Unfortunately, Grandpa hadn’t stopped shaking his head; his fingers had started tapping against his thighs, and redness still covered just about everything I could see above his neckline. “But he left you!” the man who loved me like hell reminded me like I could have forgotten. “That chucklehead left you,” he said it again, eyes bright.

One day, I’d be able to enjoy him calling someone a chuckle head, but right then wasn’t going to be the day. Not when my grandfather was huffing and puffing. Not when we were talking about something so important. Jonah Collins was important and always would be. Unfortunately.

Unless he died.

“He left me,” I tried to tell him, struggling a whole hell of a lot with getting that reality out. Acknowledging it. Tasting it. But even if something seemed good, didn’t mean it actually was. Saying it didn’t make it any less abrasive… but maybe one day it would. Maybe. “But not her.”

Me. Not her.

And I was fine with that.

Grandpa turned to give me his back as his hands went up to the top of his head, the red color deepening and making me want to roll my eyes even more. Those dark gray eyes were borderline crazy as he glared down at me like he didn’t know who the fuck I was anymore. Like he couldn’t believe I wasn’t agreeing with him.

And, honestly, a part of me couldn’t believe it either.

But I wasn’t the same Lenny I’d been before.

Just part of her.

And maybe Grandpa Gus remembered that but didn’t want to accept the fact that, for once, I wasn’t ready to raise hell—but deep down inside, I knew that later on, he’d come to terms with why that was. “What then? What if he decides to stay? Can you look at him every day if he does?”

I sucked in a breath through my nose and shrugged as I looked up at him from where I was still sitting on the couch. “No, I don’t know that I can.” I leaned forward and planted my elbows on my knees, my fingers going to massage my brow bones. “I want to beat the shit out of him. I want to rip his balls off and squirt lemon juice on his open wound.”

That got me a tiny, baby snort. And then I wondered where the hell I got being psycho from.

“But this isn’t about me, Grandpa, and stop breathing like that. You’re being so dramatic. It’s my turn today to lose my shit, all right?”

“He—” Grandpa Gus started to say just as we both heard it.

The one and only sound that would have stopped this blowout we were in the middle of.

Mo’s little kitten cries.

The same kitten cries that melted my heart every time I heard them. Even when I was tired and crankier than hell. Even when I was worried and overwhelmed. Even when I was scared and didn’t know how the hell I was still alive and who had been dumb enough to give me such a huge responsibility.

I stood up before Grandpa made a move to go to the stairs.

“I’ll go get her. You calm down in the meantime and remember all the reasons why you would hate going to jail if you got caught committing a felony,” I said before heading up to the second floor two steps at a time.

What a fucking mess.

Down the hall and two doors down, beside my bedroom, I walked right into the bright room and headed straight toward the crib. And as much as I was flustered, I couldn’t help but grin as I peeked over the railing a second before I picked Mo up.

“Hey, chunky monkey,” I said, smiling at the one thing in this world that scared the shit out of me more than everything and anything else ever had combined. I had cried a month straight when I had first seen the positive pregnancy test staring back at me. Then I had spent the next six months staying up at night, unable to sleep, because I’d been terrified that I didn’t know what the hell I was getting myself into. That I had made the wrong decision.

She was my seven-pound, eight-ounce surprise when she’d been born. The instant love of my life. The best thing I ever did.

She was the sweetest, happiest baby in the world. And I’d heard from multiple people who weren’t Grandpa Gus or Peter that she was the prettiest girl too, which I agreed with. Duh. She seriously cried like a kitten and now babbled all day. Was soft and sweet and smelled awesome, unless she’d shit her diaper. With dark brown hair and already fitting into eighteen-month-old clothes at eight months old, she was all chubby arms and legs that wiggled in the air as tiny little cries came out of her mouth.

But as perfect as she was, I focused in on my favorite part of her. Her honey-colored eyes with flecks of gold and brown in them. Big and already almond-shaped.

They were the eyes she’d inherited from her dad.

The same eyes Grandpa Gus had seen in the picture I’d showed him of Jonah.

Chapter 5

“It’s me. Again. Lenny. If you wanted to run away, fine. But at least send a smoke signal to let the rest of us know that you’re alive. You’re pissing me off now. Call me back. Bye.”

I left Grandpa Gus and Mo at the house when I headed back to work, but my gut had known instinctively that neither one of them was going to stay there for long.

And that knowledge didn’t help the damn stomachache that had nothing to do with the burrito I had wolfed down even with all the dirty looks I’d been getting slipped from the man who had wiped my ass a thousand times growing up.

I mean Grandpa’s reaction wasn’t a surprise. I would have been surprised if he’d taken it well. Plus, the way he’d been wasn’t exactly overreacting if you really knew him, but it was close enough. It was exactly what any of his friends would expect.

The calm gestures he’d made and the smile he shot at baby Mo when I had come back downstairs with a hungry eight-month-old were all a lie. But to give him credit, he tried to be in a good mood every time she was close… which was all the time since he was her babysitter. That was why he’d settled for subtle sneers behind her back.

But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t picture him buckling Mo into her car seat soon and saying in a baby voice, “Grandpa Gus is gonna go kill somebody. You wanna come with me? You wanna help bury your daddy?”

So I tried to tell myself that him eventually showing up at Maio House wouldn’t be the end of the world. It might actually be a good thing for Jonah Collins to see Mo if he came by—not that I knew if he would actually come back, especially after I’d run him off with my perfectly timed scammer call earlier.

If he hadn’t left, was he going to be a father to Mo in some way?

Or was he going to see her, realize that this wasn’t some part-time job, and decide to go back to whatever hole he had crawled out of and never come back again?

From the moment I had last emailed Jonah, three days after Mo had been born, and explained that I would never keep him apart from his daughter if he was going to genuinely try to be a part of her life, I had promised myself that I could put my pride aside and let him be there. I could stand there, imagining myself ripping off his balls and spitting them out with blood all over my face, but that was all I would do.

Live in my dreams. Where I could murder people without repercussions.

Anyway, the point was, from time to time, when I had been growing up, I had imagined my mom coming to see me. In my head, I had thought I could forgive her. You know, for giving me up, for not being around. I had thought that maybe we could have some kind of relationship.

But the older I got, and now that I had my own girl, I realized that that shit was never going to happen. There were some circumstances that would make sense, but it had been thirty years now, and she hadn’t come back. That opening had closed a while ago.

I figured if she had wanted to find me, she could have. Any excuse she could have used to justify to herself leaving me with my grandfather immediately after my birth didn’t hold any value anymore. It had been her choice to walk away, and back then, it would have been my choice to let her back in.

So I could give Mo that opportunity. Grandpa would have offered the same for me if she had tried to come back; I just knew it. So, yeah, if Jonah Collins wanted to be around… he could.

And if that made my head pound, nobody had told me to have some deadbeat, immature asshole’s baby, did they?

I’d been so wrong about him; it made my throat ache with bitterness for a moment.

My best friend, Luna, had told me that when something was really bothering her and she knew there was no point in raging over it, or even thinking about it any longer than she needed to, that she would imagine balling it like a piece of paper and throwing it away. That was what I did right then: I threw it away.

Mo was here, and even though I had never, ever seen myself as a mom… and I had no idea what the hell I was doing seven-eighths of the time and was terrified because I didn’t, she was mine. And I wasn’t going to fuck up. I’d had the best example of a parent figure growing up, and I wasn’t about to let her down.