Page 181 of Offside Devil

I’m mad at her for taking up so much space in my brain.

I’m mad at her for keeping pieces of herself tucked away where I can’t reach them.

I shake the thoughts loose. “When you say it like that, it sounds—I should have been the one there with him. I’m his parent, not her. She should have tried harder to get me on the phone.”

“She called me,” Daniel blurts.

I frown. “What?”

“She called me,” he repeats. “Mira was trying to figure out where you were and wanted to know if I could find you. I was on the other side of town, so I told her to call Hanna.”

“But I saw Hanna that afternoon. When Jace and I were walking to the locker room, she was waiting in the hallway. She didn’t give me any messages.”

Daniel raises his hands. “Look, I don’t know everything. But what I do know is that Mira tried to get in touch with you. When she couldn’t, she made sure your son was taken care of. Considering I’m fucking my boss’s daughter, I don’t think I’m a Human Resources expert, but that doesn’t seem like a fireable offense to me.”

Something must have happened. Hanna must not have gotten the message. Or there was a misunderstanding.

Some puzzle pieces aren't clicking together.

But in the end, it doesn’t even matter: Mira was right. I wasn’t mad at her about Aiden or anything that happened that day.

I was tired of feeling like my son—and my heart—was in the hands of someone I barely knew. Especially when just the tiny scraps of herself she was willing to share were enough to already have me hooked.

What would’ve happened to me if I’d gotten all of her?

“It’s complicated,” I say finally.

Daniel sighs. “Love always is.”

72

MIRA

“How can you not tell me anything?” I shriek into the phone. “I’m the one who dropped him off! I was enough of a family member for a doctor to talk to me, but you can’t tell me if Aiden is still there?”

This is the fifth person I’ve talked to in an hour. Everyone else at least had the decency to foist me off to another department.

This woman, however, is an impenetrable wall. No matter how I plead or threaten or explain my situation, she says the same thing.

“I hear you, ma’am.” The woman drones in a way that makes me think she stopped hearing what anyone on the other end of the phone line was saying many years ago. “If you have an issue with hospital policy, you can lodge a complaint online. The website is?—”

“I don’t want a website! I want to know if my son is okay!” The word slips out on accident, and I scramble to shove it back in. “My friend’s son, I mean. My employer’s—The boy I nanny…ed. Past tense.”

There’s a long pause before, “I hear you, ma’am. If you have an issue with hospital policy, you can?—”

I hang up and hurl my phone at Taylor’s couch. “This is ridiculous!”

“To be fair, you didn’t make a great case for yourself.”

I whip around to find Taylor standing in the doorway. She’s sporting sweaty hair and a matching spandex workout set and somehow still looks more put together than I do. The only thing worse than my man-repellent flannel pajama pants is my man-repellent flannel pajama pants on day three.

“I didn’t know you were here.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” she says. “But I got here starting around the time you called Aiden ‘your son.’ Things went downhill from there.”

I flop on the couch, which now has a dent of my lazy ass in it. “It was a slip. I was frazzled and the wrong word came out of my mouth.”

“Or… you love Aiden and are worried about him the way a mother would be,” she suggests.

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