Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 130022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130022 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Yes, Yves.
Not Sabre.
Yves.
What was going on?
Remy strolled in, cutting across the room with long-legged purpose, coming to my chair.
I thought he’d stand beside it, since there was no other furniture he could sit on around me. The matching armchair to the one I was in was at the opposite side.
But no.
I watched with lips parted as he parked his ass on the arm of my chair.
The.
Arm.
Of.
My chair.
Like he did back in the day.
Like he did and I loved him to do. Complete with leaning back, resting a hand in the top of the chair, close to me, my protector, his long bulk ready to spring forward on attack or to defend should some rabid dog suddenly enter the room, or someone came close to landing a drop of martini on me.
He was studying our children while I had my head tipped back studying him.
And since he continued studying our children, slowly, I turned their way to see Sabre scowling at his father, Yves looking fidgety and not focused on much of anything, and Manon staring at me.
The second I caught my daughter’s eyes, she mouthed, “What…is…happening?”
She meant her dad and the chair.
I wished I knew.
But it would take a while to find out.
Because right then, the evening took two sharp and exceptionally unexpected turns.
And not a member of our family was going to be the same after them.
CHAPTER 3
Come to Terms
Wyn
“All we ask is for you to just be cool and let Yves say what he has to say and then think about it for a second before you say anything.”
This was Sabre’s opening.
And there weren’t a lot of words, but there was a lot there.
First, whatever this was about, it wasn’t about Sabre.
It was about Yves.
Second, whatever it was, Yves was so uncomfortable about it, he’d leaned on his big brother to instigate the meeting and then start the proceedings.
Third, Sabre was brash, brave, aggressive (the good kind, says his mother), a risk-taker, called them as he saw them, and rarely (okay, maybe not-so-rarely) he could be too honest for his own good.
Like his dad.
Manon devoured life. If there was an invitation, and she could physically or legally (I hoped) do it, she said yes. She was a wee bit of a Daddy’s Girl (okay, she was a lot of that). She was hyper-social, loyal, dependable, creative, highly-strung (just a little bit, says her mother) and hilarious.
Like her mom.
Yves was a mix of Remy and I both.
Except he only got the good parts.
Yves listened before he spoke. Yves walked into a kitchen someone was cooking in and asked what he could do. Yves noted a wineglass getting low and filled it. Yves did his homework without you begging him to do it. Yves kept his room clean.
In other words…
Yves was the perfect child.
Therefore, the fact this was about Yves significantly increased my anxiety.
And last, it was crystal clear our children had not missed both their parents had quick tempers.
This had me letting my clutch slide off my lap as I moved to the edge of my seat and mindlessly reached out, curling my fingers around the muscles above Remy’s knee.
It also had my mind racing through a memory.
That memory being a time, post-argument between Remy and me.
After we’d fucked it out.
“We need to be quieter,” I whispered to him, tangled in his long limbs and our soft sheets. “Kids don’t like to hear their parents fight.”
“We need to be ourselves,” Remy retorted. “We need them to understand they should express themselves and their emotions. We need them to learn that you wouldn’t fight if you didn’t care. We need them to go into their relationships knowing they shouldn’t back down from their point of view if they really believe in it. And we need them to understand that fighting, in the end, is healthy. And they’ll understand that, baby. Because they’ll see, even if we do it, we always come out of it stronger, but more importantly, together.”
We had always come out of it stronger and together.
Until we hadn’t.
And what had that taught our kids?
“Yves?”
Remy’s voice calling his son’s name called my focus to my baby boy.
To all my children.
Manon was holding Yves’s hand.
As I watched, Sabre was running his hand up Yves’s spine and then he gripped the back of Yves’s neck.
Okay.
What was going on?
My fingers tightened on Remy’s thigh, and nothing occurred to me but to feel the warmth of connection when his hand covered mine.
“Okay, I’ve thought a million times about how I was going to say this,” Yves started.
He swallowed.
My body tensed so deeply I thought every muscle would snap.
Remy’s fingers curled around mine.
“And the only thing I could come up with was just to say it straight out. So that’s what I’m going to do,” Yves went on.
He went silent.
The room went silent with him.