Page 24 of All I Want for Christmas

I still hadn’t told Joe, even though I was dying to get his opinion, but it wasn’t my information to share. I’d promised to keep it to myself.

Everything was back to normal on Tuesday. I took Hope to daycare after I dropped the kids off at school, then headed downtown to the office.

Neely Kate was already at her desk when I arrived. She looked up as I walked in and glanced down at my feet. “No Muffy today?”

I headed for my desk. “I figured she got enough peopling the last three days. Mikey pretty much squeezed the stuffing out of her Sunday night and yesterday while he was feeling bad, so I let her have some alone time to recover.”

She chuckled. “She loved every minute of it, and you know it.”

“True, but she didn’t run to the door today to leave with us, so I let her make her own decision.”

I sat down and booted up my computer, telling Neely Kate what little I had done the day before.

“Have you heard anything more from Joe’s mom?” she asked.

“Not a thing.”

“Do you think that means she accepted Joe’s answer?”

Joe and I had discussed it the night before, and he’d confessed that while he was relieved she’d given up so easily, part of him was disappointed too.

“I know it’s counterintuitive,” he’d said as we lay in bed, me nestled into his side. “I don’t want anything to do with her, butsome small part of me wanted her to at least fight a little bit for me.”

“That makes perfect sense,” I’d said. “We all want our mothers to fight for us.” We’d been talking about Joe and his mother, but I couldn’t help wondering if Violet would be upset with me for not fighting harder to protect her kids. I didn’t know what else to do, though. Mike’s parents refused to listen to Joe or me, and the attorney said the judge likely wouldn’t change the visitation schedule until Mike had either been exonerated or convicted.

But Neely Kate was watching me now with a worried look. “Are you okay?”

“Honestly?” I asked, sitting back in my seat. “No. I’m worried about Joe. I’m worried about the kids, and I’m worried about you and Jed.”

She waved her hand. “Slow down and forget about me and Jed right now. Why are you worried about the kids? Is Mikey still not feeling well?”

I told her about the condition they’d come home in and how Mike’s parents had taken the kids to church despite the fact Mikey was ill. “I don’t know what to do about it,” I confessed, close to tears.

She studied me for a long moment, before she said, “You’ve got to talk to Mike.”

My eyes widened. “What?”

Nodding, she continued, “You have to go talk to him and convince him to think of the kids. Convince him that this shared custody isn’t working out and that this isn’t what Violet wanted. Tell him that his parents can see them once in a while, but not when they put their own needs over the kids, like they did this weekend. Because you know darn good and well, they only took him to church because, one, it’s their main source of socializing, and two, they wanted to prove they had their grandkids. It’sa one-upmanship for them, not because they actually want the kids.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed with that, but part of what she said felt true. They hated that I had partial custody, as though that meant they were deemed unfit, so they paraded the kids around whenever they had them, taking them to church and out for Sunday lunch.

“And if that doesn’t convince him,” she continued, “tell Mike to ask his kids whattheywant.”

I grimaced. “I don’t want to put them in that position. I don’t want to make them choose.”

“But what if theywantto choose?”

I’d never considered their choice to be an option, mostly because our family attorney said it wasn’t. She’d said they were too young to decide what they wanted, but were they? If they were miserable at their grandparents’, shouldn’t they have a say in whether they went there or not?

Neely Kate was right. While the courts didn’t care what the kids wanted, surely Mike did.

“You’re right,” I said.

A grin of triumph spread across her face as she cupped her hand around her ear. “What was that?”

I groaned good-naturedly. “You’re right, and I have no trouble admitting that you’re right, so what’s with the gloating?”

“I just like to hear it, is all,” she said, giving me a smug grin.

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