was getting weirder and weirder by the minute.
First my countertops, now Sienna’s room.
I was, quite honestly, scared to look at the rest of the house.
But that wasn’t the hardest part.
No, not seeing the colors that I would’ve decorated my own house in. Not even the bathroom done up exactly how I’d spoken with Tunnel about doing ours.
The hardest part was lying in the bed later that night, smelling my husband for the first time in forever and crying my heart out. That, my friends, was the worst.