The buzzing of my phone roused me from sleep. Constant, over and over, buzz, buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz, buzz.
The sun had only barely begun to rear its head, painting the sky in light blues and pinks and brightening my bedroom just enough that I could find my phone face down in the low light. I grabbed for it.
Buzzer pressed on west gate.
Buzzer pressed on west gate.
Buzzer pressed on west gate…
I swiped on the notifications that were piling up by the second. The live video feed flickered to life on my phone, and standing outside my gate, frantically and angrily pressing my buzzer over and over, was a woman I only vaguely recognized.
I pressed the button to speak through it. “Hello?”
I watched as the woman glanced around before realizing the sound was coming from the speaker. She leaned closer to the camera. “Hi, Damien. Can you let me in, please?”
Scrubbing my eyes, I focused on her again, trying to work out why her face rang bells in my mind. But it was far too early — six in the morning, if my phone was to be trusted — and I couldn’t bring myself to wake up enough to place her. “I’m sorry, the camera is broken,” I lied. “Who is this?”
“Christ, you’d think someone as rich as him would have a working camera,” she grumbled.
“I can hear you.”
“Sorry, yeah, it’s Grace. Grace Thompson.”
Grace Thompson…
Shit.
I sprung from the sheets, stumbling to my dresser as I pressed the unlock button on my app. Grace Thompson. Marissa’s sister. The one who was handling all of the handover details about Noah. Why she was here at six o’clock in the Goddamn morning was beyond me, but if I needed to sign something or she needed to drop something off, I was more than willing to let her onto my property.
The sound of the doorbell rang through the empty house. I pulled on the first pair of joggers I could find and slipped a plain white t-shirt over my head as I trudged down the stairs. This would be the first time I would be speaking to her directly since Marissa and I split over five years ago — almost everything so far had been handled by Ethan.
On some level, I was nervous. But my stomach sank into a black abyss the moment I opened the door.
Grace stood in her pastel green scrubs, name tag dangling from her neck, her auburn hair chopped short and blunt at her shoulders. And beside her, a quarter of her height, clutching a tiny toy car, a head of dark brown curls and staggeringly bright blue eyes stared up at me.
Nope. No. I was going to pass out.
“Damien, this is Noah. Noah, this is your father, Damien Blackwood.”
I took a step back from the door.
“This is your new home from today,” she continued, lowering herself to a squat.
She was a week early. Why the fuck was she a week fucking early? “Grace,” I croaked, half expecting her to explain herself and half expecting this to be a Goddamn fucking nightmare. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe.
“What?” she snapped, the bite of that single word telling me everything I needed to know about the situation at hand.
“You…” Fuck, I couldn’t find words. Breathe. Fucking breathe. “Next week. You’re supposed to drop him off next week.” I stared her down, my gaze unwavering, partly because I hadn’t mentally prepared myself yet to even be able to look at the kid I’d made and been unaware of for five whole years. I should have said hello to him. I should have been ready.
“There was a mix-up in the schedule. He’s yours from today,” she said. “I told your lawyer last night.”
“When?” I pressed. “When last night?”
“I don’t know, nine or so?”
I pulled my phone from my pajama bottoms and looked at the notifications that had piled up overnight, scrolling past each separate one from the buzzer. And sure fucking enough, at nine-thirty last night, three missed calls from Ethan.
I’d been in the shower. I’d been thinking about Olivia. I’d been doing all fucking manner of things to myself.
Oh my God. “I’m sorry,” I breathed. “I’m not… I’m not ready yet, Grace. None of his things have come in yet.”
“What?” she snapped, but quickly took a deep breath and looked back down at Noah. “Noah, buddy, how about we go inside and you can have a look around your new house while Damien—sorry, your dad—and I speak?”
Noah looked between us, his too-big eyes lingering on me. Say something, you idiot. Say something to your fucking kid. “Okay.”
He slipped past me before I could work up the nerve.
“Auntie Grace, look! Stairs!”
She chuckled as she stepped in behind him. “Exciting!”
He raced up them, and already my mind started to race, thinking about everything I’d left out upstairs that he could get into. Everything he could question. Everything that absolutely should have been put away before a child rummaged around.
“What the fuck do you mean none of his stuff has arrived?” she hissed.
I turned back to her as I closed the front door. “You weren’t supposed to bring him until next Saturday. Everything I bought is arriving this week. I have nothing, Grace.”
“You didn’t think to purchase things the moment you found out about him?” She crossed her arms over her chest, her name tag squishing against her breast.
“I didn’t know what to fucking buy,” I spat. “It’s not like you supplied me with a list.”
“Google exists, Damien.”
“Right, sorry, next time I’ll just search up what to buy to prepare for a five-year-old son you’ve never met coming to live with you for the rest of his adolescence. I’m sure there are loads of articles about that specific scenario.” I reached for the bottle of whiskey I’d left on the couch and the unlit pack of cigars beside it, instinct kicking in and telling me to clean up the things that were definitely not kid-friendly.
“Jesus, you couldn’t even clean up?”
She trailed behind me as I brought the alcohol and cigars into the kitchen. “I didn’t know he was coming today.”
“So you just live like this—”
“Why did you change the days, Grace?” I snapped, spinning on my heel to face her. She was significantly shorter than me, her round face and dark brown eyes reminding me far too much of her sister. If only she’d gotten the curly hair gene. “You knew damn well that I wouldn’t be ready. Two weeks isn’t a lot of time to prep, and cutting it short by an entire week… Did you want him to arrive like this? With me unready and a house that doesn’t feel welcoming to him?”
“I need to work this week.” She shrugged as if it was the most nonchalant thing she could say.
“So do I! I run a fucking company—”
“Why are you yelling at my auntie?”
My blood ran cold as I turned to the second stairway that deposited into the kitchen. Noah stood there, toy car still in hand and a blanket from my upstairs guest room in the other, his big eyes watering. I barely knew the kid, had barely had a second to even comprehend what was happening, but my chest blossomed so Goddamn painfully for him that it nearly had my knees buckling. “I’m sorry.”
Grace glanced back at him. “It’s okay, bud. We’re just having a discussion. Why don’t you go play with your car in the living room?”
“Where’s that?”
I cleared my throat. “That big room by the front door,” I said.
Noah nodded once and took off.
“Let me make one thing clear, Damien,” Grace said, her voice dropping in volume as she turned back to me. “I’m not happy about this. Any of it. I don’t understand why my sister left him to you and not me. Bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be filing for custody the instant I can get the paperwork done.”
Well. There it was.
She had done this on purpose. She’d flustered me, manipulated the situation, and got herself a solid case.
“You… you haven’t even given me a chance with him,” I sputtered, disbelief wracking my brain as I tried to wrap my mind around what was happening here. “You can’t just base my abilities as a father around ten fucking minutes at six in the morning, unprepared and out of my depth.”
“No, I can’t. But you’re one of the richest men in this country and you couldn’t even prep for a kid in a week. You have no experience with children. You’ve never met him. I’m a pediatrician, Damien, and I’ve been in his life since the moment he was born.” She turned away from me, angry footsteps heading toward the living room and, I imagined, the door.
“How am I supposed to get the upper leg here when I didn’t even know he existed?” I followed her, keeping my words as quiet as I could with Noah listening in from his spot on the couch. He vroomed the toy car across the cushions.
Grace stopped before Noah, pressing a kiss into the top of his curly hair. “I’ve got to go, Noah. I’ll come check on you soon, okay? You can call me whenever you want, just ask Dam—your dad.”
“Stay,” he pouted, his eyes glossing over again as if they were endless puddles. “I don’t want you to go.” Oh my God, he doesn’t understand. She can’t just leave him like this.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
I opened my mouth as I stepped toward them. “Grace—”
“Don’t,” she snapped. “You’ll make it harder than it needs to be.”
————
A sniffly, crying preschooler trailing me around my house as I desperately tried to work out what to do with him wasn’t how I imagined my Friday morning going.
I had a meeting with the board at ten o’clock, one that I could not miss. We needed to go over what was happening with the lawsuits we were filing against the businesses we’d obtained that had gone bankrupt, and pushing that back at all would look like I was floundering. I needed to come across as strong — but I had a five-year-old with a toy car and nothing else asking me questions I didn’t know the answer to every three seconds, and no one to watch him.
“Please, Caroline,” I begged, my cell tucked between my shoulder and my ear as I tried to scramble some eggs for Noah. Grace hadn’t even given him breakfast. He’d asked for cheese, but when I offered the only kind I had on hand — Stilton — he’d turned his nose up at the mold and asked for the thin, square kind. “I don’t have anyone else to watch him. I can’t miss this meeting.”
“I’m so sorry, I can’t,” my sister said, the loud sound of something whirring in the background. “I’m not even in California. I thought he wasn’t coming until next week?”
“So did I,” I sighed.
“I’ve got to go. Maybe try Mom? I heard she flew back recently, she might still be in town.”
“I spoke to Dad yesterday and he said she was flying back out to Hawaii today.” I took the pan off the gas burner and set it to the side. “Where are you?”
“Philly. Just about to helicopter out to New York, though. I’ve got to go.”
“All right. Love you.”
“Love you.”
The line ended and I turned to Noah, his small body just barely peeking up over the breakfast bar from the high-top seat. “Who was that?” he asked, his eyes fixated on his blazing red car as he made it squeak across the black marble countertop.
“Your aunt. Not the one who dropped you off today, but one you haven’t met yet,” I explained. Every sentence to him felt clunky in my mouth, and I hoped that this would get easier, that this would come more naturally.
His eyes widened as he looked up at me. “I have another aunt?”
Forcing the most convincing grin I could, I grabbed a plate that seemed far too breakable for him from my cabinet. “You sure do. She’s great. You’ll love her.”
I scraped the eggs out onto the plate and slid them across the bar to him, pulling a single fork from the drawer and plopping it into his waiting, too-small hand. “Do you have any smaller ones?” he asked, waving it about like a weapon.
I leaned onto the counter and put my face into my fucking hands. Another thing to add to the list. “No.”
He shrugged and dove into his food.
“How… how good are you at entertaining yourself?”
“What’s that?” he asked through a mouthful of eggs.
I took a deep breath in. You’ll get used to this. You will. “I need to bring you with me to work today,” I explained slowly. “I have a very important meeting. If I leave you with… I don’t know, a tablet and a phone in my office, can you stay out of trouble?”
His little brows shot up his forehead. “You’re going to leave me alone?”
Okay. Yep. Horrible idea. “Nope, forget I said that.”
He shrugged. “Mom used to take me to work all the time before she died.”
The abrupt bluntness caught me off guard, and I almost found myself laughing at it before catching the chuckle in my mouth. He said as if it was yesterday’s news — as if it didn’t phase him. I knew it had to, knew that he likely went through cycles of being okay with it and being drastically not okay with it. But that… that was another thing I needed to get used to.
He got about halfway through his eggs before letting a glob of them fall out of his mouth and back onto the plate. “This is yucky.”
“Yeah, I don’t like them without cheese either,” I chuckled.
“Yucky cheese,” he clarified. “It smelled wrong.”
“You’d like it if you tried it, though,” I said.
“Okay.” He perked up immediately, dropping his fork and his car. His eyes met mine, expectant, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he was doing.
“What?”
“I’ll try it.”
I eyed him suspiciously as I righted myself to my full height. “You’ll try it?”
He nodded. “Mom said better to try than deny.”
“Do you even know what that means?” I laughed, grabbing the Stilton from the fridge. I rummaged through the pantry at the side of the kitchen for a box of crackers — better to try it cold on that than make a whole fresh batch of eggs.
“No. But I know it means I need to just try it.”
I plucked a cheese knife from the cutlery drawer and cut off a small sliver of the blue cheese, smearing it along the topside of a cracker. I kept it light for him — better to not invade his senses. “Your mom was right about a lot of things,” I grinned, passing him the cracker.
He eyed it as if the blue spots would kill him, but one nod from me and he stuffed it in his mouth.
He chewed.
And chewed.
And chewed.
His eyes lit up the moment he swallowed. “You’re right,” he chirped.
“I’m right?”
“I like it. Another, please?”
For the first time in two hours, I felt slightly okay about the situation. I gave him another.
