Hero for the Holidays (Four Corners Ranch #9)

Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

L ANDRY GOT UP EARLY and made himself some coffee. Then he made a second cup of coffee and decided to do something he never did.

Venture into enemy territory.

He was going to Sullivan’s Point, without making an announcement. He was taking his life into his hands.

But Fia wasn’t just an ex-girlfriend anymore. She wasn’t even his enemy.

She was his co-parent . And he figured it was time for them to come up with a real strategy.

He was going to bring Lila over in the afternoon when she finished her schoolwork, and before that, Fia and himself would probably benefit from a meeting. A summit . Landry King liked a plan. He had a plan for how he was going to handle all of this with Lila, and it hadn’t gone smoothly.

So now he was on plan B. And this one was going to have to involve Fia, rather than cutting her out. He could acknowledge that his part in that had been a little shady.

And so he would come bearing coffee.

He went to Sullivan’s Point as often as anybody, because the lake was there, and they had lots of different events down at the lake. Plus it was where they had their town hall meetings. It had become a pretty normal thing. But even so, he was always aware that he was a stranger in a strange land.

That he was not a single Sullivan’s favorite person. And hell, they hadn’t even known why .

Just that Fia wasn’t a fan. So neither were any of them.

What the Sullivan parents lacked in loyalty, their daughters made up for, and then some.

Well, everyone was going to have to get accustomed to his face.

The one place he didn’t go habitually was the farmhouse. But then, he never had. It wasn’t like they’d had the kind of relationship where you went home and met the parents. No. It was more stopping somewhere in the woods for a blow job in the back of his truck and then continuing on to meet people at the lake and pretend that wasn’t what had just happened. Of course, he was an equal opportunity kind of man, and he’d spent just as much time with his face between her thighs as she’d spent on him.

She’d always been pretty. Now that she was a woman, though, if he looked at her too long he felt a kind of deep ache that permeated his whole being. Took over his chest. Took over his whole body.

He didn’t care for it.

He had dismissed it as anger for all of these years. But the truth was, he knew.

He had never stopped wanting her. He had wanted her while she stood in front of him and broke his heart all those years ago.

It didn’t matter if there were other women or a huge space of time, it didn’t change the facts. He had never felt for anyone else what he felt for her.

Justice and Denver were absolute whores. They screwed around with every pretty woman who wanted them. At a certain point Landry had figured he should test that lifestyle out. It hadn’t lasted long. It just hadn’t...excited him. He felt like he’d peaked at sixteen. And maybe it was the phenomenon of never being able to forget your first. But sex had never felt so sharp or dangerous, brilliant or mind-blowing in the years since.

He was closer to living like a monk now than being like any of his brothers.

The problem was, sometimes he looked at Fia, and he felt more just looking at her than he did when he was actually inside another woman.

Not the best thing to think of as he pulled up to the farmhouse, and grabbed both cups of coffee, then headed up the stairs.

He needed to get himself together.

He rolled up and knocked on the door. The place was so bright now. Impossibly feminine. There were ostentatious lanterns hanging from the weeping willow out front. A table and chairs sat out there, all mismatched and pretty.

It was quintessentially Fia.

He’d always liked that about her. The way that she was just so girly. Tough too, though. But she wore dresses, and she was soft. And it wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate a horse girl, but Fia just wasn’t. And he liked that.

The door opened, and he came face-to-face with those green eyes.

“Is Lila with you?”

“Nope. I just got her set up to do school.”

“Oh. I didn’t even ask about that.”

“Right now she’s doing distance learning with the middle school that she was in before. Eventually, I’d love to have her at the schoolhouse here. But she wasn’t sure she was going to stay and wasn’t sure she was going to like it, plus...”

“You hadn’t told me.” Her tone was accusing, and that was fair enough.

“No. I hadn’t told you, and that needed to happen.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I brought coffee. As a peace offering. I thought... Well, hell. I thought we might as well hash some stuff out.”

“Such as?”

“Can I come in?”

She let him pass and closed the door behind him. And he realized they had been alone together just a very few times since the old days. That last time had felt like this too. Like they were too close, like those years were too close to them. Like they were one step away from crying, kissing or screaming. All three of which had been their specialty back in the day.

“Look at us. Having a social call,” she said.

“Yes, indeed,” he replied. He held the coffee cup out.

“Is it poison?” she asked, squinting.

“No. I wouldn’t be that sloppy. I don’t have an alibi.”

“Good to know.” She took the coffee cup from his hand and took the lid off, as if she was checking the cream to coffee ratio. But he still remembered exactly how she liked it.

Damn.

Thinking that sent a bolt of lightning right through him.

He wondered if he remembered how she liked everything .

No.

That was not going to happen. They had a kid to think about. And more baggage between them than the damned Titanic could hold.

At least the Titanic had sunk.

If their personal ship sank, it could take some of their bags down with it.

They weren’t going to have luck that good. He had a feeling.

“I could respect you if you were a murderer,” she said. “But I can’t respect an idiot.”

That was the Fia he remembered from back when. Funny. Sharp.

Beautiful.

He cleared his throat.

“Good to know,” he said.

“I think it’s good to know where you stand.”

“I don’t think you or I have ever been confused about where we stood with each other.”

Everyone around them might have had questions, but as far as they went, they’d been crystal clear. It had been great, until it wasn’t. It had been love until it was hate.

And now it was...civility of convenience?

“Fair. So now we need to what? Lay down ground rules? Is that what you want?”

“It’s been a day. How do you feel?”

“It has not been a whole day, actually. But thank you. And I feel... I don’t know. In some ways happy. In some ways sad. In some ways shell-shocked. I think I really felt like for the first time in a long while my life had settled. And now I am a mother. I suppose in some ways I am, I have been. But in other ways no. So this is new. Except... I don’t know, you’ve been with her for three weeks. How does it feel?”

His chest went tight. “I pretty much want to cry every day. That’s how it feels, Fia.”

She looked at him, shocked. “I thought cowboys were allergic to tears.”

“It’s a kid. Our kid. How can you not want to cry? Looking at her, thinking about it. It’s... It’s intense. Every day is intense. And I know that I feel for her more than she does for me. I’m not even sure if she cares that I’m her father, or if it’s all the same to her. And I get what it would be. I do. It was good for me. To hear you tell her that it was okay she wasn’t looking for us. Because that hurt me when she said it to me. And you responded better than I did. You change the way I thought about it.”

“Look at us,” Fia said. “Being civil.”

“We blew up over the biggest reason a couple can. A kid. In some capacity I think kids are often the cause of explosions. And now we’re trying to be civil for the same reason a whole lot of people try civility. A kid.”

Fia put the lid back on her coffee, and bit her lip. “That is true. You’re definitely not wrong about that. This is... I don’t know. I’ve been caught between wanting to fall to my knees and give thanks for this, or...cry. I wanted to spare her. From trauma from... She’s back with us anyway. And I just want... I want us to make the tragedy she’s had to live through into something good. And that means we need to behave ourselves.”

Yeah, there was a real sense of what was the point that overtook him sometimes too. She was back here anyway. And he could admit it had been part of what fueled his anger when he’d made the decision to keep his choice from Fia.

He was relieved to see her grapple with it too. It made him feel like he wasn’t alone. Which was maybe a strange thing to think. But Fia was the only one he shared this with.

That had been true all these years. And they’d never talked about it. Never dealt with it.

The part of him that carried this felt stuck at seventeen sometimes, maybe for that reason. Because he’d locked it up in his chest back then and didn’t take it out ever.

“Agreed. We need to keep it together,” he said.

That much he knew.

“So just whatever conflict we have—because you and I both know we’re going to have conflict. There’s no way we spent the last thirteen years at each other’s throats and were just suddenly going to be amazing at conflict resolution.”

He laughed. “I guess that’s a good point.”

“We can’t drag her into it. We can’t have her feeling like she’s somehow responsible for the tension between us.”

“I think I’ve done a pretty good job of making sure she knows we come by the tension honestly.”

“We do.”

She looked like she wanted to say something, but instead looked down at her coffee.

“What? We’re alone. It’s free-for-all time. We have to get it out of our systems so it doesn’t affect Lila.”

Fia looked away. “I was remembering. Some things that I don’t always let myself. I know why I was so jealous. I found out that my dad was cheating on my mom, and I basically didn’t feel like I could trust men. Anyone. If my dad, who I always thought was a decent guy, was cheating, then why wouldn’t my boyfriend cheat? That was why I was continually losing my mind whenever you were with some other girl. Or looked at one. Why were you?”

He huffed a laugh. “Because I was an idiot.”

“Sure. Granted. I believe that. But I feel like there was more to it too.”

“My dad was a narcissist, and he used everyone’s feelings for him to control them. He’d give me something to get my loyalty. Take it away to remind me who was in charge. My mom loved him so much her only choice was to run away. In the end, she couldn’t stand the way that he used her feelings. Manipulative. She had to get out. There wasn’t really jealousy so much as I was always on the lookout for ways that you could be manipulating me. Because I... Because I would’ve done anything for you. And I freaked out about how intense all that felt. Teenagers shouldn’t...”

“That’s the real reason teenage sex is a bad idea. Isn’t it? It’s feelings.”

“I think the unintended pregnancy also,” he said.

She laughed. “Okay. Fair. The unintended pregnancies are definitely a big one.”

“Yeah. But damn those feelings.” They looked at each other for a long moment. “I thought I loved you, Fia.”

He didn’t know why he’d said that.

“I thought I loved you too.” The only sound was the ticking clock on the wall. Why the hell did she still have a clock that ticked? She cleared her throat. “Listen, whatever you felt back then, whatever we were, you weren’t alone. I...I cared for you. A lot. Looking back on it, I don’t really think it was love. It was too immature. I’d like to find a piece of that, though. Now. And remove it for all the drama, and just find a way forward. Together. For Lila’s sake.”

It was like a wall fell inside of him.

Lila.

He wanted to talk about her. Brag about her. This was something he couldn’t hold back on.

“She’s a good kid. She’s so cool. When I met her, I... I can’t even explain it. She looked so much like you, Fia. It just about damn near knocked me off my feet. I was pissed about it, then. But I was also in awe of it. Now...I’m not pissed about it. I’m not. She’s ours . We made her. Together. It’s a pretty damned amazing thing. Because she’s so stubborn, which I think is both our fault. And she’s just interesting. I know that we have to thank Jack and Melissa for that.”

She nodded. “They were really good people.”

“I realize that I denied myself that reassurance by not being able to talk to you about the decision.” He looked down. “I cut myself out of the conversation. And I’m still not sure I can say that I’m at peace with everything.”

“You’re not ready to admit that you think I’m right.”

“I don’t know if you can call a choice like that right, definitely, just like I can’t say keeping her would have been wrong. But I can understand.” He sighed. “Do we need to agree? Are you ever going to think that what I wanted was reasonable?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Then why do I have to think that your option was the only option?”

She looked angry then. Mutinous. It reminded him of old fights. And old times they’d spent making up for those fights. “You don’t. You don’t have to do a damn thing.”

“There was a lot I should have done , though. A lot of things I’ve been angry about were my own fault. I could have been part of choosing her family. I could have met them. But I never talked to you about that, I never asked you about them. I never...even asked you about her birth. What she looked like. How it was for you.” He was disgusted with himself then. For not asking her about the labor and delivery. How long it was, if she’d had some kind of pain management. If someone had been there to comfort her. “It was easier for me to make you into an enemy,” he said, his throat tight. “You’re right about that too.”

She blinked. “Wow. That’s a whole lot of you’re right from you.”

“Don’t make it hostile. I’m trying to be fair.”

She finally took a sip of the coffee. Maybe finally accepting that he wasn’t trying to poison her. “I don’t know that there’s any point going over all this old ground. We might just have to move forward. Make something new. That won’t be so bad. I think there’s no... There’s no way to logic ourselves into a perfect way of dealing with this. I think we have to be ideological. We need to let go of the past. We need to accept that we are not going to come to a consensus on the things that happened then. And we just need to draw a line under it. And that’s not a thing that any normal person wants to do ever. That’s certainly not something you or I have been willing to do all this time. But we didn’t have a reason. And now we do.”

Well, she was right about that too. Dammit.

“Want to come to dinner at my house tonight?”

“You’re kidding, right? Wait, your house or...”

“Nope. The Kings. The family homestead.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I think it would be fun to let them know who Lila’s mom is...by surprise.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. It’s different than it was with your sisters. My family already knows I have a kid. And hey, don’t you think it would be fun to absolutely shock my brothers? Especially Denver.”

Fia and Denver had worked together getting the new iteration of the ranch up and running. He remembered feeling jealous about that. And he and Fia had broken up two years earlier. But old habits died hard with her.

He could see she was tempted by that. “You just want to ambush them with me?”

“A lot of people suspect that something happened with us back in the day. It’s not like we were subtle. It’s not like we’ve been subtle a day since.”

“Well,” said Fia, “I haven’t been.”

“True. Mostly, it’s you.”

He looked at her, and he realized maybe for the first time how strange it was. That for a year of his life she had been the only thing he thought about. And that together they had created a situation that had nearly destroyed them as people. And then they’d acted like it hadn’t happened. They’d never spoken about it. They hadn’t talked to each other. They had just stopped being that piece of each other’s life.

It was crazy. It really was crazy.

And now she would be part of it again. A key part.

And that almost felt right.

Even if he couldn’t explain it.

“What time are you going to bring Lila over?”

“Two o’clock?”

“That works for me.”

He nodded. “Then when you come for dinner, you can just bring her with you.”

“I would like that.”

“All right. Hey.” He spread his hands. “Look at us. We had a conversation without having an explosion.”

“Pretty mature of us, I think.”

“Yeah. I would say.”

“All right. I’ll see you later,” she said.

“Yeah. See you.”

He congratulated himself on two things when he left Fia’s house. That he hadn’t yelled. And that he hadn’t kissed her.

He had been more tempted to do one than the other.

F IA FELT NERVOUS . How did you prepare to have your kid at your house for the first time? All of this was just so very strange.

Because of course for Lila, this would never be the same kind of mother-daughter relationship she’d had with Melissa. But it would be all Fia knew. All she understood.

A completely unique experience.

And she really wanted Lila to like the house. She wanted, on some level, for Lila to be impressed by what she had built. So that Lila would understand why Fia had made the choices she did.

And she obsessed about it all day until Landry pulled up in her driveway. She felt like it was kind of a bad precedent that she was back in a space where seeing Landry’s truck caused the whole earthquake inside her body. But at least this was about Lila and not about him. She waited outdoors, twisting her hands. Lila got out of the car, with her phone and another handheld device of some kind in her hand, along with a stuffed animal, and what looked like a plastic, segmented slug.

And Fia suddenly realized that while she had once been a teenage girl, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with a teenage girl at this moment in time.

Landry shut the truck door behind Lila, his movements effortless as he came up behind her. And she had some weird kind of schism. A sensation like they were in a life they might’ve had, but never quite made it to. Not one where they were together. But like they were doing some kind of custody exchange.

God knew that was where they would’ve ended up.

They could never have gone the distance. Landry tipped his hat. “See you ladies at dinnertime.”

She didn’t know why that made her smile. But it did.

She tried to suppress it

Which left her with Lila, who was looking at her somewhat suspiciously.

“Hi,” Fia said, her stomach going tight.

“Hi.”

She was looking up at Fia expectantly, because of course Fia was supposed to be the adult.

“You can call me Fia.”

“Okay.”

“I thought you might want to see my house. And we could...bake. You like baking?”

“Not really.”

“Well. Do you, um, do you know how to knit?”

“No. But...it looks kind of cool.”

“Or crocheting. I like to do amigurumi sometimes. And make little animals.”

“Oh yeah,” said Lila. “I’d like to do that.”

“I can teach you. And I can bake. You can watch if you want. I’ll get you set up with a round for your crochet.”

She wondered if it was normal that she felt a little bit like she was babysitting. There was also a strange, dull ache in her chest that wouldn’t go away, that let her know that this wasn’t just normal child-watching duties.

Was something wrong with her?

She’d wondered that before.

What was she supposed to feel?

What she felt was impossibly big, but she wasn’t sure it was the right kind of maternal. How did you know?

These were the kinds of things normal people could probably ask their mother. But Fia wasn’t normal. Her mother wasn’t normal. They never had been.

She couldn’t call her up and ask her. She’d have to also add, oh, hey, Mom, by the way, I had a baby just two months after you told me I’d be a terrible mother.

That would go down great.

She sat down at the table across from Lila and took out some of her crochet supplies, and a very simple pattern for a penguin. She’d taught herself to crochet years ago. It was good for her to keep busy, and at night sometimes she got a little bit overanxious. Especially now with everyone moved out, knitting or crocheting with the TV on was a great distraction.

“Um—” she picked up her hook and started a magic circle quickly “—this is going to be your base.”

She spent a few minutes explaining it to her, and she felt like a camp counselor. She wondered when her numbness would ease. There had been a rush of feelings right at first, and then she’d said all these things. The right things, she felt.

And now she felt afraid of what she might do or say. Like she might breathe in too deep and all of this would shatter.

She’d been afraid she wouldn’t be able to do this when she was sixteen. So confident she could do it now. But the initial rush had moved over her like a wave and left nothing but little pools of doubt and spiny sea creatures in its wake.

She could do without the spines, to be honest.

She breathed in and they hurt. She looked at Lila and they hurt.

But they passed the day working on their penguins and she felt like maybe it had gone well, because she at least looked pleased by her little yarn creature.

“So what do you think about ambushing the Kings with our presence?”

“I enjoyed ambushing them with mine,” Lila said.

Fia scrunched her nose up. “Hmm.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

The question cut Fia to the bone. Because of course it would seem like Fia was embarrassed of Lila. And of course she...was.

Not the way Lila was thinking, of course. It was the idea that everyone would know. Because when she thought of how she and Landry were it was all heat and fire and anger. When she thought of them it was so hot and intense.

Exposing.

Everyone would know.

“Not...of you,” she said. “It’s more... I don’t know. No one knows Landry and I were together back then. He’s explained the whole ranch to you, right?”

“Yeah, there’s four ranches, but they’re kind of all one thing. Like a Taco Bell Pizza Hut.”

“Yes. We are the Taco Bell Pizza Hut of ranching. But if there was also a Burger King and a Wendy’s attached. And we all know each other. We went to school in a one-room schoolhouse.”

“Landry said there was a schoolhouse here. I think a school that small sounds insane. I don’t even know the names of every kid in my class.”

“And that’s why I’m embarrassed. We just all know each other too well, and there are no surprises left, really? And now everyone will know...” She suddenly felt deeply immature talking about this to a thirteen-year-old.

Her thirteen-year-old daughter.

“It’s so silly,” Fia said. “It’s the history between Landry and me that I don’t really want people obsessing over—and they will. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but there isn’t that much to do here.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Lila said. “Though it’s not like I did much the last year.”

“Oh. Yeah. I... What did you do before?”

“Normal stuff. I volunteered at an animal shelter on the weekends. We used to go hiking out of the city. My dad really liked to go to Blazers games, even though they suck.”

Fia laughed. “They do suck.”

“So bad.” Lila smiled. “My mom didn’t usually come to the games. But she liked to go to the Japanese garden. She said it was her favorite place to think. She had a membership, and she would take me there sometimes and we would just sit. We used to go to the zoo a lot. It’s a really interesting zoo.”

The picture Lila painted of a family so close-knit made Fia’s chest ache.

It was what she’d wanted for her. But she’d lost it. She’d been affected by hideous trauma.

For the first time since Lila had come to Four Corners, she let herself wonder how it might have been if they’d kept her. Would they have gone on family hikes and trips to the zoo?

She blinked, trying to get rid of the stinging in her eyes. “Well, we don’t have a zoo or an animal shelter, but we have a lot of animals here. And there aren’t any stadiums, but we have a game day every year where we all compete against each other in things like football and potato sack races and get very competitive. Mostly, we also suck. We don’t have gardens like Portland, but we have quiet places in the mountains, and I do have a garden where I grow fruits and vegetables. It’s not going to be the same. But I think it could be pretty good.”

Then she felt some of the spines inside her retract. She felt some of her uneasiness ebb. Maybe she wasn’t the worst at this.

When it was time for dinner, she loaded Lila and the crochet creations in her car and they headed over to King’s Crest. The place would be familiar to her again. What a weird realization. It was a new beginning in a lot of ways, but also a strange kind of old echo. A retread. She had to guard those grooves in her heart. Which had been returned to her, but felt a little bit battered and bloodied besides.

But they weren’t in love anymore. If she was honest, in a true adult sense they never had been.

Obsession wasn’t love. Lust wasn’t love. She and Landry had a lock on lust, that was for sure.

They did lust very well.

Dammit.

She hummed, mostly to fill the silence, mostly to try to redirect her thoughts.

“It’ll be like ripping a Band-Aid off,” Lila said sagely.

“I don’t like ripping Band-Aids off, though,” Fia said.

“Landry would probably say you can’t avoid taking Band-Aids off forever or they’ll mold. Or a bobcat will come eat your knuckles.”

Fia looked at Lila out of the corner of her eye. “Would he?”

“Yes.” Lila paused. “You and Landry don’t like each other, do you?”

That didn’t land quite right. She’d...despised him. For years. Hated him, even. He was also the only man she’d ever seen naked.

“It’s a little bit more complicated than that.”

“Like him not telling you about me being here levels of complicated?”

She sighed. She hadn’t had any time to think about what kind of mother she wanted to be to a teenager. And she had never let herself fantasize about what it would be like to be a mom to a baby, because that just opened old wounds, and since she hadn’t dated since Landry, it had been kind of a moot point anyway.

She had made the farm and the farm store her baby. And she had decided to be happy with that. To be a cool aunt.

Now she was trying to be a cool mom? While she felt like a combination babysitter/failure/maternal figure. Maybe? So she wondered what all she needed to say to the kid.

How much transparency she owed her.

And then she remembered that Lila was thirteen, and Fia had been fifteen when she got pregnant. The truth was, depending on what was happening in their lives, some kids just grew up too fast. She and Landry had been at a dangerous intersection. Adult hormones and desires colliding with teenage brains and coping skills.

Maybe if somebody would’ve noticed, maybe if one of her parents would have paid attention to her. Maybe if somebody had talked to her. About how feelings could seem savage and fatal when you were that young, but they were only feelings, and deferring pleasure wouldn’t kill you. Using condoms was important. Protecting a piece of yourself might be a good idea.

“It isn’t very straightforward when you used to...care about somebody very much.”

Lila looked sage then. “So you had a bad breakup.”

She felt relieved that Lila had managed to make it sound so simple. “Yes. We did. A long time ago.”

“Was it over me?”

She bit the inside of her cheek. “Yes and no. We definitely disagreed about what to do, but we would’ve broken up anyway. I knew that. We couldn’t listen to each other. We didn’t know how. We weren’t raised by parents who listen.”

“I can’t imagine that. My mom listened to everything I had to say. She was so great. She—” Lila stopped suddenly. “You probably don’t want to hear this.”

She needed to hear it. To keep imagining Lila in all those happy times. To stop being so tempted to imagine Lila as a baby, as a child, with her. With Landry.

She swallowed hard.

“I do,” Fia said, with more gusto than she felt. “It’s pretty lucky, actually, for me. That I get to have a kid who knows what kind of mom she wants.” She looked away quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that. I didn’t mean to say it like I was trying to take over. Or erase the mom that you had.”

“I know. I mean... I need...somebody.”

Somebody.

Fia could be that. She didn’t know if she’d ever be the best, but she could be somebody . She might never be a manicured walled-in garden, but she could be a quiet place on a mountain.

The idea of that made her feel more peaceful than she had all afternoon.

“We all do,” said Fia. “And that’s what I want to be—that someone for you. So I want to know what you want. Because...I’ve never been a mother before. And I don’t know you, really. I know that my own parents left a lot to be desired. I think they tried. I think maybe. But not...not as much as they should have. Let’s just say that. They did not make it easy. And I got involved with Landry partly because we weren’t getting any support at home. We needed each other so much because we didn’t have anyone else. His dad was awful. His mom left. All of the Kings have a lot of trauma.”

“Really? They’re all so...great. They don’t seem at all like they have competition now.”

“Because they worked hard to make something better out of what they had before. It wasn’t easy. I know it wasn’t. And I respect Landry for that.”

“But not for much else?” Lila asked.

“Hey. He and I are going to do the best that we can. The best that we can with what we have. And however that looks...”

“But you were telling me about how complicated it is.”

“I think we just need to forgive each other. For what it’s worth.”

Lila looked at her, far too keenly. “Do you think you can?”

Fia wished she had an answer that wasn’t possibly a lie. But parents lied a lot. If she’d learned one thing from her own, it was that.

The least she could do was tell a lie that would make her kid feel better.

“I think we can do anything for you.”

And just then she pulled up to the farmhouse, so the conversation stopped.

“This is going to make a scene,” said Fia.

“The best thing ever was when he just brought me to the house for the first time without warning them.”

Fia gaped at Lila.

“You said he ambushed them with you, but you were serious?” Fia wanted to punch Landry for that.

Lila grinned. “I thought it was funny. It was maybe the best thing I’ve seen in forever.”

Fia knew she shouldn’t be bitter about that. That the ham-fisted way Landry was dealing with this was amusing to Lila. While she was trying so hard to be fair and measured and careful.

She sniffed. “I’m glad that you enjoyed the spectacle.”

“Are you going to?”

“No. I never wanted the spectacle, actually. But now that we’re here... I guess we might as well make a scene.”

“I think so,” Lila said cheerfully.

And bolstered by the fact that Lila was smiling, Fia got out of the car, ready to make a scene.