And since reappearing, there had been breaks in his schedule. Bye-weeks. He’d had opportunities. But there had been fucking nothing.

Instead, all I had gotten were those four random postcards at first.

Grandpa’s fingers flexed around my phone, and I watched as his mouth opened to stretch his jaw and then closed. Fuck. I knew, I knew, he was seconds away from losing his shit.

“Who else knows?” Even his voice was hoarse. Just five minutes ago, he’d been hiding behind the couch, trying to scare the hell out of me, and now he was trying to sound like Batman. Before I could answer, he shot out another question. “Why are you telling me now?”

Now or never.

“Peter knows. I told Luna earlier. We talked about it—no. Calm down. Quit getting riled up. Your face is getting red, and you know it looks ugly when it gets red,” I told him, hoping teasing him would work.

It didn’t. I’d lost him. I could tell.

“And I’m telling you because he showed up at Maio House,” I rushed, but it was useless.

The old man shot up to his feet, his face hitting tomato red. “He’s not getting anywhere near—”

I sighed and grabbed the leg of his olive pants. “Calm. Down. Jesus, Grandpa—”

“Calm down?” he shouted, making me roll my eyes.

“Yeah, calm down. You’re about to burst a blood vessel, and I’m not driving you to urgent care if you do.”

Yeah, he wasn’t calming down. He wasn’t calming down at all. The redness was creeping down his throat. I knew I had to keep going. “And you know that’s not fair for you to say that. I don’t want him around either, but I’m not going to be the jerk here, and you’re not either,” I said to him, hoping he could hear the reason in my words because, surprisingly, saying those words hadn’t been as hard as I would have expected.

They were the truth. They were a necessity. I had to keep going. “If he wants to be here and is going to be responsible and do what he should have been doing, then he has every right—”

All right, that sentence had been hard as hell, but not as hard as the choke Grandpa Gus let out.

The drama queen, who was red from his hairline down to his neck, threw his hands up over his head. “Right my—”

I had to set my burrito down, knowing I wasn’t going to get any more in my belly anytime soon and curled my fingers tighter into his pant leg because I already knew he was about to start stomping around the room if I let him. “He does, and you know it. I don’t like it any more than you do, but it is what it is,” I tried to reason. “You know you’d be telling me the same thing right now if we were talking about anybody other than your best little buddy, and you know that.”

His best little buddy and my best little buddy. The best thing in my life. The best thing, period.

Grandpa Gus started shaking his head the second the fourth word was out of my mouth. If I thought I was stubborn, this man was the original outbreak monkey. I should have brought him a cannoli too to blackmail him into behaving. Too late now.

“No. Stop shaking your head, nothing is changing. He’s here, and he deserves to be. We can’t force him to leave.” I didn’t want him to stay, but this wasn’t about me either, was it? No, but…. “He can stay if he wants to do the right thing. If not….” I held my hands up at my sides and shrugged, even though he didn’t see me do it because he was glaring at the ceiling.

The point was: nobody was getting forced to stay, much less asked to. No way. The ball was in Jonah’s court. He had gotten himself here, he could decide when he was leaving, at least until I had an answer and a commitment… and he brought it up. Which he still hadn’t.

Unfortunately, Grandpa hadn’t stopped shaking his head; his fingers had started tapping against his thighs, and redness still covered just about everything I could see above his neckline. “But he left you!” the man who loved me like hell reminded me like I could have forgotten. “That chucklehead left you,” he said it again, eyes bright.

One day, I’d be able to enjoy him calling someone a chuckle head, but right then wasn’t going to be the day. Not when my grandfather was huffing and puffing. Not when we were talking about something so important. Jonah Collins was important and always would be. Unfortunately.

Unless he died.

“He left me,” I tried to tell him, struggling a whole hell of a lot with getting that reality out. Acknowledging it. Tasting it. But even if something seemed good, didn’t mean it actually was. Saying it didn’t make it any less abrasive… but maybe one day it would. Maybe. “But not her.”

Me. Not her.

And I was fine with that.

Grandpa turned to give me his back as his hands went up to the top of his head, the red color deepening and making me want to roll my eyes even more. Those dark gray eyes were borderline crazy as he glared down at me like he didn’t know who the fuck I was anymore. Like he couldn’t believe I wasn’t agreeing with him.

And, honestly, a part of me couldn’t believe it either.

But I wasn’t the same Lenny I’d been before.

Just part of her.

And maybe Grandpa Gus remembered that but didn’t want to accept the fact that, for once, I wasn’t ready to raise hell—but deep down inside, I knew that later on, he’d come to terms with why that was. “What then? What if he decides to stay? Can you look at him every day if he does?”

I sucked in a breath through my nose and shrugged as I looked up at him from where I was still sitting on the couch. “No, I don’t know that I can.” I leaned forward and planted my elbows on my knees, my fingers going to massage my brow bones. “I want to beat the shit out of him. I want to rip his balls off and squirt lemon juice on his open wound.”

That got me a tiny, baby snort. And then I wondered where the hell I got being psycho from.

“But this isn’t about me, Grandpa, and stop breathing like that. You’re being so dramatic. It’s my turn today to lose my shit, all right?”

“He—” Grandpa Gus started to say just as we both heard it.

The one and only sound that would have stopped this blowout we were in the middle of.

Mo’s little kitten cries.

The same kitten cries that melted my heart every time I heard them. Even when I was tired and crankier than hell. Even when I was worried and overwhelmed. Even when I was scared and didn’t know how the hell I was still alive and who had been dumb enough to give me such a huge responsibility.

I stood up before Grandpa made a move to go to the stairs.

“I’ll go get her. You calm down in the meantime and remember all the reasons why you would hate going to jail if you got caught committing a felony,” I said before heading up to the second floor two steps at a time.

What a fucking mess.

Down the hall and two doors down, beside my bedroom, I walked right into the bright room and headed straight toward the crib. And as much as I was flustered, I couldn’t help but grin as I peeked over the railing a second before I picked Mo up.

“Hey, chunky monkey,” I said, smiling at the one thing in this world that scared the shit out of me more than everything and anything else ever had combined. I had cried a month straight when I had first seen the positive pregnancy test staring back at me. Then I had spent the next six months staying up at night, unable to sleep, because I’d been terrified that I didn’t know what the hell I was getting myself into. That I had made the wrong decision.