Page 371 of Branded
It had been two months since that night in the rink with Nate and Lake and my surprise gone very, very wrong.
And, though it had kept me up at night—seeing Nate, seeing his mean, watching him walk away and worrying that he was going to muster up that mean again and turn it on me and Ethan—I hadn’t heard from Nate.
Nothing.
Not for seven full days.
Then, finally, exhaustion had overtaken me, and I’d gotten my first full night of sleep in a week…and I’d woken up the next morning to an email from my attorney asking if I would be home the next day because she needed to overnight me some papers.
Papers that had been drawn up by Nate’s attorney.
Papers relinquishing custody and parental rights…and included in the paperwork, hidden at the back of a stack was a check for all the back child support he hadn’t wanted to pay.
But what had made my heart squeeze hard was the trust.
He’d set up a trust for Ethan.
For school. For a future. For whatever he might need.
I would be the custodian until he was twenty-five. And then it was Ethan’s.
I’d cried and Cas had held me, and though the cruelty and the struggle of the last years hadn’t been erased, I had begun to remember some of the good parts.
Like sitting at the rink, watching a game, Nate at my side and talking about dreams.
Like Nate telling me about promises and how they were meant to be kept and how I’d told Ethan that same thing so many times over the years that I’d forgotten where I’d gotten it from.
Like the care he’d taken with my body when I’d first given myself to him.
Like the way he’d buy me a pretzel or a drink or a meal when I had no money and was hungry and had lied about wanting something.
All of that had been lost in the hurt and heartbreak and the bad times, and maybe I wouldn’t ever be able to forgive him, wouldn’t be able to see the boy I’d fallen in love with, but I had remembered some of the good. And remembering that good had soothed something in me.
I’d finally slept.
Because I hadn’t picked quite so badly.
I could trust myself.
I—
“Okay, Mom!” Ethan called back.
I blinked, tucked the past away, but when Cas ran his knuckles over my cheek, I knew that later that night, he would coax my thoughts out of me, would get me to talk it out.
Because he’d done it more than once over the last weeks.
Because he cared about every part of me.
Even if he would never find any good about Nate fucking Miller.
“Gorgeous,” he murmured, pressing a kiss to my forehead. “My gorgeous, gorgeous woman.”
He wasn’t talking about the outside—though, thankfully, he liked the package I came in (because I really liked his package). But I understood now that he was talking about what he saw inside me—a light that continued growing brighter every day because I was loved and secure and happy.
It was the same light I was watching grow in Ethan.
My boy, who was so freaking excited we were moving in with Cas.
