Page 37 of The Wish List
Freya nodded. “We are going to raise the best man the world has ever seen. There’s a girl out there—maybe she hasn’t even been born yet, maybe she isn’t even a twinkle in her mother’s eye, but she’s going to thank you someday. Or maybe there’s another boy out there who will thank you. Who knows? But what I do know is he’s not going to turn into your ex-boyfriend.”
Trinity sucked in a shaky breath. “That’s what I’m afraid of. What if my baby takes after his father?”
“Nope.” Freya held up her hand. “We’re not even going to honor that scumbag by calling him a father. We can refer to him as the blessed sperm donor.”
Beth’s eyes gleamed as she met Trinity’s gaze. “I don’t care if I was raised in the South, I won’t even bless that jerk’s heart.”
Trinity smiled and the heavy weight that had been sitting on her chest felt a touch lighter. “I wouldn’t bless his heart if he was the last man on earth.”
Beth nodded and leaned in to kiss her cheek. Another unexpected, if appreciated, bit of affection from her normally standoffish sister.
“I’m going to talk to Dr. Brennan for a minute,” Beth said. “You’re going to be okay, Trin, and your son is going to be more than okay. He’s going to be loved by all of us.”
Trinity kept it together until the door closed. Then she couldn’t hold back her tears any longer. Freya gave her a little nudge and climbed on the exam table next to her.
“I don’t think there’s room,” Trinity protested with a laugh.
“We’ll make room.” Her sister smelled of expensive perfume.
Trinity guessed that the stylish wrap dress Freya wore cost more than Trinity made in a month of styling hair at the little salon in the tiny speck of a town she’d moved to in northern Colorado. She’d left Montana with nothing but the stuff she could fit in the back of her car. Most of her possessions were still shoved in her trunk in black garbage bags.
She was about to bring a baby into the world, and the sum total of her worldly belongings amounted to a couple of bags of trash. Certainly not enough to build a life for a child. But now her sisters knew the truth. Maybe not all of it. Maybe not the details that were too embarrassing for her to say out loud.
But they knew she was in trouble. As much as she wanted to believe she could take care of herself, the thought that they would protect her gave her no small amount of comfort.
“It’s going to be okay,” Freya promised. She placed a hand on Trinity’s stomach.
“How do you know?” Trinity asked.
“I’m not sure,” Freya admitted, “but I do.”
Trinity closed her eyes and dashed a hand across each cheek. “It’s going to be okay.” She repeated Freya’s words, hoping if she said them often enough, that she could eventually believe them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FREYAREALIZEDSHEhad a severe problem two days later. She liked Christopher Greer. Not just in the way of appreciating that he was an undeniably attractive man and it had been far too long since her lady parts had seen any action.
She enjoyed him as a person. The two of them had taken over most of the work on the main floor of her mother’s house while Trinity did what she could to clean and make room upstairs for things that would no longer fit on the first floor. There was plenty of work for everyone, and they’d quickly fallen into a routine. Freya also had plenty of ways to stay busy with her affiliate and endorsement deals.
She didn’t love capitalizing on her time in Magnolia to make money, but unless she got brave enough to send out her manuscript and someone offered her a book contract, it was the career she had.
Things had changed in her mind and heart with Trinity’s revelations at the doctor. How did she not know her sister was in trouble? How had she allowed distance and life excuses to pull them so far apart?
At least Beth had been as unaware as her. Freya wasn’t sure if she could have taken it if Trinity had confided in Beth. She occupied herself with wiping imaginary dirt from the kitchen counters she’d cleaned earlier that morning and tried to ignore the sound of Greer setting up for his day of work.
She liked to tease him about spending so much time at her mother’s house instead of brokering deals for clients and doing whatever else it was agents did with their time.
He’d only smiled and assured her he could handle both. The man was annoyingly unflappable.
Freya considered getting under people’s skin one of her superpowers. She’d honed it to a sharp edge during her time in California, and it was one of the tactics she used to help her stand out among a crowded field of reality stars.
She did her best to affect her mother’s agent. Affecting people made her feel special—she was a typical middle child in that way.
But Greer could have cared less about Freya, and it bothered her. She heard the whir of the saw, and when it stopped, the soft hum of his baritone. He liked to listen to music while working, although she noticed that he took out his earbuds when Trinity was around.
She noticed he had no problem conversing with her sister but mostly ignored Freya unless he had a specific question for her. She wasn’t the type of woman to be ignored.
She touched the hem of the dress she wore, which barely covered the important bits, and with a final fluff of her silky hair, walked into the family room. She wanted to surprise him and figured her best chance of sneaking up on him was to catch him while he was listening to music.
