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But as Coast’s hands started to massage my ass and his head tipped toward my neck, all I could think of was him.

“Know one of my favorite parts of having our own place?” Coast asked, his lips on my neck, making a shiver work its way down my spine.

“What’s that?” I asked, desire pooling in my core and surging through my veins.

“No rules about not fucking in the kitchen,” he said.

Then he was turning me and bending me over the island.

His hands went to the straps of my leotard, drawing the tight material down my body until I was completely naked right there in our kitchen.

Coast’s hands were all over me. Exploring, teasing, igniting the fire through my body.

And just when I felt about to combust, he surged deep inside me.

My moan echoed out through the lower level of the house as Coast pushed me down across the island. The cool stone met my overheated skin, making shivers move through me as Coast started to fuck me.

Slow and deep at first.

Then harder and faster as our need grew, as the ache for release reached a fever pitch.

“Fuck, yeah,” Coast groaned, grabbing a handful of my hair to arch me off the island, so he could hear me better. “Come for me.”

So I did.

Hard and long, taking him with me.

Neither of us had even stopped to think about protection.

So a few weeks later, we had a happy surprise when the stick turned blue.

Coast - 1 year

“Okay. I have something for you,” Zoe said, her voice having a strange edge to it.

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, looking up from coloring with Lil’ Bit. “That it?” I nodded toward the folder she was hugging to her chest.

“I don’t want you to be mad.”

“Doubt that’s gonna happen.”

“Just know that all of this was done in a secret way. It can’t be traced back to anyone. And no one will know what I did. Well, what I had Arty do,” she said.

“Be right back,” I told Lainey as I climbed off the floor, putting a hand to Zoe’s lower back and leading her into the kitchen. “Lemme see.”

I reached for the folder and spread it out on the island.

It had a thick stack of paper inside, each tabbed and paper-clipped.

My stomach clenched at the first name.

William Roe.

Little Will.

That brave boy who’d been holding his little sister’s hand on our front stoop while the foster care lady held the baby.

“He’s almost done with medical school,” Zoe told me. “He’s going to be a pediatrician. His little sister just graduated high school. The baby? He’s a really talented musician. He puts his music up online. He seems really, really happy.”

My gaze flicked to Lainey.

“They were adopted by the foster family they went to after you. By all accounts, they were loved, had a stable life, grew up happy.”

Just like that, a small crack in my heart seemed to finally heal.

“They can’t all be great stories.”

“Stories are ever-evolving,” she said, reaching for the paper with the orange tab. “This is Leonard.”

“Lenny,” I corrected, remembering his freckled face and mischievous pranks.

“Lenny, unfortunately, aged out of the system. But he now works at a nonprofit that advocates for foster children. Arty dug really deep and found an article once where he talked about a foster brother he once knew who used to meet him prank-for-prank when he was in his second foster home. He said it was one of his fondest memories. That was you, wasn’t it? ”

“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling suddenly choked up.

“These,” she said, going back to the folder, “are Madison and Allison,” I told him, holding up their pictures.

“The girls whose abuser you made sure could never hurt anyone again. They’re both married.

This is Allison’s wife and their daughter.

And Madison with her husband and two sons.

Allison is a therapist. Madison is a teacher. ”

She put the papers face down on the counter.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” I said. “How many do you have?”

“All of them,” she said. “Every single kid—or teen—that passed through your house. But these are the ones I want to talk to you about most,” she said, pulling a few tabbed pages to the side. “These are three of the babies you did take care of at some point.”

I looked at the pictures, wishing I could see the babies in the faces of the teens or young adults, but too much time had passed.

“Why these ones?” I asked.

“Ryland,” she said, putting that image to the front, “is in juvie.”

I remembered Ryland well. He’d been an easy baby, always watching me with strangely intense dark green eyes.

“For what?”

“Assault. On his foster father.”

I took the paper, staring at the stats Arty had compiled.

“He gets out in a few months. Then this is Grayson. From what Arty gathered from online chatter, he is involved with a street crew over near Ama’s clinic. He’s working as a scout, he thinks.”

Grayson had been about four months old when I met him.

I got to see his first time rolling over, his first real belly laugh, his first bite of food.

“And this one, this is Amy. The one I am most worried about.”

Amy had been around five or six months when we’d met. She’d been a happy baby full of laughs and was always “talking back” to me in baby babble.

“Why?” I asked, dread filling my stomach.

“Because from what Arty can tell, Amy ran away from her foster home six months ago and is likely living on the street.”

“Fuck,” I said, taking the paper. There was nothing of the happy baby in the last picture snapped of her. She seemed intense, hard, angry at the world.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty about this,” Zoe said. “I could have had Arty leave these ones off.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought… I thought you might want to help them. Since no one else seems to be.” She thumbed through the file.

“I was really expecting to have only good—or neutral—news to tell you. I had a lot of faith in the system. Some of it was misplaced, I see now. The odds show that the outcomes of foster kids are worse than the general population, though. So I feel like your kids came out pretty well, all things considered.”

“Except for these three,” I said, staring at the faces that had once been babies who’d been completely dependent on me for their very survival.

“Ryland is getting out of juvie in a few weeks. He will likely be going to a group home at this rate. I feel like he could use a big brother kind of influence.

“And maybe Grayson could use someone to disentangle him from the gang, set him on the right path. Or, at least, a path that won’t lead him right into jail. And Amy, well…”

“Someone has to get her off the street.”

“I’m not saying it has to be you. If you don’t feel comfortable doing it, or you don’t want to reopen all that old stuff. But you could get in contact with the right people…”

“No. No, I want to do it.”

Because she’d been right that one time, when she called them my kids.

These were my kids.

And they needed me.

“I thought you might,” she said, giving me a tentative smile. “So you’re not mad, right?”

“Dunno if it’s possible to be mad at you,” I told her, wrapping an arm around her back. “And especially not for this. I think not knowing was a lot worse than knowing.”

I pulled her in close, sealing my lips to hers for one long, lingering kiss.

Then I was pulling away and grabbing my keys.

“Where are you going?”

“To find a homeless girl. And drag another one out of a gang. Maybe don’t wait up for me.”

Zoe - 2 years

“For the life of me, I can’t figure out what is so complicated about getting your underwear in the hamper,” I mumbled to myself, using the pair of tongs I kept in the bathroom for exactly this purpose to pick up the boxers and drop them into the hamper.

Against my chest, our son slept peacefully. Likely plotting his own devious plans to leave his underpants on the floor in fifteen years’ time.

“You talking to me?” Coast asked, coming down the hall as I made my way out of the bathroom.

“Myself. Our son. The cruel orchestrator of this world of ours where worn underwear gets left on the floor for someone who was not the wearer to pick up.”

Coast opened his mouth to say something, but there was a voice booming from somewhere downstairs.

“Ey, I brought breakfast burritos!” Eddie called.

The absolute last thing I wanted to do was make breakfast that morning. Eddie was practically a mind-reader, I swear.

By the time we made our way downstairs, the food was already spread out across the counter and three teenagers were already plowing into it as Eddie picked up Lainey and set her in her booster at the table.

“Hey, pick up your fucking drawers,” Coast said, lightly whacking Grayson on the back of the head as he walked past him.

“How’d you know it wasn’t Ryland?” Grayson asked over a mouthful of breakfast burrito.

“Because I lived in a box for two years where we couldn’t have a scrap of paper on the floor,” Ryland supplied.

“And apologize to Zoe,” Coast demanded.

“Sorry, Zo.”

“Boys are animals,” Amy said, dropping down next to Lainey at the table.

“Animals,” Lainey agreed with a firm head nod.

Basically, anything that Amy said, Lainey agreed with. It was like she realized that we girls were outnumbered in this house, and we had to stick together.

When I’d brought the file to Coast, I hadn’t expected things to change so much for us.

I thought it would be healing for him to see that despite all his worries, his kids mostly turned out great.

That the decision he’d deemed as ‘selfish’ to call in child services hadn’t led to some catastrophic series of events.

But Coast had made it a one-man mission to seek out the three at-risk children. Starting with Amy who—arguably—was in the worst place, being a young girl on the street, unprotected.

Of course, perhaps he hadn’t given her enough credit. Because when he’d found her little camp, he’d leaned down to glance inside her tent, only to find a knife pressed into his carotid from behind.

Amy had grown into a rough, tough, take-no-shit teenager who spoke her mind and strictly enforced her boundaries.