by Emma Renshaw
My hand reached out before I nodded, and I snagged a large, perfectly round, and perfectly golden snickerdoodle cookie topped with a chocolate peanut butter cup. I stuck half the cookie in my mouth and bit down. “Damn,” I whispered. “That’s good.”
“Thank you.” She set the plate on the front desk. “Are you checking in? Do you have a reservation?”
I nodded and glanced at the pile of cookies again.
“You can have another,” she said.
I smirked a little guiltily and looked away from the cookies to meet her gaze. She was smiling widely. I plucked two from the plate. “Your cookies are fantastic.”
“My daughter made them. She’s the chef here.” She stood a little taller with each word. I nodded.
“She’s a master. My reservation is under Gentry. Gunner Gentry.”
“I swear I’ve heard that name before,” she said as she typed on the sleek laptop in front of her. I didn’t respond. I was recognized by baseball fans, even if they weren’t fans of the team I played for, but I never outright told someone who I was. In the summers, when I wore short sleeves, my burned arm—something reporters harped on—was a dead giveaway, but now that the season was cooling the temperature, I stayed in long sleeves. “Are you from around here?”
“I am. Mom’s still here, but I haven’t lived in the area for a long time.”
“That must be it,” she said and snapped her fingers as she shot me a smile. “I found you. A single-cabin rental for four months? Is that right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I slid my card across the desk. She swiped it through the machine and handed it back to me with a set of keys. A real key, not a card with a magnetic strip. It wasn’t anything I was used to, and I spent half of my year on the road and in hotel rooms.
“For a long-term rental, our cleaning staff cleans three times a week instead of every day, but if you need more of something, just holler and we’ll pop right over. I put you in one of the last cabins for some seclusion. Is that alright?” She had a hand propped on her hip, and her smile hadn’t dimmed even slightly. A small-town Texas twang had made an appearance with a few of her words. As she snagged a white paper sack from beneath the desk and loaded in a few cookies for me, showcasing her hospitality, it sank in even more. I was home.
“It’s great.”
“It’s at the end of the trail, so it’s a short walk, or I can drive you in one of the golf carts. If you need us to pick you up in the morning and take you to your car or the restaurant on-site, just call and we’ll swing by to get you.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine walking, but thank you.”
“I’m Gayle. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks. Night, Gayle.”
I walked out into the night. Within the few minutes I’d been inside, the sun had set, and trail lights now lit the way. My mom had plans to meet me here tomorrow, and I would finally be able to drag the reason she’d wanted me to come home out of her. She’d talked to me about it as the season had wrapped up and I’d started talking about my plans for the off-season, but she’d been vague. She’d said it was important, but I wondered if she just thought it was time to face Hawk Valley.
2
Delilah
My gut churned and I scratched out the words I’d just written before I’d thrown the pen onto the desk. I’d started this letter journal just in case Shayla got clean, came home, and wanted to be a mom to Tucker. I started writing letters to her the day we brought Tucker home from the hospital, which was the same day she skipped town.
I wanted to record every little gurgle, sigh, and smile Tuck made. I didn’t want her to miss any of it, so I wrote it all down in detail. As time went on, the letters got a little snippy. How could she leave Tuck behind? How could she leave this precious boy?
The first time he called me Mama was when I wrote my first truly angry letter. I didn’t want her to come back. I wanted her to stay far away from Tuck and me. I raised him. He’s my son. I don’t care if I didn’t carry him; I’ve been there for every day of his life. Hell, every hour. Every minute. Every second.
I bandaged up every booboo. I sat in the principal’s office with embarrassed red cheeks after I got a call about him biting a boy in kindergarten. It was me who potty trained him and got sprayed when I changed his diapers. Every late night, every scare, every laugh. All of it. They’re mine. He’s mine.
She hadn’t been around for eight years, while I sacrificed and worked my way through culinary school with a baby. And now she wanted to come back?
Her handwritten note, on greasy, food-stained paper, was filled with threats. The first paragraph stated she wanted to come home and be in her son’s life. And why? After all this time? After eight years? What had prompted this change in her? My heart dropped to the floor and tears sprang to my eyes. As I read on, my cheeks flamed with anger and my heart rate increased along with my irritation.
Somewhere along the way she went from zero to sixty in a nanosecond. She threatened to take him in the middle of the night if I didn’t meet her demands. She promised she’d see me in court if I didn’t give her access. And she swore, no matter what, I’d never see him again.
“It will be over my dead body that you ever see my boy again.”
I read that line over and over, consumed with fear over the very thought of missing anything in his life. The rational and logical part of me that knew no judge would grant her custody had fled the building, and in its place was every irrational and anxious thought.
I grabbed the pen, flipped to a new blank page, and scrawled the words as I batted away tears with my other hand.
He’s my son. I will fight for him. You don’t even know his name. You abandoned him, you couldn’t even give him a name!
The words were scrawled and messy, nothing like my normal careful handwriting. A tear dripped onto the page, making the ink in that spot bleed.
I slammed the notebook closed and got up from the little desk in the corner of my room. I fisted Shayla’s letter in my hand and looked around the space. I couldn’t let Tucker find this. I needed to talk to my parents first and figure out a plan; then I would be honest with him. He had to come first in all of this though. Tuck was my priority. And a small part of me, a completely selfish part, wanted a little more time just as things were. I wasn’t ready to tell him, and that was the fucking truth.
“Mom! Come on! I’m hungry.”
His tennis shoes squeaked against the polished wood as he came down the hall, getting closer to my room. My heart caught in my throat. “Shit,” I whispered.
He was only a couple of steps away now. I picked up the edge of the mattress and shoved the letter under it. I sat on the edge of the bed, scrubbing my face of any lingering tears before bending over to put on my shoes. Tuck opened the bedroom door without knocking. I’d been trying to teach him to knock for years, but he barged right in whenever he wanted. “You have to knock, Tuck.”
He rolled his eyes. Long gone was the sweet dimple-cheeked four-year-old boy, and in his place was my eight-year-old son, who would be shooting past me in height way sooner than I would be ready for. He backed out of the room and knocked in an exaggerated manner. I wanted to teach him about respecting boundaries and privacy. I usually changed in my closet though, and the thought of having a man over was laughable. Eligible single guys in a small town were slim pickins and my brother had scared off most of them anyway. “Come in,” I called. My cheek rose as one side of my mouth turned up in a smirky smile.
“What are you doing? Why are you taking so long? I’m going to starve to death. And then what would you do? Get cats?”
I raised an eyebrow and glared at him. He chuckled. Yeah, that four-year-old boy was definitely gone. “I’m putting my shoes on. I’m starting to think a cat would be better company than you though. A lot less smelly. My laundry would be cut in half. A cat wouldn’t eat as much as you. You know, the more I think about it, a cat sounds like the better deal. What do you think? Want to li
ve with Grams and Gramps? I’ll get a cat and live a happy life?”
His grin grew and my heart ached in my chest. The corner of the mattress felt like it was burning underneath me with the threats his birth mother—my cousin, and someone I’d thought was my best friend—had hurled at me. Tucker didn’t know that I wasn’t his biological mom. I knew I’d have to tell him one day, and I would; I’d be honest. I’d tell him the good and the bad about his birth mom. But not yet. And not in this way.
Just...a little more time.
I tied my shoe, clapped my hands, and stood. “Let’s go get you some food.”
I wrapped my arm around his neck and kissed the top of his head, which was getting far too close to the top of mine. I didn’t know how my eight-year-old was so quickly gaining on me in height, but I knew by the time he was ten, he’d be taller than me.
“Can I drive?”
“No,” I said and plucked the golf-cart keys off the hook. Tucker and I lived at the edge of the Castle Rock Inn’s property. My parents did too, but they lived on the other side and we couldn’t see their house from here. Our cottage was mixed in with the others, which were available to rent.
“Hop on.”
Tuck sat on the back seat stretching out his legs. I turned on the cart, shaped like a vintage muscle car, and headed toward my parents’ place.
The minute I’d graduated from high school, they’d set their sights on the hill country and buying an inn and living out the rest of their years working on it. I’d been in culinary school for six months when Shayla came home pregnant, still addicted to drugs and in need of help. I transferred closer to home so I could live with my parents and Shayla, helping her along the way, driving her to NA and AA meetings, and finding her every time she fell off the wagon.
I’d wondered how she was going to be able to handle her baby, but my parents and I were committed to helping her. I never imagined that I would leave her hospital room to get her some pudding only to come back to her empty bed, while Tuck lay crying in the crib next to it. I sat on her empty hospital bed for hours—holding and rocking a crying Tuck—while my own tears streamed down my face as I stared at the door, wondering if she would ever walk back through it. After several hours I knew she had left us behind.
My parents’ house was a beacon in the dark night. My mom was standing at the sink as my father held her from behind, their eyes closed, as they swayed to music I couldn’t hear.
Tuck hopped off before I even came to a complete stop and ran inside, leaving the front door wide open. I sauntered in after him, taking a few deep breaths before I entered the kitchen and faced my parents’ eyes, which saw way too much.
Mom stopped in her tracks with a bowl of mashed potatoes in her hands as she stared at me, tilting her head. I shook my head and mouthed, Later.
Somehow, someway, we would solve this.
3
Delilah
The whisk scraped against the bottom of the metal mixing bowl in quick succession. Little bubbles surfaced in the mixture, but I didn’t stop. My hand kept flicking it around and around as I stood in the middle of my dream kitchen at the inn.
“If you don’t stop mixing, you’re going to take those eggs from light and fluffy to whipped peaks. Your father tossed and turned all night worried about you.”
I looked down at the bowl in my hands. Mom was right. The eggs were overmixed. I dropped the bowl into the sink, wrapped my hands around it, and let my head hang. My eyes closed as I took three deep breaths before facing her with tears in my eyes.
“Shayla sent me a letter.”
Mom raised a hand to her chest, and the other hand covered her open mouth. Her eyes filled with tears as she stepped forward. “What? Do you know where she is? Is she okay?”
I shook my head. Yesterday, before I’d opened that damn letter, if my mom had told me she’d heard from Shayla, I’d have been demanding answers to those questions too. Now I didn’t know how to feel. I wanted my cousin, the person who’d practically grown up as my sister, to be safe and healthy. I hadn’t heard from her in eight years. But on the other hand, if it meant potentially losing Tucker, I wanted her as far as possible from Hawk Valley.
“I don’t know where she is. Or if she’s okay. If she’s sober. The only thing I do know is that she wants…” I trailed off, looking around for my son. He was somewhere around here, and I didn’t want him overhearing this conversation. I cleared my throat before finishing my sentence in a whisper. “She wants Tucker.”
Mom’s hands dropped to fists on her hips. “What do you mean?”
I took the crumpled sheet of paper from my back pocket, handing it over. She opened the note. The edges of the paper were already fraying from the number of times I’d opened and folded it over the past twelve hours.
I poured the ruined egg mixture down the sink, watching Mom over my shoulder as her eyebrows slowly rose with each passing sentence. I cracked new eggs in the bowl and looked up just in time to see her fold and pocket the note. “I need to show it to your father.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled. I ran the back of my hand across my forehead and clenched my teeth. I was already running thirty minutes behind on the breakfast schedule, but I couldn’t focus. Our first guests had been seated, there was nothing on the buffet, and individual orders would be coming in soon. “What am I going to do?”
Mom stood behind me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “I don’t know, but we’ll figure this out. I think first things first though, we find Shayla. She didn’t leave a way to contact her, but hopefully, she calls before showing up. I hate this path she’s traveled down. We…we tried to do everything right after her parents died.”
“Mom,” I whispered and leaned my head on her shoulder. “This isn’t your fault. Y’all took her in when Aunt Merissa and Uncle Ronnie died. She was a member of our family. I think of her as my sister.”
“She’s just as much a daughter to me as you are my daughter and your brother is my son. I want her to be okay, and having her in Tucker’s life wouldn’t be the worst thing if she’s sober.”
A sense of betrayal sliced through me. I’d been working on finding a way to officially adopt Tucker for a long time, but I didn’t know how to go about it. To officially make it happen, I had to track down Shayla and have her waive her parental rights. It had always felt like there was time, and now there was a ticking clock in the back of my mind, counting down until my life imploded.
“That’s not what I meant, sweetheart. Shayla is his biological mother, but you are his mom. I don’t think that should change. You’ve raised him and he knows you as his mom, but if she is able to be in his life in any capacity, don’t you think he deserves that?”
“Yes,” I answered even though it cracked my heart in half.
“We’ll figure all this out. We don’t know anything yet. Right now, let’s go about this as if it’s a normal day.”
“Normal. Right.”
“Oh my god!” Tuck yelled from the dining room area. My heart jumped to my throat and I froze for a second, fearing the worst. Fearing Shayla had arrived and spilled the beans before we even had a chance to process. I ran to the dining area, racing through my thoughts faster than my feet could carry me.
Would she even recognize him?
What if she tried to take him?
Should I call the cops?
I ground to a halt before I crashed into the dining room tables. My gaze shot around the room looking for the threat, but there was none. Mom crashed into my back, breathing hard. “What’s happening?”
Tucker was looking up at a tall man as if he’d raised the sun. Tucker’s hands were on his head, and the man was looking down at my son with a small smile on his face, nodding as Tuck raced through his words.
“Do you know who that is?” Mom asked. “I thought I recognized his name last night when he checked in, but his face wasn’t familiar to me.”
“No,” I answered before walking over to Tuck. I dropped a hand on top of his head, r
unning my palm over his silky chestnut hair, which matched mine in color. No one would ever guess he wasn’t biologically mine. He resembled me closely. “What’s going on?”
“Mom.” Tucker turned toward me. His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes were bright with excitement. His other hand shook as he took a hand off his head and grabbed mine, squeezing so hard I could feel my bones smashing together. “How can you not know who this is?”
I turned my attention toward the stranger and smiled. “I’m sorry but should I know?”
“He’s only the greatest center fielder in the league, Mom,” Tucker said with exasperation leaking through every word.
“Gunner Gentry.” The man stuck out his hand for me. My gaze roamed over his face and suddenly I recognized him. Those intense blue eyes stared at me daily when I went into Tuck’s room. The easy smile he was wearing was far different from the intense stare in the poster hanging on the wall.
“Delilah Moreland. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you without the black lines under your eyes. Tuck has a poster of you. With as many times as I’ve seen your face, I should’ve known who you were from across the room.”
“Mom,” Tucker hissed through his teeth.
Gunner laughed, winked at me, and moved his eyes back to Tuck. “I had posters of all my favorite ballplayers in my room too.”
“I’m sorry he bothered you. Tuck, let’s let Mr. Gentry eat his breakfast in peace. Mr. Gentry, can I get you anything? I’m the chef here, and I’ll whip up anything you like. I hope Tucker didn’t disturb you. He’s a really big baseball fan.”
