Page 5 of Roundabout

It feels…different without them. It feels like something’s missing. They are missing.

It’s been a month since the girls were taken from us and placed back with their bio mom. It’s been a month since I walked in and heard their voices. It’s been a month since I’ve felt whole.

“Shit,” I say between numb lips, hitting the steering wheel with my palm and making a tear fall from my bottom lashes.

This is what we signed up for, I remind myself for what must be the hundredth time in the last thirty days. It’s what everybody always says, “Isn’t that the point of fostering, to only keep them temporarily?”

The point of fostering gets blurred when you fall for every face that comes through your door. The point of fostering gets lost when the children you fall for are returned to homes they had no business being in to begin with. I’ve loved every kid we’ve fostered, and some we’ve seen off to their original families with smiles on our faces. They were watery smiles but they were real because we knew the children were going back to parents that put in the effort. That did the work. That loved their children enough to turn their lives around. Some have been taken from our clutches way before we, or their biological parents honestly, were ready.

Brittni and Makya were. Sisters that came to stay with us at eleven and six with hair so black it was blueish. Thank God too because it made removing the lice from their scalps and eyelids easier. After living under our roof for a year, carving their place in not only our hearts but the rest of our family’s, too, the girls were ripped away from us while they were at school, given back to a mom that didn’t deserve them the first time around. I’ll never forgive myself for not treating that morning, that final goodbye, like it was our last. I didn’t know it would be though. I didn’t fucking know.

We’d heard of that happening to other foster families, but we never thought it’d happen to us. We never wanted it to happen to us.

My son, Jace, could’ve been taken from us the same way. We met Jace on the eighth day of his life, still in the hospital, fully dependent on machines. Coty and I took turns staying up for the next thirty after that, helping him through withdrawals from an extremely powerful drug that his body was addicted to before he even left the womb of his birth mother’s. The kind of devotion we put in night after night for a complete stranger, the immense love we felt for a baby we didn’t create ourselves, there’s nothing temporary about that. Lifelong bonds are formed whether you want them to be or not.

We’re lucky we were eventually able to adopt Jace because I couldn’t have survived losing him.

I’m barely surviving now.

After wiping under both eyes, I grab my bag from the passenger seat.

I need to go inside. I need to see Jace. Hug him and Coty. They make everything better.

They make almost everything better.

The front door shuts a second after the garage door closes behind me. Not a moment later, Marc is climbing our stairs, carrying a wound-up hose.

Blaze trails after him, grasping one of the ends in her small, inquisitive hands, and I stop to cock my head.

A hose?

Coty appears in the kitchen before I can ask any questions, Jace on his back like a monkey. At thirty years old, Coty could still pass as a male model, and the couple gray hairs that’ve cropped up in that lusciously thick head of unkempt brown hair he has, somehow only make him hotter. It’s so unfair.

With no shirt on, he’s only in a pair of board shorts, providing the perfect example of just how good he still looks. Rippled muscles down his front and sides all lead to that V disappearing below his shorts that I’ve become well acquainted with over the last ten years but still find myself wanting to follow. My cheeks burn at the idea of finding the tip to that arrow.

“Hey, babe,” Coty greets with a wink that says he knows exactly where my thoughts were headed.

“Hey…” I manage to get out, just as affected by the move as I was when we first met. I’ll probably never be desensitized to Coty’s winks. He’s so damn good at them.

We kiss each other on the lips, then I take Jace from him, squeezing his bare sides until they shake with laughter. For some reason, our son’s also in board shorts.

It’s a beautiful fall day, full of the brightest hues of orange, yellow, and red this area’s capable of—which okay, isn’t much—but it’s a cold beautiful fall day. Not exactly swimming weather.

“You don’t mind water, right?”

“Water?” I ask, pulling my lips from Jace’s temple while trying not to wrinkle my nose at the smell of unwashed scalp. “Water? Like the kind I work with daily?”

“That’s the one.” Coty grins, the dimple in his left cheek making its grand entrance. Oh no. I know that dimple. It means utter trouble.

Instead of answering—it was rhetorical, right?—I say, “Coty?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you and Jace wearing swim trunks? Does it have anything to do with Marc and Blaze carrying a hose up our stairs?” This is one of those rare occasions where I hope I’m wrong.

His grin only stretches wider, then Beckett yells from somewhere upstairs, “Are we good?”

Either I missed Beckett’s SUV in the driveway when I pulled in, or I was in the garage longer than I thought. I don’t know which scenario is worse.