Page 94 of Thanking Her Brother's Best Friends

I sighed, the last of my defenses collapsing. "Don't be. I probably deserved it. I know I treated her like shit that day. I didn't mean it."

Dom responded with a brief nod. Both Niall and he had been quiet with me for a while. We still talked. We hung out and discussed business, but I knew things had changed.

"Can you just come meet her? I'd go with Niall, but she specifically asked to see the three of us. It's okay if you can't, though. We'll figure something out."

Dom turned to leave. It hurt, watching him treat me so frigidly, like I was a big disappointment to him, nothing more.

"Wait." I sighed. "I'll come."

His shoulders were hunched slightly, but he did not look back at me. "You sure?"

"Yeah, but send a fucking ice pack for my nose first, and give me ten minutes. I don't want to make a fool of myself in front of her."

Dom emitted the smallest chuckle. "Sure. I'll do that. Sorry for hitting you, man."

"Sorry for starting it."

* * *

Selene

I called them.

Did I spend a single moment this entire time when I wasn't thinking about them? Not really. When I wasn't awake, I dreamed of them. When I was awake—you get the drift.

Ollie missed the boys too. Perhaps that propelled me to make this decision. That, therapy, and this persistent, nagging little voice in the back of my head.

About forty percent of me still didn't want to let them know anything about my pregnancy.

I was angry and hurt with what Aiden had told me and how he kept goingon and onabout how great it was that we were non-exclusive.

Like, I got, it, you didn't want to tie your balls to any string.

There was no need to keep making pamphlets on the subject.

But the rest of me—the saner, calmer mother who knew that secrets like these would come out eventually and lead to the spilling of a can of worms—that person believed they had the right to know.

I had started showing, anyway.

This was my second pregnancy, and I had three tiny humans inside me. I looked in the mirror this morning, and already, the bump was getting huge.

At this rate, telling the boys would be the easier thing. Telling Ben? Oh, well.

I'd cross that bridge and hopefully not have to burn it when I came to it. I'd been avoiding him too—not because I didn't miss him, but because he refused to acknowledge Abigail's role in being careless with Oliver.

I was not without faults either.

My home—with all the security and the mountain of reinforcements I had engineered—had not been enough to keep Dave away from my son. I got his breakfast ready and watched him eat, curbing the urge to homeschool him for the fiftieth time since this morning.

"Ollie," I said, going slowly so that I wouldn't open up any unpleasant memories for him. "Baby, when Dave came around as a delivery boy, were you outside?"

He gave me a guilty little gaze. "I learned to play with the talking machine, Mommy," he mumbled while gesturing at the intercom system.

"And I wanted to do a grown-up thing. He was only here a minute," he continued, his eyes wide and big.

"Were there no guards out there at the time?"

"I told them he was a delivery boy, Mommy." His lower lip trembled. "I'm sorry."

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