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CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

brEE

C har knew.

She didn’t say it outright, not at first. But I could see it in her smile. That slow, tired kind of smile that tried to spare you the truth.

The benefit had taken her one last burst of energy and burned it until the flame went out.

She spent most of her time now lying down, curled beneath that soft-blue blanket she liked, eyes closed more often than not. She couldn’t eat anymore. I puréed things at first, then just offered broth. Eventually, even water became too much.

She never complained. Not once.

Neither did Benny. Somehow, my sweet boy knew. He clung to her, curling up in the crook of her arm as if willing her to stay. He never cuddled with anyone that intensely—not me, not Miss Claudia. Just Char.

Maybe that was the real heartbreak. Watching your child bond deeply with someone you knew wouldn’t be here much longer.

Only three days after the excitement of riding in the sled on the ice, after Benny had gone to school, she asked me to help her with something.

“A Christmas present for Baker,” she said, her voice a rasp.

I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. “Of course.”

It wasn’t just helping her. It was reliving. Every breath she took sounded like the ones my mom had struggled for toward the end. The same sunken eyes. The same small, shivering hands.

She wanted to record a message. Something Reece could play one day.

Not for now. For later. When it hurt, and he needed to hear her voice again.

I set up my phone and tried not to cry as she spoke to him, voice shaky but sure, telling him how proud she was.

How much she loved him. How much she loved what we were building here—me, Benny, Claudia, and him.

She called us his family again.

Inflicting sadness upon my confused heart. It’d felt real for a while now. It was real for me. But Reece never made any sweeping declarations of love. Our time together, despite how happy he seemed, was rapidly drawing to a close.

And I knew then, I had to start pulling away. I’d never meant to stay. It was just supposed to help her. Help him. Now here I was, too far in.

Losing another mother to cancer and another man to not giving a damn about me. But at least this time I still had Benny and Claudia. I wanted so badly to be the one for Reece, the woman he couldn’t imagine his life without. He wanted what he always wanted: Friendship and fucking.

I wish I’d considered this as a possible ending to our story before agreeing to his fake girlfriend terms, but then again, would it have changed anything?

Maybe I would’ve reminded myself more often that this wasn’t real, but I’d still have gone through with it. For Benny. For Char. Even for Reece .

Benny and I started spending time at our apartment to reacclimate him to the place.

An hour here or an hour there, after school pickups.

There wasn’t a lot to do, most of our furniture was back at Reece’s place.

My boy would go anywhere I took him, but I tried to make it fun, a game just for me and him.

To shake things up. To give him time to adjust to not seeing Reece or Char.

I didn’t tell Reece. Because I knew what he’d say to me.

We’d made an agreement. His mom needed to think we were together until she passed, however long that was.

She couldn’t know that this was all fake for him.

A ruse to keep her happy in the time she had left. Yada, yada…

I’d never tell. God, I loved her.

But this had to end in a way that wouldn’t mess my boy up too badly.

We kept up our secret jaunts to the apartment for the next week and a half, and when we were at the house, we spent our time sitting with Char and Claudia. Reece only got me alone at night now. In the bedroom. This was the only way I could figure how to start redrawing those blurred lines.

And then, the call came.

In the juice aisle at the market, picking up organic apple juice Char could barely sip because she got her nutrients through the IV now. The nurse’s voice cracked.

“Ms. Michaels, we had to call paramedics. She’s en route to the ER.”

I nearly dropped my phone. Even though I’d been expecting this call, waiting on it, the crushing reality of the situation sort of threw me.

Most people might wonder why a woman receiving palliative care at home would be taken to the ER.

This had always been part of the plan. Char’s idea.

Reece loved his house but she knew he’d never be able to stay there if all he ever saw were visions of his mother’s lifeless body inside her room.

Still taking care of him, even on her deathbed .

“Thank you,” I said automatically, even though nothing about that moment warranted gratitude.

I called Claudia. And then I did the thing I never wanted to do: I drove straight to the arena.

Reece was mid-practice. I saw him on the ice, stopping pucks with focus. I knew his phone was probably tucked away in the locker room. No way they’d let me out there, but I didn’t care.

I walked right onto the ice.

“Hey!” the coach yelled. “What the hell are you doing? You can’t be out here!”

I didn’t even flinch. “Do what you have to do,” I snapped. Then I cupped my hands and called out, “Baker!”

He turned, instantly alert.

And skated hard toward me. “Bree? What’s wrong?”

I blinked back tears. “I just got a call from the nurse. They couldn’t reach you. Your mom is at the hospital. We have to go.”

He turned pale. Like ghost-pale. Like he might pass out on the spot.

From behind us, Bishop skated up. “You got him?”

“I got him,” I said, already tugging Reece toward the exit.

We stopped by the locker room just long enough to shed his pads, slide on street shoes, and grab his keys. Reece turned to me. “We have to get Benny.”

“I don’t know if she’s conscious?—”

“She’ll want to see him.”

I nodded. Of course she would. And Benny would need this too. Closure was hard, but absence hurt more.

Claudia called me to meet her at the hospital. When we arrived, she stood in the lobby, arms already outstretched for Benny. For a woman who hated to drive, she surprised me. I’d expected to have to pick her up. But like me, she knew this day wasn’t about her or her fears .

We stopped at the ER desk. “My name is Baker Reece. My mother, Charlotte Reece, was just brought in by ambulance.”

“Just a moment,” the receptionist said and she made a call. A few moments after she’d hung up, a doctor in dark-blue scrubs walked out to speak with him. Us, I guess.

Reece gripped my hand. “Do you want to go in first?” I asked. “Give you more time with her.”

“No,” he said. “I want you there with me.”

“Normally, we don’t let a party this large into the room at one time, and we don’t let children that young back, but given the circumstances, you all can go in.”

The circumstance, as in, she was dying.

Her room was dim, the machines steady and quiet. Char’s breaths came too shallow and I knew there wasn’t much time now. Her eyes fluttered when we entered.

Claudia stepped forward, leaned close, whispered something in her ear. A goodbye, a blessing, a release—I didn’t know. Then she kissed her forehead and turned to us, tears sliding silently down her face.

Reece lifted Benny up, letting him lie gently in the space between her shoulder and the bedrail. Benny laid his head on her pillow, resting it against hers.

Even as Char lay there mostly unconscious, a tear rolled down her cheek. She understood her Benny was with her.

“I’m here,” I whispered in her ear. “I’m here, Char.

Thank you for letting me be part of your family.

Thank you for loving my boy like your own.

Thank you for bringing a good man like Baker into this world.

You are so loved. I prayed that my mom would meet you when you get to the other side.

” Tears choked those last words. I wiped frantically at my face because I had something important to say.

“Baker’s here. I need you to hang on long enough for him to say what he needs to say.

Then, it’s okay. You can go. No more pain, Char. ”

It gutted me to let her go. Another mother gone. But I had a role to fill here today and I planned to fill it to the best of my abilities.

Claudia took Benny after that. Took him home.

And I stayed.

I stayed as Reece held his mother’s hand. As he whispered how much he loved her. As her breathing slowed. Then stopped. Monitors went off. The doctor walked in unhooking everything to stop the alarms.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “I’ll give you some time.” Then he graciously left us alone. Reece held it together until it was just us and his mother lying still.

Then he broke. And I scooped up the pieces of him into my arms, offering a safe space to grieve.

They gave us all the time we needed. The hospital chaplain stopped in to ask if we wanted him to pray with us, but it wasn’t going to resonate with Reece now, nor would it help comfort him, so I politely thanked him for stopping but declined the offer.

Reece held his mother’s hand until the heat left her body.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”

He reluctantly nodded. I helped him stand. A shell of a man.

Somehow, we made it to the house. I hardly remembered driving us there. It got worse inside, where the weight of her absence echoed through every room. No more gentle humming from the den. No more tea mug on the counter. No more sunlit smiles at breakfast.

We sat in the living room long after Benny had gone to bed, not talking.

My phone buzzed on the coffee table.

Dane. Again .

I ignored it.

The next one went to voicemail.

I didn’t need to listen. I already knew the hits:

“You’ve got Reece now. What do you need my money for? ”

“You always knew that kid was broken. Why’d you keep him?”

“You’re ruining my life, Bree.”

I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream.

I just reached for Reece’s hand. And he took mine, without a word, holding it like he always had—like we were real.

Even if we weren’t.

Two days after the hospital, I took Benny back to the apartment. Bishop had shown up the first day. They sat out by the water and talked, or didn’t. I couldn’t really tell. This morning Jones showed up. I offered to bring Claudia with us, but she wanted to sit with Char’s memories for a while.

We all had to deal in our own ways.

The apartment still smelled like lemon floor cleaner. The memories, both old and new, the ones that belonged to just me and my boy, they helped. I wished we had a comfortable place to sit. But we still had my bed in the bedroom. We could hang out there and watch something on Benny’s tablet.

Despite the memories, the place felt hollow now, not like our home.

But this was, in fact, our home. The arrangement was over.

Before we moved to the bedroom, I walked to the linen closet to grab my wash day comforter.

I spread it over the carpeting in the living room and called to order us a pizza.

Mushroom and green olive. Two chocolate milks.

I felt like having a chocolate milk with my boy.

We got into a tickle fight while we waited for our delivery. He rolled on the floor smiling, eyes squeezed shut, giggling. Then to settle him, we put his favorite show on his tablet. The one with the dogs who helped people.

About a half hour later, our order arrived.

“We’re having a picnic,” I told him, opening the lid. I set it on the floor between us, then went to the kitchen to get us plates and a knife to cut his up.

All his sippy cups were at Reece’s place, so I hoped he wouldn’t spill his milk.

Benny plopped down next to me, little legs outstretched in front of him, and I placed his plate with the tiny pizza squares on his lap.

I made a rocket ship sound, lifting one of the squares off the plate and flying it in the air until I reached his open mouth.

Benny wasn’t one of those kids hard to keep entertained.

“See? Still fun,” I said, though my voice caught a little. I smiled through it.

Because it was fun. And it wasn’t. It was both.

This place had been mine. Just mine and Benny’s. A soft, little haven after everything had fallen apart. But now it felt… distant. Like we were playing house instead of living in one.

We built a fort with the rest of the blankets from the linen closet tossed over the headboard and footboard.

Then we lay on our backs, staring up at the soft ocean pattern on the inside of the fabric, our ceiling.

Seeing the ocean made me think of Reece’s place.

I knew we had to go back until he was ready for us to leave permanently.

But for now, I made shadow puppets. And for that small slice of the day, I let myself believe that maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much as I imagined to leave Reece.

That it was just another day in the life of Bree and Benny Michaels.

Trying to figure out what came next.