Page 66 of Just My Ex

“Yeah.” Quinn’s fighting a smile now and she glances at me, pleading in her eyes, likesay something!

“Kissing your mom tells her I care about her,” I offer, while shrugging my shoulders and giving Quinn a look like,I don’t know what else to say.

“Care about her” can mean a lot of different things. And in my defense, caring about a person can mean platonic things.

It doesn’t mean platonic things, okay?

And when Quinn told me she’d never stopped loving me? I’ve been waiting so long to hear those words from her—hoping they’d come someday but terrified they never would.

I don’t want to confuse our daughter or send her mixed signals, though. I bend down and lift Navie up to my shoulder. “And I kiss you to tell you I care about you.” I grab her foot, her chubby, adorable foot and lift it to my mouth. I blow a raspberry and then plant a smooch on each toe. She squeals with laughter.

I think this satisfies her because she doesn’t ask any more questions.

We carry on with our day. Stella comes to help with Navie while Quinn and I go walking on the beach—no more running until the cut on her foot heals—and she’s silent most of the way. I try to tell myself that’s okay. That I need to keep my sights on the task at hand. I’m here to protect her, not fall for her all over again.

Except, I never fell out of love with her in the first place.

The rest of the day, focusing on Navie, the truth of what happened this morning is on the periphery of everything we do and say.

Drake, Sebastian’s food guy, brings us salmon salads for dinner, and this time, Stella joins us as we eat in the open loft area above the lobby. Navie eats all of her croutons first. I don’t know why that’s so cute, but it is, and I realize I’m pretending we’re a real family again, not fractured anymore.

Whole.

Oliver’s telling everyone at the table, in way too loud tones, about the time we caught squirrels in homemade traps made out of chicken wire and laundry soap boxes. He’s got the giggles, as he often does, and Sophie has to finish the story.

“I wasn’t there, mind you, but according to Oliver, Henry rigged a complex pulley and lever system, to sweep them out of the ravine up by the barn.” She looks at me. “Something about training them?”

“I wanted them as pets,” I insist. “I was saving them from predators.”

“And then what did Maverick the donkey do?” Sophie says, getting the giggles now, resting her chin in her hands.

“Oliver, Gabriel, and I put the squirrels in their cages, they got their own so they wouldn’t beat each other up, put a thick blanket on Maverick’s back, and then strapped the cages on top of that.”

Stella narrows her eyes. “Not cool, guys. I got a phone call from Gary Shields about that. It was so embarrassing. And I felt bad for poor Maverick. I had to apologize to Gary that my nephews had been using Maverick in a sting operation.”

“He was too slow for it to be called a sting operation,” Alec says, with a twitch in his lips.

“And I had nothing to do with it,” Sebastian says.

“But you knew they were doing it,” Stella says.

He shrugs. “Of course. I knew everything.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Elianna says.

“But the real tragedy was that by the time we got up to the barn to set up the cages in there and give them food and water, they’d all escaped, and we had no idea how,” I say. “There were no chewing marks or any signs of forced exit. The cages were still closed. The squirrels were just gone.”

“That will be a mystery forever, I guess.” Alec says, shrugging. But the way he’s looking at me …

“You! You unlocked the cages.” I point at him.

“We did. You didn’t know that Milo and I were hiding in the bushes, watching all of this go down. It wasn’t hard to let them out. Like you said, Maverick was slow as a joke.”

“I underestimated you,” I say to Alec, raising my glass in the air. “To Alec and Milo for pulling a fast one over on their older brothers.”

For a moment, Alec’s expression is open and the cloud lifts.

There’s a round of “here heres,” and after we finish eating, we go down to the second floor to shoot some pool.

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