Page 48 of Destined For The Wolf Daddy

“You and Dad walk too slow,” he griped, opening the door and sprinting through the foyer and up the stairs.

She looked up at me with an amused expression. “Five going on fifteen,” she said lightly.

“Yeah,” I said. “You have no idea.”

Her brow creased again as her smile fell. “I thought I felt some self-loathing coming up the hill,” she said. “What’s going on?”

“I talked to Mom a bit about gene therapy for Gramps, and when I put Noah in the car, he asked what it was. When I told him, he asked if you were getting it, and when I told him yes, he said he was glad you would be able to protect yourself. Because he wasn’t sure if he could stop Ashton from hurting you.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding just as devastated as I felt. “Christ, Cole...”

“I know,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “He’s been a kid for so long, I just assumed anything would go over his head that we talked about, but I guess he’s been listening and noticing. I told him we would talk about things so he’d know exactly what would happen if anything ever happened to me or to you.”

She nodded, but she seemed to hesitate a little bit.

“I mean...I just figured...if he’s asking questions like that and thinking about strategies to protect you and himself and me, I obviously haven’t been doing my job well enough. If he’s old enough to ask, I figure he’s old enough for us to finally address these elephants in the room. But if you think we shouldn’t—”

“No, no,” she said quickly. “It’s not that I think we shouldn’t. I just...god, I feel terrible. Not as much for him feeling this way—because it makes perfect sense with everything he’s been going through—but because I should have known to pay more attention to how he must have been feeling. There was the abduction, and then you going missing, and all of the stuff with the cameras, and the lawsuit, and finally that thing with Ashton. Hell, I have a degree in child development, and I didn’t think to check in on him.”

“He seems like a happy, well-adjusted kid,” I said with a shrug.

“And he is,” she said, sliding her arms around my waist and looking up at me. “He is happy, and he is well-adjusted. You’re doing an amazing job, Cole. It was just an oversight on our part not to think about how he must be trying to process all of these things.”

“He shouldn’t even know what worrying is,” I said ruefully. “He shouldn’t even know how it feels.”

“That’s a thought distortion,” she said. “Remember? ‘Shoulds’ are thought distortions.”

I rolled my eyes, and she gave me a playful little shake. “Don’t roll your eyes at me. I know your therapist has been talking about that with you.”

“So you’re my shrink now?” I teased affectionately.

“I’m your accountability buddy,” she said with a wink. “You’re welcome.”

“Alright, accountability buddy. Let’s go give this almost-six-year-old a bath before he comes out here and yells at us for walking too slow. We can talk about my thought distortions later.”

Marley gave a little giggle and nodded, moving to walk next to me with one arm still wrapped around my back.

Sure enough, by the time we made it up to the bathroom in our room, the bath was almost full and almost spilling over with bubbles.

“Holy—Noah, how much of the bubble bath did you use?” I asked.

“All of it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“All of it,” I echoed, watching the bubbles continue to amass and coalesce into enormous mountains of suds. “Do you think that was the best call, buddy?”

“Yeah,” he said flatly, already stripping down. “I like bubbles.”

Marley laughed and shook her head. “A few extra bubbles never hurt anyone.”

I gave her a wry grin and winked at her. “Tell that to those texts you sent me while you were having a sleepover with the girls.”

She swatted me. “That was wine, thank you very much,” she said. “And don’t talk about that in front of Noah.”

I chuckled as I heard her heart racing in her chest. Noah looked over at us.

“It’s okay, Momma. I whine sometimes, too,” he said. “It’s not a good rabbit, but it happens.”

“A good what?” Marley asked through a little laugh.

---