Page 21 of Cruel Kiss

My scream, to be specific.

I walk into my master bathroom first thing in the morning, barely conscious, hair a disaster, to find Ronan standing in it.

I scream. It's a full, undignified, horror-movie scream, but completely involuntarily.

"What the hell are youdoing?—"

He's got my BioInfo scale in his hands. The little square of digitized plastic that started this entire catastrophe, that told me my life was a lie from three thousand miles away.

As I gawk, I watch him flip it over, dig his thumbnail under the battery cover, and rip the batteries out. Then he sets the thing over his knee and cracks it clean in half.

The plastic gives with a nasty snap. He drops both pieces in the trash can.

"There," he says with a happy sigh. "I think that's better, don't you?"

"You could have asked me first!" I say, out of breath, my heart still hammering from the scare. "Didn't I tell you that's what you were supposed to do before making decisions on my behalf?"

"You're right." He straightens up. His eyes are dark and fierce where they fix on me. "I'll pull it back out of the trash if you want it. You, after all, should get to decide."

I look at the two halves of the scale in the garbage can.

"... No," I admit. "Leave it."

"That's what I thought." Then his voice drops into something low, something that's got two things braided together in it—one part sweet enough to melt me, one part cold enough to raise every hair on my arms. "But I want to say this, and it's very important that you listen. No number in a box is ever going to tell you what you're worth again. Not that one. Not any of them. And if anyone ever tries to use one to frighten you in your own home again…" His jaw sets. "… they'll answer to me. Personally. That's not me deciding for you,kotyonok. That's just a fact about the world."

He steps past me out of the bathroom before I can decide whether to be furious or fall to my knees in weepy gratitude.

I'm left standing there stupidly, with a broken scale in my trash and my heart doing something it has no business doing.

The kids are, frankly, thrilled.

Isabella treats the whole thing like it's Christmas morning and Ronan is the present wrapped in a pretty red bow. She wakes up every day and races down the hall to check that he's still there. When she finds him—at the stove, at the window, wherever—she lights up like the sun came out just for her.

She makes him examine Doctor Fuzz twice a day with her plastic doctor kit. She saves the chair next to her for him at every meal and gets horrifically offended if anyone else tries to sit there.

Hayden is quieter about it, but it's worse, in a way, because it goes deeper. My nine-year-old spent months with a dad who left,who lied, who took school pickup so he could cheat and build a custody case.

And now, there's a man in the house who catches fish with him off a dock, who cares enough to learn what a hydrothermal vent is, who asks real follow-up questions and doesn't fake his interest.

A man Hayden looks at the way I used to hope he'd look at Todd. Like he's found somebody worth being like.

A role model.

A father figure.

I watch them from the kitchen doorway one evening, the two of them bent over a book, Ronan's finger tracing something on the page, Hayden explaining some new fascination to a grown man like it's the most important thing in the world, and the grown man listening like it is.

It splits me right down the middle.

Because I know what I'm doing. I'm letting my children attach themselves, heart and soul, to a man who lied to me. A man who might vanish at any moment. He might get taken, or killed, or hauled off by an FBI agent who may or may not be real. He's exactly the kind of man I built a machine to catch.

I'm setting my kids up for the heartbreak I know is coming.

The guilt of it is killing me like gut problems that no Pepto-Bismol or Tums could ever alleviate. I lie awake with it. I tell myself I'll pull back, I'll cool it down, I'll remind everyone that this is temporary and Mr. Ronan is not staying.

No sir. No way. No how.

Then I catch myself, watching the whole charade and wanting the exact same things they want. Wanting the fish and the pancakes and the caterpillar checkups. The vault-heavy door and the man behind it.