Chapter 18

I’m a real sweetheart, and a real smartass. It’s a package deal.

-Hannah’s secret thoughts

Hannah

The person that Travis turned into wasn’t one I recognized.

He also wasn’t the man I fell in love with.

In fact, he was kind of scary, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed.

My daughter and Alex had, too.

Alex had come home from the hospital about a week after she’d been admitted.

I’d missed over a week at my job staying there with her. My brother’s wife had stayed at our house and kept Reggie in school, while Michael had returned home. Travis had gone back to work, but drove the hour and a half there and back every night to check on Alex.

I kept TJ at the hospital with me, and Alex had gotten quite a bit of bonding time in with her little baby bro.

By the time she was released five days after she arrived, I was sure that someone had transplanted a new kid in Alex…or maybe it was just being away from the venom that her mother spewed at her each and every time her father or I came up.

Regardless, I was enjoying this new little girl, and realizing why her grandmother, grandfather, uncles, and father were so dismayed with what she had turned into over the last year.

And really, I was a hundred percent certain that it all boiled down to Allegra.

Allegra was booked into the county jail, and then bonded out the next day on her own recognizance. Her scheduled court hearing was set for today, and then a little after that, the custody hearing.

Today was a big day, and Travis was acting like a fucking lunatic.

He wasn’t saying much of anything, but both the girls, as well as TJ and I, could feel his simmering anger.

He was convinced that today would go bad.

Me? I wasn’t sure.

I knew that Allegra’s father was the money man in this county. However, the judge that presided over it had proved himself a good man over and over again from what little I’d heard about him.

I was sure that Travis’ worries were for naught.

However, I let him fume, and did my normal daily routine of getting the kids up and ready for school and daycare, only with one addition of Alex to the mix.

Everyone was up, clothed, and fed.

They were watching TV quietly when Travis started to angrily slam around the house.

First it was the kitchen cabinets as he tried to find a clean coffee cup.

“They’re in the dishwasher,” I told him. “I just loaded it and ran it this morning, so you’ll either have to open it and wash one, or use your Yeti.”

Travis grumbled something under his breath, but went to the cabinet where I kept his Yeti cups—he had twenty of them, no joke.

Once he got his cup, he walked to the coffee maker, and then started to bitch when the cup wouldn’t fit underneath the Keurig.

He slammed it down on the counter, and I calmly walked over to him and lifted the drip tray from the Keurig, placed his cup underneath the dispenser, and started it.

He said nothing, but I could practically feel his body shaking with withheld fury.

I walked away without a word and turned to the kids.

“Y’all ready, girls?”

Alex popped up first and walked to the door where her backpack was resting against the backdoor, followed shortly by Reggie.

Reggie shoved her feet into her boots.

“Is Daddy coming to see me today?”

I started to reply to her, saying that her father hadn’t communicated with me that he was coming—though he never did. But Travis’ reply to her question had me nearly seeing red.

“Your father’s a jerk, Reg. He’s not going to come, and probably never will.”

Reggie’s head hung, and Travis, thinking he was helping when he wasn’t, ruffled her hair and walked to TJ, gave him a kiss, then walked out of the room.

I walked to where TJ was in his swing, lifted him out, and then walked to the car seat and started buckling him in.

All the while, I counted to twenty in my head so I didn’t follow Travis and give him a piece of my mind.

The least the fucker could’ve done was help me get them in the car…it’s not like getting three kids ready to go in the morning was hard or anything. Like getting up an hour and a half early is just the easiest thing to do when you were sleep deprived. But whatever.

Snapping the last of the buckles, I picked up my sleeping baby boy and groaned at the weight of the car seat with TJ in it.

“Getting big, boy,” I told him.

Grabbing the bottles of milk from the counter for TJ’s meals, I asked Reggie to grab the diaper bag, and we were off.

“Uncle Baylor!” Alex cried out.

She hugged him around the waist, but let him go almost immediately in her rush to get into my Jeep.

Baylor blinked, then focused on me.

“Let me help,” Baylor said.

I was surprised to find him right outside the door, but I didn’t complain when he took the hulking mass of TJ from my arms and expertly deposited him in the car…like his father could’ve done.

“Thank you,” I sighed, placing the rest of the stuff in the front seat. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re riding together to the court hearing.”

I nodded. “Oh, okay.”

The car seat clicked into the base, and then he backed out of the car, winking at Reggie who was waiting for him to move.

Reggie who still looked very upset.

Dammit.

“Reggie, baby,” I whispered. “I’ll call your father and ask him if he has plans to come see you today, okay?”

Her face lit up. “Thank you, Mommy.”

Then she got into the car, and Baylor gave me a sympathetic look.

He knew the story. He also knew, just like everyone else, how sad Reggie got when he didn’t show—which was never.

Yes, she should be used to it by now, but she was a little girl. Little girls wanted their fathers to be in their lives. They didn’t understand when their father no longer wanted anything to do with them, or were too busy at work to come down and see them.

After dropping all the kids off at their prospective locations, I drove back home, and used that time to call Joshua.

He didn’t answer.

What a surprise.

Sometimes I didn’t know why I bothered.

Getting out of the car with a resigned sigh, I walked to the backdoor and barely pushed it open as I bent down to take off my shoes.

That’s when I heard Travis.

“I’m never fucking doing it again,” I heard him say to Baylor. “It’s a pain in the ass, and a fucking joke.”

“That’s what marriage is about, man. Doing stuff that you don’t want to do.”

“Well, I don’t want to do that, either.”

My belly dropped as my throat started to constrict. Tears burned my eyes, and I was on the verge of tears before I’d even walked all the way through the door.

“Hannah?” he asked. “You make sure it was all right with her before you decided this?”

“No. Hannah’s awesome, but I’m not doing it again. I’m glad that I didn’t do it before because then she’d expect me to follow through.”

The words hit me like an anvil straight to the chest.

I swallowed the tears and shut the door a little harder than necessary to announce my arrival home.

Travis and Baylor looked up, and I decided that I needed to tell this asshole Travis, not my usual Travis, that what he was doing wasn’t acceptable. Starting with the very first thing he’d done to piss me off this morning.

“I’d appreciate it,” I told him, “if you wouldn’t intervene when it comes to Reggie’s father and Reggie. It’s hard enough having to explain to her that he’s not coming. I don’t need you adding your two cents and breaking her heart.”

Travis’ face shut down.

“You baby her,” Travis countered. “You’re not doing her any favors by lying about that piece of shit.”

I ground my teeth together and pierced him with a withering glare.

“First of all, you’re not her father,” I told him. “And apparently, you’re not even going to be her stepfather.”

Travis’ molars audibly snapped together as he tilted his head to the side.

“Yeah, I heard that,” I told him. “Would’ve been nice if you discussed with me that we were no longer engaged, but that’s just me I guess.”

Travis didn’t say anything, and Baylor chose that moment to check out.

He got up without a word and walked outside, leaving both of us alone.

Thankfully.

“Hannah,” he stood up.

I clenched my hand into a tight fist and opened my mouth to let him have it, but before I could, a sound came from my purse.

My phone rang, and thinking it was Joshua calling me back, I answered it without looking.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found not Joshua, but Wolf, one of my best friends in the entire world, on the other end.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey, Wolf!” I cried out, happy that he’d called. I could use a dose of happy right now. “What are you doing?”

Wolf and I had met when he was in the hospital recovering from a gunshot wound to his head. I’d been his nurse, and he’d been my patient each shift that I worked until he was released.

Travis also hated him because he was married to his baby sister—and had plans of divorcing her.

Unfortunately, Abby had died in the same accident that had gotten Wolf shot in the head, and Wolf never got the chance to divorce her.

Travis also hated that I was friends with Wolf. He still thought we were more than friends, despite my telling him that we never were more than that.

I knew without looking that Travis’ face had turned thunderous.

“I’m in town for something, and just found out about Allegra. What the fuck, Han. Why wouldn’t you have told me about that?”

I sighed. “I haven’t had time. I’m running behind, and there’s absolutely no time to do anything, much less call you and tell you about all the problems I have. And I’m so sleep deprived that any spare moment I have, I use it napping. TJ has colic.”

Travis set his cup down and walked out, leaving me alone in the room.

“You don’t sound good.”

I wasn’t.

“I’m okay, Wolf. How’s the boy doing?”

Nathan wasn’t his son. Nathan was his best friend’s son who’d died in the same tragic killings that had taken Abby and almost taken him. Nathan had suffered the same fate as Wolf, but unlike Wolf, he’d not fared as well.

Now, though, he was doing remarkably well for what he’d been put through over the course of his short life. He still had a few developmental delays, but day by day he was smashing every single glass ceiling that was put over him. He was surviving and thriving, and that made me extremely happy.

“He’s doing great,” he said. “You want to have lunch with me?”

I thought about that. “The hearing is at nine. The custody hearing is at eleven. I can do lunch about twelve thirty if you want.”

“That’ll work for me. I’ll meet you at the courthouse. That’s where I’ll be anyway.”

I didn’t bother to ask.

Wolf was working. His cases were almost always confidential. I knew that this was going to be something he couldn’t talk about.

“Sounds great.”

Then I went about cleaning up after the asshole who couldn’t be bothered to put his own fucking cup into the goddamn sink.

All the while, I tried to contain the urge to burst into tears.