Page 36 of Accidental Vegas Vows

“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.

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