With a smile on my face, I watched as Hunter hurried over to be with his friends. It was so good to see him socializing, and he seemed to have relaxed a little in the last few days. My presence and Autumn’s had apparently been enough for him to start feeling safe again, which was all I’d really wanted. Karla would lose interest and back off soon enough, and for the time being, all that mattered was keeping focused on making sure Hunter felt loved and cared for.

I slipped inside the building and headed straight to Autumn’s classroom. I was hoping for a sneaky make-out before work, but when I opened the door, I found her friend Zoe in there with her.

“Well, speak of the devil.” Zoe planted her hands on her hips and looked at me.

“And what exactly have I done?” I grinned as I made my way over to Autumn and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. She beamed up at me.

“We were actually talking about your new program,” she told me. “The grading system? It’s been so useful, we actually have our weekends back.”

“If I’m not stealing them from you,” I pointed out playfully. “They’re doing the job, then?”

“Oh, they’re perfect.” Zoe nodded. “You need to roll it out across all the schools in the county. I can’t think how much time this might save teachers who really need it, you know?”

“That sounds like a great idea,” I said. “I’ll need to speak to my people and figure out the details, but if you think it’s worth it—”

“More than worth it,” Zoe urged. “And it would be big for you if you could get this into all the schools in the county, right?”

“Sure would.” I glanced at Autumn, who was beaming up at me delightedly. “But that’s not why I did it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know you did it for love or something like that.” She shook her head teasingly. I didn’t meet Autumn’s gaze. Neither of us had said that to each other yet, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to let that word come out of my mouth as part of Zoe lightly roasting us.

“Anyway, class is getting ready to start.” She glanced down at her watch. “I need to get out of here.”

“So do I.” I sighed apologetically to Autumn. “I want to head home and speak to the administrators about the program. If you like it so much, I want to get ahead of it before it spreads anywhere else.”

“You should.” Autumn waved her hand. “Have a good day. And I’ll drive Hunter home this afternoon after class, all right?”

“All right.” I nodded and then stole one last kiss before I ducked out of the door and started back to my car, waving at Hunter as I passed by. Heading back to the house, I ran through all my contacts in my head, figuring out who the best point of contact might be to get ahold of within the school district. Because I had something that could change everything for teachers like Autumn, and if it was working well, there was no reason to sit on it a moment longer.

I headed straight to my office when I was through the door and grabbed my phone. Though I had been something of a recluse when it came to my work for the last few weeks, I still had decent clout in the business, and I intended to take full advantage of that. A half hour of phone calls later, I ended up on the other end of the line with the woman who organized the resources for school teachers around the district.

“And you said that you’ve been testing this program with a couple of teachers?” she asked. I could hear the incredulity in her voice—and she didn’t even know that the teacher I had tested this with was also the one I was dating. I decided to keep that on the down-low for the time being—to make sure my credibility wasn’t totally shot.

“Yes, and they’ve both given me great feedback for the program as a whole,” I replied enthusiastically. “They told me the program has saved them a lot of time. One of them has started running some after-school activities with the time she had to spare.”

“I see.” She sounded impressed. “And how much are you charging for this program? For, say, a ten-school rollout?”

“I’d be happy to give you a trial run for free,” I told her eagerly. “Maybe six weeks? And if you like it, we can talk about packaging the program into the teacher’s software across the district.”

“That sounds fair to me,” she agreed, and I could hear the grin on her face even through the phone.

“You know,” she confessed. “I used to teach. And the grade curves were always my least favorite part of doing that. I always wondered why nobody put something together to make them easier! I suppose you saw a gap in the market, huh?”

“I suppose I did.” I grinned. “And I’m delighted if I can help out the teachers in the district too.”

“You have children at a school around here?”

“Yes, a son. Hunter.”

“And any spare time the teachers have to focus on their students will benefit him as well,” she rounded off for me. “Well, makes sense. Let me make a few calls and see where this program would be best suited to start out, okay? You’ll hear from me soon.”

“Looking forward to it,” I replied. She hung up, leaving me feeling as though I could punch the air in victory. Things were starting to slide into place. I hadn’t heard from Karla in a while, Hunter seemed like he was opening up again, and Autumn and I were getting closer and closer to dropping that all-important L-word.

And if I could pull off this project on top of everything else, that would be perfect. It could be huge if I pulled it off. Sure, it would be hard work getting off the ground and rolling out across the district, but it would be worth it. Not only would I be able to have a big impact on the world around me, and Hunter especially, but it could make me a lot of money. Maybe that was a little greedy, but every time I had a project like this one come through, I thought forward to what it could mean for Hunter—to everything I could do for him with that kind of money. I could send him to whatever college he wanted in the world. I could pay for any summer camp he wished to attend, could afford classes that would cover anything he wanted to learn. Every time I put this money aside, I was assuring a future for my son and the life I wanted him to have. And that made me happy.

I was about to go downstairs to make coffee and plan out exactly how to roll out the program when my phone buzzed again in my pocket. I grabbed it, assuming it would be the same woman I had been on the line with, maybe calling to mention something she’d forgotten the first time around. Instead, I saw a number I didn’t recognize on the screen. Furrowing my brow, I lifted it to my ear and took the call.

“Hello?”

“Holden?”

I recognized the voice at once. My body tensed from top to bottom, and my heart felt frozen dead solid in my chest. Karla. But I had her number. Where the fuck was she calling from?

“Karla, what do you want?” I asked. I strained to hear what was in the background of the call, hoping it would give me an indicator of where she was. I could make out a little traffic, but nothing more than that. She must have been calling from a payphone somewhere. But why?

“I wanted to let you know I’m standing outside of Hunter’s school right now,” she told me. If I hadn’t been scared before, I launched into full-blown panic mode when I heard those words come out of her mouth. No. I wanted to sprint down there, grab my son, and run as far away from the woman who claimed to be his mother as I could. I instantly went to grab my car keys, trying to keep her on the line.

“What the hell are you doing down there?” I demanded. I racked my brains for where she might be. There was a pay phone maybe two hundred feet down the street from the school. Perhaps she was there. I hurried out to the car as I waited for her to reply, but she seemed determined to make me wait for the response.

“I think that it’s only fair Hunter know about his mother,” she replied, and her voice was strangely calm as if this whole situation was almost funny to her. I wanted to scream down the line at her, tell her to get away from my son and never go near him again as long as she lived. But I needed to stay calm and get down there.

“Karla, don’t do this,” I warned her as I turned on the engine and pulled out of the driveway. “You know this is a bad idea. It’s only going to make things worse.”

“As if they could be any worse than they are right now,” she shot back cruelly. “You’re keeping me away from him, Holden, and you’re letting some new woman into his life at the same time? You don’t think that’s hypocritical?”

Her voice was taunting now like she knew she had me where she wanted me. I clenched and unclenched my hands on the wheel. If only I could reach through the phone and drag her away from him, away from my son, away from whatever she had in mind.

“Karla—”

But before I could get another word out, the phone went dead. With an annoyed grunt, I tossed it to the side and dumped it in the seat next to me. All that mattered now was getting down there in time—before she had a chance to get to Hunter. I tried to soothe myself, reminding myself that Autumn was there and that she would do everything she could to take care of my kid any way she was able. That would be enough. It had to be. I had to believe, with everything in me, that it was as I sped through the streets of Portland and toward Karla, Autumn, and Hunter.