Page 24 of Sweet Surrender

He placed the ice cream in the freezer and headed back for the door before remembering that there wasn’t any more.

“You’re going to tell me on the way back,” Tripp told him as he locked up.

“Fine,” Zane said.

They hopped into the truck and buckled up. The radio came on as Tripp started the engine, and Dolly Parton’s sweet voice sang “Hard Candy Christmas” until Tripp reached over and turned it off.

Tripp pulled out of the parking spot, and Zane set his eyes on the twinkling lights on the shop windows.

“She wants to put the boys in the same class,” he said finally, as Zane turned onto Moose Avenue.

“That sounds awesome,” Tripp said, nodding. “Think how much fun we would have had in class together.”

He turned onto Red Oak, and they passed the park from the opposite side. The ice cream shop looked so small from here.

“Agreed,” Zane said. “But she barely knows them. And there’s a rule that twins can’t be in the same class.”

“She talked to you about it though, right?” Zane asked.

“Not until after she went to the principal,” Zane said. “She told her Cal needed help socially, so they should make an exception to the rule.”

He chose not to share that Nick might need help with his schoolwork. That would feel like a betrayal to share right now, even with his uncle, who’d had his own troubles in school.

“What the heck?” Tripp said, sounding angry.

Zane felt a tiny fraction of his own tension slip, now that his brother was mad too. He wasn’t being unreasonable.

“She’s been his teacher for like a week,” Tripp said angrily.

“Two days,” Zane corrected him.

“Seriously,” Tripp said, shaking his head, as they turned right onto Fox Hollow and headed for home. “That’s outrageous. Are you going to complain to Chittenden?”

“The new teacher already talked to her about my kids,” Zane said, shaking his head. “I’m not going to make it worse by going in and making a lot of noise too.”

“Making noise isn’t your thing anyway,” Tripp said. “You could just send an email.”

Zane nodded. He actually felt a pang at the idea of complaining, even though he was furious. The young woman did seem like she thought she was doing something good, even if she had missed the mark by a lot.

“Maybe,” he said.

“I can’t believe she thinks she can come in here and tell you what’s best for your kids,” Tripp went on. “You know what you’re doing.”

“Thanks, man,” Zane said.

The truth was, he wasn’t always so sure he did. Being a father to his boys was the greatest gift he had ever been given. But parenting was challenging at every turn. He hadn’t realized until he was in the trenches himself that half the time you couldn’t even take a second to consider your options. Decisions, big andsmall, were constantly being made on the fly—for better or for worse. And when he lay in bed each night, staring at the ceiling and considering the day, he often looked back and thought about a hundred ways he could have done better.

His best hope was to play the odds, and hope that his prayers, his best efforts, and his fierce desire to help his boys would be enough for him to do the right thing most of the time, and for the two of them to grow up happy and strong.

But when he looked at Cal’s shyness, so much like his own, and Nick’s struggles in school, though he knew the boy was bright, he had to wonder if he was failing them in some way.

And what if he was? That still didn’t mean that some random woman could come storming in and fix it all in a heartbeat.

“She thinks she can just break all the rules,” he murmured.

“Well, she thinks she can break two rules,” Tripp said. “The twin rule, and the rule of respecting the parent.”

Zane didn’t mention the third rule he’d found himself thinking about more and more over the past few days.

---