Page 129 of Reckless Love

He sighs and rocks back in his chair, clearly uneasy. “I may have told Ren that I’d watch out for Rebecca for a while.”

“What’s she do again?”

“Social worker. Ren says she’s threatened all the time, and he’s worried about her being on her own. She’s not originally from here.”

“Will she leave the island?” I ask.

“To go back to Canada? Doubtful. But you know what the island can be like about outsiders.”

“Ren’s a client, then?”

“In a way.”

“If you’re going to take on security clients instead of recruiting, that’ll leave us…” I let the sentence dangle, knowing that the answer is always how short-staffed we are already.

“Within a month, she’ll have moved back in, and things will be fine again. This arrangement between them is temporary. Once cooler heads prevail, all will be well again. And I’m aware that our staffing shortage is still a substantial problem on the island. You don’t need to remind me.”

“Can’t grow if we don’t have the staff, and you’ve got connections and relationships I don’t have. So I can’t do your job.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Owen snaps. “A bit of grace while I sort this personal issue out. I’ve given you lots of leeway with the Raul-and-Ava debacle that halved our client list, and then having Celia Tucker arrested, which gutted us even more.”

He’s exaggerating. We still have more protection requests than we can fill with our current staffing, but we did lose a bit of luster because of my relationship with Ava. Apparently the elite class on the island frowns on a woman cheating, even if they’re willing to look the other way when a man does it.

Nevertheless, I hold up my hands in surrender. Owen is a good guy and a decent boss and partner, even if he’s irritable today. “Fair enough. You’ll have all the grace in the world from me.”

“Right,” Owen says, turning his computer screen in my direction. “Let’s debrief from the last month and look ahead at what we’ve got scheduled. Lots of clients flying in for special events in the next few weeks. We’ll need to use our resources wisely.”

I lean forward and listen in as he gives me the rundown on everything we have coming up. By the end, he’s back to himself, and I almost believe that this Ren-and-Rebecca situation won’t be a serious problem.

I hold the birth certificate in my hands, and I can’t believe how light it is. The paper itself has some sort of plastic coating, and I’m relieved it won’t easily rip or tear.

“I don’t think we need to frame it,” I murmur, almost more to myself than Ava. “But I don’t even know where to start with explaining this.”

Ava sits outside the open bathroom door. Landon is in my oversized bathtub, playing with bath toys at a high enough volume that I’m sure he’s not paying attention to anything being said out here.

“My parents already treat him like he’s their grandson, but I wonder if we tell them first. A trial run?”

“They’re adults, so of course they’ll understand. They also know my mother. We have to figure out a good way to tell Landon.”

“What’s the simplest explanation that we could give right now?”

“A mistake at the hospital,” Ava says. “Not really looking to get into the whole ‘how babies are made’ discussion.” She lets out a deep sigh. “And I should probably be the one talking, even though it makes me want to vomit with anxiety. He’s never been super attached to Raul, but it’s still a huge flip of his reality.”

I go over and sit beside her on the floor. She rests her head against me, and I kiss her crown. “You’re a good mom. And in the end, he’ll know he’s loved by me, by you, by your family, and by my family.”

Ava invites me into Landon’s room for their nighttime routine, and I realize that I might get to do this now. I haven’t tried to infringe on their time together because part of me was still holding back a little, afraid something terrible would go wrong and the two of them would be snatched away.

“Stephen and I wanted to talk to you about something,” Ava says, perched on the edge of Landon’s bed, while I’m in the chair I used to use to chat to my dad when they lived here.

“Are we going back to our house?” Landon asks, and there’s a hint of panic in his voice. “I like it here.”

“No,” Ava says with a breathless little laugh. “No. Um…” She shoots me a glance. “When I first found out I was going to have a baby, I actually wasn’t sure who your dad was.”

Landon frowns, and he sits up in bed. “How come?”

“You know how I told you that Stephen and I used to know each other before you were born? We were dating, and then Stephen left the country, and I started dating Raul. And all of that happened very close together, so I wasn’t sure who might be your dad.”

“But then you figured it out?”