Page 73 of That Reunited Feeling

“It’s okay.” I rub the top of Dylan’s head. “He’ll be back in a flash.” If I make that promise to Dylan, maybe that will make it true.

“Okay,” he says. “And you promised you’d put me on his schedule, right?”

“Totally.” And there’s my next way in. “He does need some extra help while he’s in London, though.” I take a deep breath. “So he’s asked me to go with him. To help.”

Dylan gasps again.

I stroke his hair. “But if you want me to stay home, I totally won’t go. I’ll stay.”

“Going to London would be awesome. Why wouldn’t you go?”

Oh. I guess he wouldn’t miss me as much as I thought. That makes me sad as much as it makes me happy. Tom’s right. He’s not a baby anymore.

“Because I’d worry about you. And also because I’d have to leave tomorrow. So it’s very short?—”

“I’d be with Maggie and Jim, though, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fine. They’re nice. Kind of like grandparents.”

Someone might as well be slicing my heart in two with a glinting silver blade right now, because that’s exactly what it feels like.

With neither my nor his shithead father’s parents having shown any interest in him, and the last shithead’s parents both being dead, Tom’s aunt and uncle are the closest experience to grandparents this kid has ever had.

And in a couple months, we’ll be moving away from them too. Jesus. If he’s acting out a bit at school now, what the hell will it be like when we get to LA? It hadn’t dawned on me before, but it’s not only Tom I should worry about him becoming attached to. It’s Maggie and Jim.

But there’s no option. The clinical trial might fix his ear problem, or at least slow down its progression, and help him keep most of his hearing for most of his life. So we have to go. It’s his only chance.

“I’m happy you like them.” I drop a kiss on the top of his head. His smell has barely changed since he was a baby. It’s just a little sweatier these days. “It’s late, though. You should put that away and get some sleep or you’ll be nodding off at your desk tomorrow.”

He yawns, turns off the tablet, and hands it to me as he slides farther under the covers.

I sneak one more kiss on his head. “Good night.”

“Night, Mom.”

As I close the door behind me, his voice pipes up again. “London will be awesome.”

A lump rises in my throat.

My heart could not be fuller.

20

HANNAH

“A

re you ever going to tell Louisa no instead of just ignoring her?”

Tom’s phone has pinged approximately nine hundred and forty-seven times since we got off the plane at Heathrow a couple hours ago. Apparently, his unreasonably greedy ex-wife got wind he was coming to town and decided it would be the perfect opportunity for him to sign the French house over to her.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do yet,” he says, tapping his fob on the security box inside the elevator of his London apartment building.

“You mean you might actually give it to her? Just, like, give hera house? In France? Next door to Elton John? For no reason?”

The white-and-silver doors glide shut with a million-dollarbing-bong.

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