Page 47 of Deserving Ryleigh
“That isnottrue,” Lara said heatedly. The close friendship between the two women was something Ry envied. “You and Pipe would make thebestparents. Ever. Any kid would beluckyto be placed with you.”
Cora smiled at her friend. “Thanks. But I think you might be biased.”
“No, she’s not,” Reese said. “You’ve been a huge help with Dylan already. The other day when you showed up on my doorstep, when he was crying his head off, I swear I was at my wits’ end. You didn’t say a word. You just gathered him up and walked right out the door. You knew I needed a break, and you didn’t hesitate to give that to me.”
“Some people would see that as kidnapping,” Cora pointed out with a smile.
Everyone laughed.
“Not me,” Henley said. “And you’re even better with Jas. She can be a handful, but you never get tired of her questions. Of her constant babble about anything and everything. Even I have my limits on how many games of tic-tac-toe I can play. But not you. You’d sit with her for days if that’s what she wanted.”
Henley wasn’t wrong. Ry had also noticed how patient Cora was with the young teenager. Her lips pressed together and she turned back to her computer. She was going to get to the bottom of why she and Pipe had beendenied fostership, or whatever it was called, at the last minute. Again.
It didn’t take long at all to find out why the latest foster had fallen through. Her dad wasn’t even trying to be sneaky anymore. Social services had received an email that was extremely damning and derogatory. It claimed Pipe was abusive toward a former girlfriend in the UK. It included a police report that said Pipe had beaten and choked the woman until she was unconscious. Ry had never seen a British police report, but evenshecould tell it was bogus. It looked like a form a ten-year-old had made on his computer.
To mitigate the damage her father had caused, she created her own email, a perfect replica of correspondence from a police precinct in DC—where Cora used to live—informing social services that the report they’d received was a fake, and none of the allegations about Bryson Clark were true. The email indicated an ex-boyfriend of Cora’s was attempting to sabotage her ability to foster by making false accusations against her and her husband.
“Did you find something?” Cora asked, obviously seeing Ry’s satisfied smirk.
“Yup. But I fixed it.”
“Youfixedit?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What’d you do?” Cora asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually, I do. Wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t,” the other woman said firmly.
That stuck Ry as funny, though she didn’t know why. Cora was hardly afraid to say what she was thinking.
“What age range are you and Pipe interested in fostering?”
“Why? I thought you were going to tell me what you found and how you fixed it,” Cora said, in lieu of answering her question.
“Are you opposed to a kid who’s older, about to age out of the system? Like sixteen or seventeen? Or are you looking for someone who’s seven, eight, nine, in that age range?” Ry asked, meeting Cora’s gaze.
“It doesn’t matter. We just don’t want a baby or someone under, say, three. They’re much easier to place and have a lot of options.”
“And do you want one? Or is two or more at the same time acceptable?”
“What are youreallyasking?” Cora demanded, clearly exasperated.
Ry was well aware she and Cora had the attention of everyone in the room. Something that usually made Ry feel very uncomfortable. But she’d seen something else while she’d been searching the social services’ records. Something important.
“There’s a family. Their parents were killed in some sort of drug dispute. The oldest child is a girl. She’s seventeen. The youngest is four. They have no relatives willing to take them on, which isn’t surprising, since there are four of them. The seventeen-year-old quit school and is trying to get guardianship of her siblings, but it’s not going well because she can’t find a job. Not anything that would support a family of four. They were there when their parents were shot and apparently aren’t dealing well with the violence they witnessed. Social services has been able to find foster homes for the four- and eight-year-olds. Butthe thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds haven’t had any interest. They don’t want to be separated, which is complicating matters.”
“Yes,” Cora said before Ry could add anything else. “You all know the entire reason we expanded our cabin was because we wanted to foster more than one child at a time. We’ve got plenty of room, now that we have a four-bedroom home.”
“You should probably talk to Pipe,” Alaska said hesitatingly.
“Don’t need to,” Cora said firmly. “We’ve talked about this a lot. Fostering. Who we’d be willing to accept. And we both decided that we’d take anyone who needed us. And it sounds like these kids definitely need us.”
“They need The Refuge,” Henley said with a sniff.
“You’d be wonderful with them,” Maisy told Cora.
