Page 31 of Skylar

“No. Definitely not. I loved you very much, but I knew that Charli and Blake would love you very much too, and that they’d be great parents for you.”

“What do I call you?”

“You call me what you’ve always called me,” Skylar said.

“Auntie Sky?”

“Yep.”

“What about him?” Shiloh asked, poking in Aiden’s direction with a small finger.

“You can call him Uncle Aiden,” Skylar said, not even giving Aiden a chance to say anything else. Not that he would have. “And Aiden has a niece, so she’s a cousin to you. Just like Timothy is.”

Shiloh turned her attention to Aiden. “What’s her name?”

“Her name is Willow,” he said. “She’s five years old.”

“What does she look like?”

“I have a picture on my phone if you’d like to see that.”

Shiloh seemed more interested in Willow than in Aiden, but that was fine. He pulled out his phone and searched for a good picture of Willow. The best one was of her and his mom, so he chose that, then held out his phone so she could see the picture.

Shiloh bent her head to look at it closely, then she looked up at him with a gaze that was so like Skylar’s. So far, like with the photos Skylar had shown him, he didn’t see much of himself in her.

“She’s pretty,” Shiloh said. “Who’s that with her?”

“That’s my mom.”

“She’s your grandmother,” Charli said.

Shiloh turned to look at her mom. “I have another grandma?”

“You do.”

“And another grandpa?”

Aiden felt a pang of grief at the question. Charli gave him a sympathetic look before addressing her daughter.

“Sadly, Aiden’s dad died,” Charli said. “So though you do have two grandpas, only one of them is here with us now.”

“Is he in Heaven now?” Shiloh asked.

Charli looked at Aiden with lifted brows, clearly leaving it up to him to answer that question. She might be remembering that his family hadn’t been Christians when he’d been a teen.

“Yes. He’s in Heaven now,” Aiden told her, grateful that it was actually the truth.

“When do I get to meet Willow and my new grandma?”

Shiloh was certainly taking everything in stride. She was a confident, inquisitive little girl, and he knew that it was most likely because of the loving and stable home she’d grown up in.

But none of that could hide the fact that she was also a very sick little girl. She might have a bright sparkle in her eyes, but her skin was pale, and she looked frail sitting in the bed, surrounded by machines and hooked up to things that were there to help her make it through this horrible stretch of her life.

If he’d been thinking about trying to get custody of her, this meeting would have dissuaded him. He could no longer deny that she was exactly where she needed to be. The home she would have had with him and Skylar if they’d been forced to get married after they’d broken up, wouldn’t have been anywhere near as loving and stable as Charli and Blake’s.

“We’ll talk to Aiden and see when it works for them,” Charli said. “It might have to wait until you’re out of the hospital.”

Shiloh frowned. “That might be a long time.”

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