Page 67 of The Dating Charade

Cassie swallowed the lump in her throat. Bree had never chastised her. Never. Not once in their twenty-five-year history.

Bree blinked and reached for Cassie’s hand. “I know you want a family. I know it. And girl, you deserve it more than every single person on this planet. But you also gotta realize that what is victory to you is tragedy to them. You have to start seeing what is happening through their eyes, even if they aren’t showing it on the outside.”

Cassie’s words rushed out, “But I’m sure these are different circumstances than you faced, Bree. Their mom left them without food for weeks—”

Bree shook her head, spreading her hands on the table as though spreading a deck of cards. “You know these facts. These few facts. But what you don’t know is every other memory these kids have with their mom, every good moment. Every possible reason for why their mom did what she did. That’s the thing. We don’t know her why.”

Cassie crossed her arms, suddenly cold despite the radiator beside them. She felt silly, sheepish as she defended herself quietly. “I just thought they would want to be out of all that—”

“What I saw tonight is that they want to be with her, just without ‘all that.’ This—” Bree waved a hand around the room. “—all of this, is not the plan. This is the backup plan, born out of tragedy. You can cover the place in scented candles and chocolate-chip cookies and bubble baths all you want, but at the end of the day, those girls are hurting.”

Cassie felt the hammer fall on her heart, crushing, flattening.

For several minutes they sat there, silent. Finally, slowly, Bree stood and reached for her coat. Cassie stood with her.

“They will be happy with you, Cass. Darn happy. And I’m over the moon to see it all play out. But I want you to remember that grief and happiness aren’t always mutually exclusive, okay?”

“I know,” Cassie whispered.

“I know you do, but do you know it enough?”

Bree’s gaze bore into Cassie’s for one long moment before Cassie nodded, seeing Bree—her carefree, tropical fish Bree—in ways she’d never seen her before.

Honestly, she’d never looked so beautiful.

18

Jett

Hearing the knob jiggle on the bathroom door had the same effect on Jett’s heartrate as a burglar taking a golf club to his window. From his very private moment in the bathroom, he groaned as the door opened and little Dakota, dragging a gallon of milk, came inside.

Milk sloshed on his toes, on the linoleum, on the black bath mat, as she set it before him.

“Dakota, go put that back right now.”

Dakota, however, pushed the sippy cup between his knees. “I want some milk.”

Jett picked up the cup and set it on the bathroom vanity, his pulse beating rapidly as he raised his arm and pointed. “Out, Dakota.”

Where was Sunny when you needed him? From his seated view, each and every cushion was thrown off the couch—the new normal. In the center of the rug, Drew was piling them together, building a train or a house or a boat or whatever his imagination had concocted that hour. Unused diapers, known to the twins of late as “snowballs,” were thrown in every corner of the room. TJ sat in the handy bouncer he and Sarah had finally put together a few nights earlier. He kicked his feet as he stared at the dangling star above his head.

“Dakota, go on. I’ll get you milk when I’m done.”

“Make a snowball, make a snowball, throw it now, throw it now . . .” Drew sang to himself as he turned to a couch cushion and began to lift it on one side. “Maaaaake a snowball—”

Milk sloshed yet again over his foot as Dakota turned and began to drag it out the door like a twenty-pound weight.

“Drew!” Jett called out.

Weeks of solo parenting was training his brain to become that of a master chess player. Hundreds of times he had played the game and lost, seeing the lamp knocked over, the kid tumble off the couch, the toilet paper strewn throughout the house. Slowly he was becoming the grandmaster in the chess game of parenthood. Perhaps that would be his new name one day: The Grandmaster.

And today he foresaw the deadly domino effect that would take place as Drew lifted one couch cushion. It slowly ticked upward by degrees, and when it went beyond the ninety-degree mark, Jett could practically see it falling to the other side, knocking onto the coffee table, tipping over the Coke can, pivoting twenty degrees, and landing flat on TJ. Cue the suffocation. Cue Jett running to lift it from TJ’s face. Cue the fifteen minutes of teary scream fest.

Jett loathed the scream fest. At all costs, the scream fest was to be avoided.

In the chess game of parenthood, quiet was king.

“Drew!” Jett shouted again, but Drew, with all the focus of an engineer in his career-making moment, was now singing as he got beneath the cushion, using his head to lift the heavy, three-foot cushion.