Page 52 of Inheriting Miss Fortune

I watched the last golden edges of the sun disappear from the outline of the mountains, I listened to him greet his friends and ask to tell Lellie good night.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said with a big goofy smile. “You ready for bedtime? Do you have your horse and your books?”

His smile faded as he listened to her babble. “I don’t remember the words exactly… okay, okay… Nate was an ordinary wolf who lived in the forest,” he began.

The story was familiar. It was one of Lellie’s favorite picture books, the one she insisted on him reading each night since he did all the animal voices. I was sure he was ad-libbing tonight, but when he got to the scene where wolf and bear argue over spaghetti, she was still in stitches on the other end of the phone, shrieking and giggling the way she always did. Her laughter made him break character and laugh, too.

I closed my eyes and breathed in the sound of their joined laughter.Katie, you would have loved seeing him with her.

Memories of my best friend during various moments of her too-short motherhood floated through my mind as the night air swirled around us. What would she say to Dev about the custody situation? What would she advise me to do about my own conflicting priorities?

“You okay?”

I blinked open my eyes to see Dev peering at me with a divot of concern between his brows. He must have ended the call and put the phone away while I’d zoned out.

“Yeah,” I began before realizing I wasn’t actually all that okay. “I was thinking about Katie.”

Dev studied me. “I haven’t had a chance to ask you… that’s not true. I haven’t wanted to hear more about how she died. I guess I’ve been avoiding thinking about it. I know the two of you were close. Do you want to talk about it?”

He looked awkward as fuck, but that only made me appreciate the gesture more. “I wish she was here. I wish she could see you with Lellie.”

Dev looked down at the tip of his boots while he kicked at a stubborn weed. “What was Katie’s favorite part of being a mom?”

I took a minute to consider. “It surprised me, actually. When she first told me she wanted to have a baby, I thought she was crazy. She was incredibly dedicated to her career. It was one of the things that bonded us early on. We were both workaholics and hell-bent on making partner. But she said motherhood was her dream, too. She wanted to have both, and she was determined to prove she could.”

I met his eyes. “As soon as Lellie was born, it was like a softer side of her emerged. I wasn’t there for the delivery—her friend Renata was her birth partner—but I got to the hospital about an hour after Lellie was born. I remember Katie had this quiet confidence… like… an unexpected calm. She wasn’t nervous or awkward with the baby. Don’t get me wrong, she definitely didn’t know what she was doing with a newborn, but she wasn’t afraid.Iwas afraid, but she wasn’t.”

Dev smiled. “I can’t picture you holding a newborn. Lellie must have been tiny in your arms.”

I suddenly realized he’d never seen pictures of her as a baby. After pulling my phone out of my pocket, I opened up the photo app and scrolled way back until I saw the hospital photos. Then I scrolled further back to find pictures of Katie pregnant.

We spent a while going through photos. Talking about Katie was emotional but good.

“I got the call about her accident from Renata,” I said when we got to the worst part of the story. “She lives next door to Katie and is…wasLellie’s nanny. You might have met her when you were there.”

“I met so many people that night, it’s hard to remember. I, ah, might have been distracted by one person in particular, and it definitely wasn’t Renata.”

My face heated under his gaze. “Right, well… she’s younger. A grad student at UT Dallas. It’s actually her parents who live next door to Katie, but she and Katie were closer in age. I would have suggested her as a potential parent for Lellie, but she’s dating a guy Katie and I really don’t like. And she’s just… too young, honestly. She’s a wonderful nanny, but I’m not sure she’s mature enough to be a full-time parent yet.”

“Are any of us?” Dev teased.

“What about your parents?” I asked.

His emotional reaction to discovering Katie held the deed to their house indicated that there was a story there. The way he tensed up at the mention of them confirmed it.

“What about them?” he asked.

“Would they want her?”

He hunched his shoulders a bit and looked back down at his boots. “Probably.”

Sometimes getting information out of this man was like trying to get a cat to come when called—impossible and infuriating. “And that wouldn’t be a good thing?”

He straightened back up but didn’t look at me. “They’d be better than the Scotts, but not by much.”

“Is that why you didn’t move back to Texas? Katie never said.”

Before he could answer, two things happened at once. A tech came out of the building to call Dev inside, and my phone buzzed with a message.

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