Page 39 of Oathbreaker

“Good.” She puts the last bite of breakfast in her mouth, wipes her lips, and then pushes her plate away. “I’m going to go talk to her.”

“You don’t want me to come?”

She hesitates. “No. I think I need to take this one. Maybe we can try again at dinner.”

“All right.”

I watch her go thoughtfully.

The one part of this that I’m holding on to is that she hasn’t said a word about me finding somewhere else to stay, and she didn’t seem at all upset about my intention to be part of Frankie’s life.

If only I knew what she was thinking—about me and about the future.

Thirteen

Briar

My talk with Frankie doesn’t go well.

My little girl is sad and hopeful and scared and mad…and I’m right there with her. My emotions are at an all-time high, and then add in the lovely guilt I’m carrying around about West and?—

Fun. Fun.

Anyway, I debated keeping Frankie home from school today, both of us playing hooky and basically keeping her captive until she let go of her stubbornness and talked to me.

But I wasn’t joking with Colt earlier.

She gets that recalcitrant streak from me.

And battering against it doesn’t work.

Heaven help me when she’s a teenager. I’m going to have my hands full as a single?—

I still, my hands clutched tight on the steering wheel, and drop my forehead to the leather circle.

Thank God, I was late dropping Frankie off and my car is the only one in the preschool’s lot.

No one to see me have my existential crisis.

Because I’m not a single mom any longer.

Because Colt is back.

Because Frankie knows the truth of him being her dad and that secret I carried for nearly five years is coming out.

I groan, eyes stinging.

I want to sit here, to sit in my misery, to keep beating myself up.

If I’d told them earlier then I wouldn’t be worrying about protecting Colt from my four brothers wanting to murder him for daring to touch their little sister, for daring to do a lot more than just touch.

They are going to flip out.

I know it’s going to be like the scene in my kitchen, that it might even be worse than that.

And I know I’m out of time, that the truth is out of my control, that me wanting to think and think and think about the best way to approach this, about all the possible outcomes, both negative and positive, isn’t going to be possible.

I need action.