Built

“I won’t leave you alone, Hyde. I won’t leave you alone at my house or anywhere else. In fact, if you ever even feel alone I’ll show you how to use my phone and you can call your aunt Echo, you can call your aunt Beryl and Joss, and you can call your grandma because even though I’m there, you still might feel lonely, okay?”

He nodded and sniffed up what I was sure was an epic amount of snot. He rubbed his eyes again and blinked lashes that were spiky with spent tears at me. “What about Sayer? Can I call her if I feel alone?”

The kid was going to kill me. “You want to call Sayer?”

He shrugged again but this time he had a smile on his mouth and that dimple that matched mine flashing in his cheek.

“She’s really pretty and nice. She smells good and she plays with me. She’s a princess and I like her.”

I bit back a groan. She was all of those things . . . well, maybe not a princess, but that aside, I liked when she played with me, too. “I like her, too, and I’m sure she would be happy to talk to you if you were feeling lonely. She really wants you to be happy.”

He nodded like a little grown-up and gave me a full grin. “She wants you to be happy, too. She told me.”

I lifted my eyebrows up at him and pulled the International back onto the street so that I wasn’t late dropping him off back at the foster home.

“She did? What did she tell you?”

“Hmm . . .” He kicked his feet again and laughed at me when I growled at him because he was tapping his chin like he was thinking hard about the answer. He giggled uncontrollably when I reached out and tickled his ribs with my index finger until he gasped, “Okay, okay! She just said that she was working hard to make sure I got to go home with you because it’s what was best for both of us. She said I made you happy, which made me happy, which made her happy.”

Five-year-old logic at its finest. “You do make me happy, kiddo.”

“You make me happy, too, Zeb.”

We just needed to get the third member of that happiness tripod on board with all the good things we were feeling so we could be complete.

“When did she tell you all of this?”

He shrugged. “When she came to the house to play with me. She’s always dressed up.”

Which meant she must have stopped by after work to see him. I didn’t want to be jealous of my kid, but I kind of was.

She might not know it or be willing to admit it, but she was going to choose us . . . both of us. Her actions said as much.

Again that tiny spark of hope, that thing I was clinging to with every ounce of strength I had, pulsed bright.

CHAPTER 15

Sayer

It had been nearly a month since Zeb walked out of my bedroom, leaving me shattered and pooling into a puddle of misery that was entirely of my own making. I was drowning in every single choice that had led to that point, and every word he uttered to me as he walked out wrapped around me and cocooned me in his harsh truths.

I still had to talk to him about the case. The court had wanted Social Services to check out his place before Hyde went to stay the night, and I felt like a boulder dropped on my heart when he’d told me they could come up and that he didn’t think I needed to be there for the visit. He answered every text I sent him asking about how Hyde was settling in with one word like: “fine,” “okay,” “good.” Every email I sent asking if he had already talked to the school district and made sure Hyde’s vaccination records were up-to-date was answered with one that had only the facts and copies of the documents I would need to show the court if they asked for proof about how proactive Zeb was being as a parent.

I understood that he had to pull away because I left him no other option. I understood I had given him nothing to keep fighting for, but the loss still hurt. I knew that space he made for himself inside my life and my heart wouldn’t be filled with anything else and I became achingly aware that alone and lonely were two different monsters.

Even as bad as being alone felt, it couldn’t hold a candle to feeling lonely.

Alone was empty and cavernous. It yawned wide inside of me, never ending, and the pain of it echoed hollow and dull.

Lonely was the exact opposite. Lonely filled me up to the point of bursting. There was so much of it that I had no clue about how it wasn’t pushing through my skin. Lonely screeched loud and infinite between my ears. The shrill cry was an ugly mélange of blame, want, fear, and fury. There was also nothing dull about lonely. It poked hot, so hot, in every tender place it could find. It prodded all those wounds now open and weeping as they bled everywhere, and I was finally forced to do something about them or end up bleeding to death.

I wanted to be the girl who I was when I was with Zeb all the time. She was who I was choosing, and even with that decision made, I wasn’t exactly sure what steps I needed to take to keep her around forever.

I knew I was going to have to put on my best battle gear for the final court appearance. It was the first time I would be seeing Zeb in weeks, and he wouldn’t be alone. Both his mother and sister were tagging along to hear the final verdict, so I felt outnumbered even though we were all on the same side of this particular fight. I knew I needed to let the woman I was trying so hard to be take the lead if I was going to get through the hearing with my poise and professionalism intact. I bought a new outfit from the same jealous saleswoman who had been hovering over me and Zeb on the day we shopped for sheets, and took an inordinate amount of satisfaction in the fact that she begrudgingly told me the vibrant purple hue didn’t look good on many people but I could pull it off. I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head when I bought a startlingly yellow shirt to go underneath it. Maybe it was too much, too eye-catching, but I didn’t care . . . and that felt freeing.