Chapter 1 - Will
If I felt any more guilt, I thought I might actually dissolve into the pavement. There was always something weighing me down; thoughts of work when I was with my kids, unable to concentrate when I was away from them. My simmering irritation was aimed mostly at myself but often spewed out on the kids. Here I was trying to have a nice morning with them and all I could do was worry about the meeting I was missing. I forced my focus onto them, pushing all other thoughts out of my mind.
My son, Harrison, stamped off the trail to chase a squirrel away from a discarded piece of sandwich, and I laughed out loud, because then I felt a fresh new batch of guilt about the squirrel losing its meal.
“What’s funny?” Ava, my five-year-old, asked. Her little intense face scrunched up, ready to be offended.
I ruffled her blonde hair; it was getting darker with every passing year. Her bangs fell into her eyes. She needed a haircut, something I should have noticed sooner. More guilt. “Nothing, honey.”
Nothing at all was funny. I had shirked taking them to the cemetery to visit their mother that morning. It used to be weekly, then monthly, now just whenever I could grab a spare moment. The last time, Harrison told Ava she’d bring home a ghost if she kept trampling over graves, which only made her jump eagerly from plot to plot in hopes that would really happen. He ended up sitting on her while she shrieked, and I only prayed Callie was laughing if she saw what fiends they’d turned into, as I dragged them out of there. What I’d turned them into without her to help me parent them.
Another thing neither one of them would find the least bit funny was that I needed to tell them our vacation was canceled for the foreseeable future. I was afraid, as soon as they started crying and pitching a fit, I’d snap and tell them it was their own fault for running off seven nannies in the last two years. Of course, I couldn’t do that. They were grieving, so of course they acted up sometimes. Okay, a lot of the time. I knew there was no way I could handle them alone on foreign shores, especially since the trip was partly work related. I couldn’t leave them with the resort daycare. They were tyrants, basically.
“Go away, Ava,” Harrison said, giving his sister a mild shove. She contemplated between war and peace for a moment, then shrugged and ran ahead of us on the trail, her arms flapping like a bird. “Is Santa Claus really real?” he asked for the third time since breakfast, after she was far enough away not to hear. I was actually surprised he’d want to spare her feelings.
“Yes,” I said dully. “Why are you asking me that at the beginning of June? Are you suddenly worried you’re on the naughty list?”
He frowned, looking mistrustful. Ah, the big lie all parents sign on to tell their kids for years. Eight was too young to learn the terrible truth about Santa, wasn’t it? And if he did, he’d gleefully ruin it for Ava. There was no way I could spill the beans yet.
“Jackson Gormfell told me he wasn’t, and he seemed pretty convinced.”
I went through my mental file and placed Jackson as a young teenager who lived in our building. His parents were both plastic surgeons who placed numerous ads in my family’s magazines. I wanted to grill Harrison about where he’d been around that little bully, but remembered my desperation to get a few hours of uninterrupted work last week and had let his older sister babysit them in their apartment.
“Jackson Gormfell is misinformed,” I said, shaking my head in disgust. “Stay away from that kid. You know he’s on the naughty list.”
Harrison chewed on this for a second, finally nodding slowly. “Maybe that’s why he thinks he’s not real? Because he hasn’t got any presents from him lately?”
“I’m certain that’s it.” I got a moment of inspiration and decided to go with it, despite it adding to my guilt pile. “Listen, we’re going to need to hire a new nanny soon, and I think it would help you two stay on the nice list if you could, you know, be nice to her.”
He snorted. “That won’t happen.”
I didn’t know if this ominous declaration meant Santa would never put them on the naughty list, or they’d never let another nanny have a moment of rest in their presence. Before I could clarify, Ava came charging back.
“Can we get a dog? A little one? A cute one? I want to name it Frederica.”
“No,” I said. God, no. “No dogs.”
“If we got a big dog, it could be our nanny, like in Peter Pan,” Harrison said. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he maintained an innocent face.
“Yes, a big dog for the nanny and a little dog to be my best friend,” Ava agreed, grabbing my hand and squeezing.
New guilt alert! Why did she think she needed a dog for a best friend? Didn’t she have any human friends? She did enough activities with kids her age. What was I doing wrong now? It had to be because I never had any playdates at the apartment. Or perhaps she was being shunned by the other parents because of the biting. I forced myself out of my guilt loop to answer.
“No dogs of any kind,” I said.
As if the universe hated me, a little dog came tearing around the bend. It was scruffy and not at all cute, more like a crazed gremlin, but Ava shrieked with glee and went after it. The little rag bag of fur probably had fleas and rabies, and I started after her, but then I saw it was on a leash after all. The person on the other end of it stopped me in my tracks and all I could do was stare as my kids accosted the dog.
She was the most beautiful woman I’d seen in a long time, maybe ever.Guilt.For noticing. For being attracted to her. I couldn’t stop taking her in.
Long, wavy auburn hair spilled down her back and over her shoulders. She wore a simple blue sweater and close-fitting jeans, forcing me to notice her lithe legs. She crouched down to let the kids pet her dog, her smile lighting up a porcelain complexion. Oh God, I had to get over there before Ava tossed the little beast around like one of her dolls and broke it. She was already trying to hug the thing. Oh God, now the woman was going to try to take the dog away from Ava. I hoped she wouldn’t be deaf for too long due to the screaming that was about to commence.
“Use gentle hands,” she said, untangling Ava’s grip as I skidded up to them.
To my surprise, Ava let go of the dog’s neck and nodded, looking up at the woman with big eyes.
“What’s her name?”
“His name is Freddy,” she said.