Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72196 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 361(@200wpm)___ 289(@250wpm)___ 241(@300wpm)
That hadn’t been the worst part, though.
Allegra had called me, asking how Alex was.
Apparently, she’d sobered up, and now she was concerned.
Which led me to now, my daughter falling into an exhausted sleep, and me wanting to kill someone.
I found Hannah right outside the door talking to her brother.
The moment she saw me, she turned, and I gathered her into my arms, burying my face back into the side of her neck as I tried to breathe and tell myself that I couldn’t take care of my kids if I was in jail.
“She won’t be calling you again,” Michael promised. “Called a buddy who called a buddy. They took her phone out of her room.”
I gritted my teeth and let Hannah go, then blew out a breath.
“You hear all that she said?”
I nodded.
“She also told me on the way to the hospital that her mommy ‘always drinks.’” I stretched my neck side to side at Hannah’s words.
“I’ve already contacted our lawyer. He’s filing an emergency injunction that’ll temporarily give you full custody of her until the rest is settled.” She paused. “He thinks that she’ll get jail time for this.”
I fucking hoped so.
I heard a squeak of shoes, and saw Reggie running toward us.
“Is Alex okay?” she demanded, her little hands on her little hips as she stomped her foot.
I brought her into my side, and she buried her face in my gut as she wrapped her scrawny arms around my waist.
“She’ll be okay, honey,” I told her.
She let out a relieved breath.
Then I heard the crying.
I looked up to find Nikki heading our way with a very unhappy TJ in her arms.
She looked almost apologetic.
“I tried for an hour,” she said. “We drove all the way here with him crying. I know you said he had colic, but damn, girl. This is almost unbearable.”
I took my son from her arms, and his tiny frame fit into the crook of my arm with perfect ease.
That didn’t stop his screaming, though.
It only ratcheted up a notch.
However, Hannah somehow realized that I needed to hold him, so she let him continue to scream for a good ten minutes before I kissed my boy on his scrunched, pissed off forehead, and handed him to her.
Hannah took him, and he still didn’t stop.
In fact, the only thing that got him under control was when she walked to the chair that was just inside the room, lifted her shirt, and latched him onto her breast.
“That’ll work for about ten minutes,” I told the two people who were staring at me expectantly. “Reggie, girl. Can you go sit in there with Alex? If she wakes up, can you come tell me?”
Reggie nodded enthusiastically, and then she was gone.
I looked back to the two in front of me, and then to the two kiddos behind them that were sitting in the waiting room area just beyond Alex’s room. They were both quietly playing on an iPad each, both enthralled and uncaring.
Oh, how the naivety would be nice right about now.
“What are you going to do?” Michael asked.
I looked down at my shoes, raised one hand up above my head, then cleared my throat.
“I’m going to fucking ruin her.”
Chapter 18
I’m a real sweetheart, and a real smartass. It’s a package deal.
-Hannah’s secret thoughts
Hannah
The person that Travis turned into wasn’t one I recognized.
He also wasn’t the man I fell in love with.
In fact, he was kind of scary, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
My daughter and Alex had, too.
Alex had come home from the hospital about a week after she’d been admitted.
I’d missed over a week at my job staying there with her. My brother’s wife had stayed at our house and kept Reggie in school, while Michael had returned home. Travis had gone back to work, but drove the hour and a half there and back every night to check on Alex.
I kept TJ at the hospital with me, and Alex had gotten quite a bit of bonding time in with her little baby bro.
By the time she was released five days after she arrived, I was sure that someone had transplanted a new kid in Alex…or maybe it was just being away from the venom that her mother spewed at her each and every time her father or I came up.
Regardless, I was enjoying this new little girl, and realizing why her grandmother, grandfather, uncles, and father were so dismayed with what she had turned into over the last year.
And really, I was a hundred percent certain that it all boiled down to Allegra.
Allegra was booked into the county jail, and then bonded out the next day on her own recognizance. Her scheduled court hearing was set for today, and then a little after that, the custody hearing.
Today was a big day, and Travis was acting like a fucking lunatic.