Page 83 of Falling For You

Selena came back down the bar with a bottle and poured a glass. She set it on the counter beneath Gus's picture and walked away without a word.

I watched the glass. Behind us, the crew was loud. Travis was telling another story. But I wasn't catching a word of it.

Andy's thumb moved across my knuckles under the counter. "I miss him too."

I kept my eyes on the picture.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yeah."

"I can't get what happened to Daphne's sister out of my head."

I turned my glass on the counter.

"Sometimes I think about Birdie getting older. Going to college, moving to a new city, starting her life. And I can't help being scared for her. Sydney was somebody's daughter too." I squeezed her hand. "What do I do? How do I protect her from guys like Lockwood?"

Andy looked at me. She didn't answer right away.

"You can't protect her from everything. No parent can. But the best thing you can do for Birdie is make sure she can protect herself when the time comes. And you're already doing that.

"She already has her own mind. Because you let her have one. She argues with you, she questions everything, she tells you when she thinks you're wrong and you listen. You've never made her feel small. You've never told her to be quiet because it was easier." She squeezed my hand. "That little girl has a healthy sense of who she is because of the home you built for her. That doesn't happen by accident."

She leaned into my shoulder. "You're on the right track, Wyatt. We just have to be there for her every step of the way."

I stared at the glass on the bar. "I worry I'm not good enough for her. My mom did this on her own, so I know it can be done. But the man who was supposed to show me how to be a father packed a bag when I was four. Everything after that I had to guess at."

She looked at Gus's picture.

"You can be the dad Gus was to you."

"That's a high bar to meet."

Andy leaned over and kissed me. "I told you. You're already doing it."

I looked at Gus's picture on the wall. Then I thought about Barb in the armchair with her reading glasses, Birdie asleep on her shoulder. Andy on the living room floor doing voices for a stuffed bear. I didn't have to be everything for Birdie. I never did. She had Barb. She had Andy. What I had to do—what I could do—was keep the home I'd built for her safe enough for her to grow up in.

"And if none of that works?" I said.

Andy smiled. "Then she calls me. And I arrest them."

Something I'd been carrying since the first time I heard Sydney's name loosened in my chest. I cupped Andy's face and kissed her. She leaned into me, her hand warm on the back of my neck.

Birdie was going to be okay.

CHAPTER 32

Cass

ANDY

The Women's Correctional Center was a twenty-minute drive north of the city.

I checked in at the front desk and surrendered my firearm. The officer at the checkpoint inspected the folder I'd brought, flipped through the pages, and waved me through the metal detector.

The waiting area was a row of plastic chairs against a cinder block wall. A woman sat at the far end with a child on her lap, whispering something into her hair. I sat down and opened the folder on my knee. I had read it so many times over the past year that I could have recited the pages, and I opened it anyway, every time, because closing it felt like leaving her alone in there.

Sydney Alistair. Twenty-three. Hospitality worker.