I had nothing to be freaked out about. Absolutely nothing. But that was a lot easier said than done.

“How have you been?” she asked almost casually.

“Fine and I hope you have too, but you need to go,” I managed to tell her calmly, carefully, despite the fact that my hands and forearms had started tingling with discomfort and I was feeling about eighty other different emotions I wasn’t ready to classify.

“I just want to talk,” Anita tried to explain, one of her hands going to cup the elbow of the opposite arm. She looked thinner than the last time I’d seen her. The whites in her eyes were more yellow, and I couldn’t help but wonder what was wrong with her.

I’d told her very plainly when I’d shoved her toward her car after pulling her away from Mandy and Josh, “If you ever want to see Josh again, you need to clean your life up.” And from the yellow that was supposed to be white and the flat color of her hair, she hadn’t done that.

I knew Anita. At least I knew the person she used to be. She’d been this teenager who had fallen in love with my brother after meeting him at a club back in Fort Worth. She had been nice enough, partied a lot, laughed really loudly. I guess you could say we were a lot alike. Anita had only been seeing my brother for about two months when she told him she was pregnant with his kid. She was only a year older than me, but as I took her in, I saw this person who seemed to have aged physically faster than I had. What had started off with her “not being ready to raise a baby” had turned into this person in front of me who got mixed in with one bad decision after another.

She was Josh’s biological mom, but in all the ways that mattered, he was mine, and I would only share what he was willing to give. He had been mine before Mandy, and he was still mine even after Mandy. I was the one who helped bottle feed him after he’d been released from the hospital. I’d been the one who took turns with my brother waking up in the middle of the night when he cried. I had cleaned his dirty baby butt, bought him clothes, blended his food when he’d gotten off formula. I was the one who cried when my brother met Mandy and announced to my best friend and me that he was moving out and getting a place with her. I was the person who had missed the shit out of Josh when I didn’t live with him for those years their family had been together.

Not Anita.

“Go. Now. There’s still the restraining order against you. You can’t be here,” I said, using that no-nonsense voice I’d practiced on the boys countless times.

Pink bloomed across her cheeks, and it reminded me of the expression on her face the first time she’d tried to see Josh when he was a year and a half. He’d started crying, sobbing actually, and she’d been so embarrassed, I had felt terrible for her. Then again, no one had made her disappear. No one had made her say and do the things that led to my brother filing a restraining order against her for Josh’s sake.

“Diana, please. It’s been so long—”

“If you want to see Josh, it’s not going to be like this. You can’t just show up here. You need to go. Now.”

Yeah, the rose color deepened and her eyes darted away. “Diana—”

“Anita, now,” I insisted, knowing damn well there was still an hour left until Josh got home from batting practice.

She groaned, her hands going up to the sides of her head as she swallowed hard. “Would you listen to me for a minute? That’s all I need.”

“No. I want you to go. Right now. I’ll give you my e-mail address. Contact me that way. I don’t want to talk to you, and I don’t want to see you, but we can message each other.” You’d figure she’d gotten a clue the last two times she’d called and I’d either hung up on her or ignored it. I wanted to have whatever she said in writing just in case.

Her mouth—that mouth that had called my beloved nephew a mistake once upon a time—opened, but it wasn’t her voice that came out.

“Pretty sure she’s telling you to fuck off.”

Something tickled at the back of my throat. Relief? I turned to look over my shoulder to spot Dallas stepping onto the sidewalk toward my house. And despite the fact that I wanted to yell at her and tell her all the ways she’d hurt my Josh, I couldn’t help but take in the scene called my neighbor.

And it wasn’t because he was dirty and sweaty and his shirt was clinging to him like a wet T-shirt.

Mostly.

Because, Jesus Christ, it was like my brain forgot who was standing next to me for all of the fifteen or thirty seconds that I watched this damn near stranger walk over. Unless Anita was blind, she was taking in the same thing I was. I knew what she saw. That “fuck off” face. The powerful upper body. Old, worn-in jeans with stains all over them, and scuffed, paint-stained, black work boots. The shirt he had on must have shrunk at some point because the sleeves barely covered his shoulders, highlighting the dark ink that covered his biceps, but I made myself look at his face before I got caught.

“You gonna get going or do I need to walk you to your car?” Dallas asked as he stopped right beside me, his shoulder inches away from my head, completely surprising me. I wasn’t going to deny a gift when it was given to me, even though it was from someone I didn’t know how I could repay.

“I just want to talk,” the woman, who had given my brother so much hell, said.

“Pretty sure she doesn’t wanna talk to you. Am I right?”

I was still looking at Dallas when I said in a distracted voice, “Yes.”

My neighbor shrugged, his attention laser-focused on the woman a few feet away. “You heard her. Get gone.”

“I just need a damn minute, Diana—”

Somehow, the use of my name managed to get me to lift my eyes to meet hers. “Don’t make me call the cops. Please. I told you, get your life together, Anita. Don’t show up to my house unexpected. This isn’t the way to do this.”

My neighbor had turned his head to look at me for the first time, slow, slow, slowly when I first said the c-o-p-s word. I turned my body so that, out of the corner of my eye, I could see him blink. A muscle in that sharp cheekbone of his twitched. His nostrils flared just enough to be noticeable.

“The cops?” the man who lived across the street asked in a calm, cool voice. And Dallas—I could have hugged him right then, kissed him even—lifted one of those big, callused hands of his and pointed it along with his head to the side. “Leave.” One word and only one word was necessary. “Now.” One more word cemented that harsh command.

As if sensing her impending demise at the fact I was about to tell someone bigger than both of us that she was breaking the law, Anita made a short, sharp noise in her throat. “Forget it. I’m leaving.”

I didn’t watch her hightail it and neither did Dallas; he was too busy staring a hole straight into my eyes. A part of me regretted starting this staring thing with him, but it was too late now. If he wanted to do it, we could do it.

It was the sound of a car starting nearby that snapped us both out of the world we had built up around us. Dallas turned to look at something over my shoulder, his expression darkening for the first time, lines forming horizontally across his forehead as he glared at what I could only assume was Anita’s car taking off. It was a black Chevy. I wouldn’t forget it.