Epilogue

I’ve mastered the art of bouncing back.

-Jessie’s secret thoughts

Jessie

Eight years later

“Mom!” My daughter came running into the kitchen, her hand covering her head. “Does this need stitches?”

Lydia lifted her hand from her head. The moment she did, blood started to ooze down along her hairline to the curve of her chin and to the newly tiled floor.

“Uhhh,” Ellen said, turning her head to the side with the tip of one finger. “It certainly looks like it. Why don’t you go get my med kit from the bathroom?”

Lydia trotted off only to come to a stop once Linc came barreling through the door.

“Mom said I need stitches!” Lydia told her older brother.

Linc looked down at Lydia’s still bleeding face.

“You also need to grab a towel so you don’t leak all over the fuckin’ floor,” Linc said laughingly.

“Linc!” Ellen growled, pointing her knife at him. “Watch that dirty mouth of yours.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Linc growled. “What’s for dinner? I’m starving.”

“You’re a professional football player,” I cut in. “Why are you starving? You have enough money to buy a fuckin’ grocery store.”

A carrot hit me on the forehead, and I turned my gaze back to my woman.

“Was that necessary?”

Ellen’s lips twitched. “Wipe up that blood, and stop cussing. It’s crass, dammit.”

Linc snorted.

“I am rich,” Linc said, grabbing the paper towels on his own and wiping the blood up himself. “But I still feel like I shouldn’t spend it. Like, if I do, I might need it again one day and not have it.”

I laughed.

“Your financial advisor has you fixed up well into your nineties with only what you made this year,” I told him, then stood up from the kitchen table to grab the bag that Lydia was hauling by one handle, dragging it along the floor, and smearing the blood into the grout lines of the kitchen tile. “Maybe, if you stopped giving it to us, you’d feel like you had more money.”

Linc grinned.

“You didn’t think I’d be able to do it, did you?” he challenged me.

“I knew you’d be able to do it,” I countered. “But I didn’t think you’d think I was stupid enough not to give it back to you in some way.”

Linc’s eyes narrowed just as Ellen threw all of her cut up veggies into the pot that she was about to start cooking the stew in. “You better not have given it back.”

I grinned. “I didn’t. I started a college fund for your children.”

“I don’t have any children,” Linc countered. “At least none that I know of.”

Ellen slapped him on the arm with a wet towel.

“Watch it, boy,” she ordered. “I specifically remember giving you the birds and the bees talk when you were sixteen. I even showed you how to roll a condom on a cucumber.” She stopped next to Lydia and pressed a four by four piece of gauze against her cut.

Her concentration was amazing.

I was so proud of her for finishing nursing school and going on to become a licensed nurse practitioner.

***

“Why did you use a cucumber and not a banana?” I asked her, leaning my hips casually against the counter and crossing my arms over my chest.

Ellen’s lips twitched. Her eyes flicked from me to Linc and back again.

“Because a banana wouldn’t be proportional to what he has to work with,” she explained.

My brows rose. “Why would you know what my sixteen-year-old son was working with?”

Her lips twitched as she continued to disinfect the cut. “I didn’t know. I was only assuming the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.” She looked at my dick. “Or eggplant from the vine.”

I snorted.

“Eeeeewwwwww,” Linc whined like he was ten instead of twenty-five, slapping his hands against his ears. “That’s so gross.”

“That’s life,” I countered. “What time do you leave to play on Sunday?”

Though Linc now lived over two hours away in Louisiana, he still made it a point to come over every week, even if it was only for a couple of hours.

At twenty-one, he’d been drafted by the New Orleans Saints as a first-round draft pick. He’d, of course, been ecstatic. But no one had been more ecstatic than me.

And, ever since, he’d been smashing the records of some of the best quarterbacks in history.

This year was the first year, however, that he was going to the Super Bowl, and I could tell he was nervous. Just looking at him, I could see the way he held his body strung so tight.

“Tomorrow,” Linc answered. “What about y’all?”

“We’re leaving tomorrow, too,” Ellen answered as she got her suture kit ready. “Though, we’re driving. We’re going to spend some time in ‘Nawlins.”

I snorted.

Ever since Ellen had learned that Linc was going to be a player at LSU, she’d done her best to learn the culture of New Orleans. Then, when she’d found out that he’d been drafted by the Saints, she’d been in hog heaven. She loved the area, and I knew that, if there ever came a time when we were looking for a new place to live, New Orleans or something in the surrounding area would be where we went.

And not even because Linc now lived there, but because she loved the culture so much.

It’d been where we got married—for a second time. It’d been a private ceremony, just her, me, Linc and Lydia. It was where she’d told me that she was pregnant, and also where her water had broken with Laura, our third child.

“Is the rest of the club going?”

“You think they’d miss one of their favorite members play in a fucking Super Bowl?” I asked. “Of course they’re fucking going.”

I was hit in the head with a roll of medical tape.

“Hey!”

Linc grinned.

“I hate that I can’t fuckin’ ride my bike anymore without people trying to run me off the road for a goddamn autograph,” he grunted. “My publicist tried to tell me I couldn’t wear my cut, either.”

I started to laugh.

“Let me guess, you told him to shove that opinion up his ass?”

Linc was dedicated, that was for sure. He’d known at eighteen that he wanted to be a member of The Dixie Wardens MC, just like his old man, and he’d accomplished it at the age of twenty-one.

He would have accomplished it sooner if those first three years playing ball in college hadn’t kept him away from home more than he’d intended.

Although, it put him in a good place to be spotted by NFL scouts, so we really couldn’t complain.

“Mommy!”

My head snapped over in time to see my three-year-old daughter leading two police officers in the room—Aaron and Big Papa.

“Yo,” I said. “What’s up?”

Laura threw herself into my lap, and I caught her before she could hit her face on the table.

“You mind if we talk outside for a minute?” Aaron asked.

“Puppy!”

I looked over to see Achilles start growling ferociously at Tank.

The two dogs had never figured out how to get along, though they never went further than a few growls.

I was pretty damn sure that Achilles could take Tank if he really wanted to but that was because Tank was getting on in years.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” I said, standing up.

I placed Laura in my chair and handed her my phone.

She opened it like a fuckin’ pro and went to work doing what she always did on my phone—which was go to some animal sounds game and start making as much racket as a three-year-old could make.

“Be back in a minute, baby,” I said to Ellen as I passed.

Her eyes caught mine, and I could clearly read the fact that she expected to be apprised of whatever situation brought the two men over here without a warning.

I had a feeling I knew though.

Eight years ago, I’d gotten a restraining order against Margot and full custody of our daughter, Lydia.

Margot had been sent back to the psychiatric facility and had later been sent to prison after she’d tried to murder her doctor…twice.

The last seven years she’d been in a minimum-security prison for women, and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her since.

That didn’t mean that she didn’t constantly write letters to the kids. Letters that I promptly intercepted and then destroyed as soon as they hit our mailbox.

Lydia didn’t know that she wasn’t our blood child, but one day she would—though that day wasn’t today.

It was still something that Ellen and I bickered about—telling her. I didn’t think that Lydia needed to know at all. Ellen thought it was something she needed to hear from us rather than finding out herself later on.

We’d tell her in time, I supposed, but right now wasn’t that time.

Hence the reason Big Papa and Aaron likely didn’t want to talk in front of our children.

It wasn’t a surprise when Linc followed us out, though.

“What’s up?” I asked.

Aaron spoke first.

“Margot was shot to death outside of a halfway house when she tried to rob a woman. The woman, who had a license to carry concealed, feared for the safety of her children and herself. She pulled out her gun, and shot her dead center in the chest.”

I blew out a breath.

“Shit.”

I can’t say that I was upset about her death, but I could say I definitely felt some relief at the news. It was freeing, in a way, to know that that chapter of our lives was over.

No longer having to worry about that woman and what she’d do next was an enormous weight lifted off my shoulders. It was enough to make me want to yell out in relief.

“That sucks,” Linc grumbled under his breath. “Guess we won’t have to renew the restraining orders after all.”

I slapped my hand down on my son’s back.

“I’d offer to go for a ride with you, but I don’t want your coach to kill me if you fall off and break a nail before Sunday’s game.”

My kid flipped me the finger. “Fuck off.”

I snorted.

“Language!”

We all looked at the closed door.

“How the hell does she do that?” Linc asked.

“You’ll eventually find out, son, that women have eyes in the backs of their heads.”

“And, apparently, ears like a goddamn wolf’s.”

***

Ellen

I walked tiredly up the stairs that would lead us to the box seats that Linc had reserved for us to use for the game today.

I stared at the stairs and wondered idly what the hell I was doing.

I had no clue why I’d taken the stairs, but when I took a seat beside the man that was sitting at the top waiting for me, I realized that I wasn’t the only one nervous.

“Have they kicked off yet?” I asked hopefully, taking a seat beside my man.

Jessie looked up at me.

“No,” he sighed. “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

I couldn’t help it. I threw myself into Jessie’s arms and buried my face into his neck.

His beard tickled my skin, but I didn’t pull back from the death grip I had on him.

“It’ll be okay.”

“Yeah?” I challenged him. “Then why the heck are you in here instead of the box thingy?”

Jessie pushed me back so he could look at me.

“Because this is where you are.”

“Mom!” our two heathens hollered, as they burst through the door at the same time.

“What?” I looked over Jessie’s shoulder at my two girls, my eyes lingering longer on Lydia as I studied her features.

Unless you knew about it, you couldn’t tell that eight years ago she’d been born prematurely with a drug addiction. Now she was a normal, healthy eight-year-old who played soccer and ran so fast sometimes that I was scared she’d hurt herself.

“Laura threw her hotdog down into the bleachers, and she ate mine while I was using the bathroom.”

I dropped my forehead down onto Jessie’s shoulder.

“They’re your kids,” I said. “You deal with it. I’m going to sit right here and try not to freak the hell out.”

He started a rumbling chuckle, and then I found myself moving through the air despite my desire to stay exactly where I was.

“I don’t want to go,” I moaned.

Jessie ignored me.

“You’d be devastated if you didn’t get to watch Linc win his first ever Super Bowl,” Jessie countered.

I sighed.

“You’re right.”

And I would’ve been.

Approximately four hours later, I was staring at Linc’s face on the Jumbotron as he accepted the Vince Lombardi Trophy with a wide smile on his face.

“Who do you want to thank for all of your success, Linc?”

Linc looked up at the box. Though he couldn’t see us, he knew we were there.

“My dad for catching hundreds and hundreds of passes so I could hone my skills…and my step-mom for pushing me to always be a better person, even when I didn’t want to be. I don’t know if I’d be here right now if they didn’t believe in me.”

A sob caught in my throat.

“Well, fuck me in the ass,” Big Papa said from behind us. “But that boy sure does know how to tug on the heartstrings.”

That’s about when I started to sniffle and snort as tears of happiness started to roll down my cheeks.

“Does she sound like Miss Piggy to you or is that just me?”

I flipped my brother off, then buried my face into my husband’s shoulder and cried while the rest of our friends laughed.

Then I sent him a text message.

Ellen (6:24 PM): I love you.

He replied back within seconds.

Jessie (6:24 PM): I love you, more.