She didn’t look at me as she answered, “I remember someone saying he’s separated from his wife, but that’s all I know. I’ve hardly seen him in the last twenty years. I’ve definitely never seen her around.”

Separated. I knew it. That explained everything. The ring. The woman in the car he’d gotten into a screaming match with. Maybe that explained him being weird. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to think we were flirting with each other? One of my clients that I’d had for years had gone through a rough divorce. After she’d told me all the shit she and her husband were fighting over, she had pretty much convinced me that everyone should get a prenup.

“I met his brother.” I’d more than “met” his brother, but that wasn’t my business to share. “He’s kind of a jerk. No offense.”

Ginny turned her entire body to look at me. “Jackson is here?”

Why the hell did she say his name like she was saying Candy Man? It was my phone ringing that had me snapping straight up with a jolt, immediately forgetting her question. Too lazy to get up, I reached forward as far as I could to grab my purse. I strained and then strained a little more, snatching the edge of it and pulling it toward me with a huff. Sure enough, my phone was in the pocket I always left it in, and I only had to take a quick glance at the screen before I hit the ignore button at the “restricted call.”

I had just set my phone back into my bag without a word when it started ringing once more. With a sigh, I glanced at the screen and groaned, torn between being relieved I’d decided to look again and dreading the caller. “Fuck.”

“Who is it?” Ginny asked that time, all nosey.

I let my finger float over the screen for a second, knowing I needed to answer it but not really wanting to. “The boys’ school.”

The look on her face said enough. She had two sons. Getting a phone call from the school was never a good thing. Ever.

“Shit,” I cursed one more time before making myself tap the screen. “Hello?” I answered, praying for a miracle I knew wasn’t going to happen. I already had one hand in my purse, searching for the keys.

“Mrs. Casillas?”

I frowned a little at the title but didn’t correct the woman on the other line who knew she was about to ruin my day. “Yes?”

“This is Irene at Taft Elementary. There’s been an incident—”

* * *

Nothing before the age of twenty-six could have prepared me for raising two boys. Really. There wasn’t a single thing.

None of the four boyfriends I’d had over the course of my life had prepped me for how to deal with two small people who would eventually grow into men. Men who would eventually have responsibilities and maybe even families—decades and decades from now. The thought was terrifying. I’d dated boys and I’d dated idiots who were still boys no matter how much facial hair they had. And I was responsible for raising a pair to not become like them. I was about as far away from being an expert as you could get. Looking back on them now, my exes were like pieces of gum you’d find beneath a table at a restaurant.

While Rodrigo and I had always been close, at five years older than me, I had been too young to pay attention to those careful years between five and fifteen, to see how he’d survived them. All I could remember was this bigger-than-life personality who had been popular, athletic, and likable. If there had been growing pains, I couldn’t remember. And I definitely couldn’t ask my parents about it. I also couldn’t call the Larsens for advice; they’d raised two girls, not two boys, and in the span of no time, I’d figured out that for a lot of things, boys were a lot different than girls. Josh and Lou had done some shit that I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around, and I had no doubt five-year-old me would have thought the same thing.

What the hell was I supposed to do with Josh and Louie? Was I supposed to discipline them differently? Talk to them differently? Was there a leeway with them that wasn’t possible with girls?

I didn’t think so. I could remember my parents being a lot more relaxed—and that was saying something because they were strict—with Rodrigo than with me. It used to piss me off. They would use the excuse that he was a boy and I was some sort of innocent flower that had to be protected at all costs as their reasoning behind why I would get grounded for weeks if I got home past curfew while he would get a sigh and an eye roll. There had been plenty of other things that my parents had expected of me that they hadn’t of Drigo.

So, as I sat in my Honda with Josh and Louie in the backseat, both strangely silent, I still couldn’t decide how to handle the situation. After I had picked up Josh from school, neither one of us had said a word as I drove back to work and proceeded to go back and forth between color jobs for my last two clients of the day until it was time to pick up Louie. And as if sensing the tension in the car, Lou had been suspiciously quiet, too.

The fact was Josh had punched a little boy in the face.

Now I had been pissed off about it for all of ten minutes until I’d shown up at their school to talk to the principal and Josh himself, to find out that yeah, he had hit someone in his class. But he had punched him because the little shit had been beating up on a different kid in their class in the bathroom. The fact that they were in fifth grade doing this kind of crap didn’t escape me at all. Josh had supposedly intervened, and the little shit had then turned his attention and aggression on my nephew. The slight amount of irritation I’d felt having to go pick him up had disappeared in an instant. But the principal had something up his butt and was talking about how severe the offense was and blah, blah, blah, the school doesn’t condone violence, blah, blah blah.

The asshole then proceeded to try and suspend Josh for a week, but I argued until I got it down to two days with a promise to have a long talk and consider disciplining him.

That was where my problem came in.

Diana, the aunt, wanted to give Josh a high five for standing up for another kid. I wanted to take him for ice cream and congratulate him on doing the right thing. Maybe even buy him a new game for his Xbox with my tip money.

Diana, the person who was supposed to be a parent figure, knew that if it had been me who got in trouble at school, my parents would have beat my ass and grounded me for the next six months. My mom had slapped me once when I was fourteen for yelling at her and then slamming the door in her face. I could remember it like it was yesterday, her throwing my bedroom door open and whack. Getting suspended from school? Forget about it. I’d be six feet in the ground.

So what the hell was I supposed to do? What was the right path to go down?

Sure, my parents had an iron grip on my life back then and I had turned out okay, but there had been problems along the way. I couldn’t count the number of times I had thought that my mom and dad didn’t understand anything, that they didn’t know me. It hadn’t been easy feeling like I couldn’t tell them things because I knew they wouldn’t get it.

I didn’t want Josh or Louie to feel that way toward me. Maybe that was the problem between being an aunt and being a parent figure. I was one, but had to be the other.

So where the hell did that leave me?

“Am I in trouble?” Louie randomly asked from his spot in the backseat on his booster chair.