Page 24 of From the Embers
I glanced at the clock and damn if she wasn’t right. We only had twenty minutes to get everyone in bed and—God willing—halfway to sleep. I set my daughter on her feet and accepted the wrath of her toddler glare. She was still smiling, so it didn’t pack much heat.
“Okay, Lunes. Go tell Maddie and Ash goodnight.”
“Nigh nigh!” she started yelling as she took off down the hall to the playroom.
Grinning like a fool, I watched her go. I loved that little girl so much; it was a fine line between euphoria and pain while watching her grow up.
“Any luck with the phone?” Bree asked.
I sighed and planted my hands on my hips. “Not yet. It must have fallen between the cushions though. The girls had it a little while ago.”
“You want me to call it?”
“Please.”
She tapped on her phone and a second later a muffled, nearly untraceable buzzing pulsed in the general direction of the sofa.
“How’d your call go?” I once again dropped to my knees and continued my hunt through the cushions.
“About as well as can be expected when your attorney calls you after hours.”
“Anything new?”
She let out a sigh. “Not really. Prism’s accountants claim everything is in order, but an IRS audit is never going to be completely comfortable for a company.”
Bree had been working her ass off since she dove headfirst back into full-time corporate life. She spent long days and longer nights trying to get Prism back to its peak. Rob had taken quite a few risks that hadn’t necessarily panned out, leaving Bree to clean up the messes. Luckily, Bree thrived under pressure. Sure, she was tired and stressed most of the time, but overall, she seemed to like being back in action.
Going behind me, she straightened the pillows as I cleared each section. “Why don’t we just use my phone?” Bree suggested. “Or sit in the car?”
“Luna’s monitor cuts in and out in the car.”
She arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Have you been spending a lot of time in your car recently?”
“Only when I’m doing drugs or day drinking.”
I paused my search long enough to wait for her scowl. It was a half pucker, half pinch to the side, but it didn’t pack nearly the punch it used to. I’d also gotten wise to her eyes changing just a shade or so lighter when she was trying to hide her good humor. God, I loved riling her up.
Never one to disappoint, she leveled me with a squinted gaze.
“I’m kidding. During naptime, the old Tahoe doubles as my home office so I don’t wake up the girls.”
“Why don’t you just use my office upstairs?”
I went back to flipping cushions. “I didn’t realize I was allowed in there again after the great Christmas M&M’s debacle.”
“Eason, you ate all the red ones,” she defended. “I allow myself one bag a year. Imagine my disappointment when I opened my secret drawer and they were all green.”
I craned my head back and peered up at her skeptically. “One bag a year? Does this mean we don’t count the pastels at Easter or pinks at Valentine’s day or the peanut ones you keep hidden in an empty tub of flax seed in the pantry year-round?”
Her shoulders squared and her chin lifted haughtily, and then she fought to suppress a grin. “We don’t talk about those.”
“Okay, good. Because I ate all the reds out of the flax seed too.”
“Eason!”
Bree and I had come a long way over the last year, but it was not a journey without speedbumps—or the occasional sinkhole. As I’d suspected, working for little Miss Perfection had not been an easy adjustment. The first few weeks were awful, and I reconsidered the dueling piano job on a nightly basis. Bree could be very particular. I understood when it came to the kids. She liked them to eat a healthy diet, have limited screen time, and spend the majority of their time outside in the fresh air. It was the good parenting I’d expected and wanted for Luna too.
What I had not expected was to be critiqued on how I folded towels or loaded the dishwasher. Once, she gave me a step-by-step course on how to properly change the toilet paper in Asher’s bathroom.
It should be noted that housework was not part of my job description, but she worked hard, so I tried to make sure she didn’t come home to a mountain of laundry—or, say, a sock covered in poop because Asher had run out of toilet paper and gotten creative. See the aforementioned class on changing the toilet paper when I’d tried to stash an extra roll on the back of his toilet in case of emergency.
A few weeks in, we sat down for a discussion like grown adults. She presented me with a seventy-nine-page binder of rules and instructions, and I told her I would rather live in a tent under the bridge than read the damn thing. She, in turn, told me where to find Rob’s old camping equipment and gave me explicit instructions of where I could shove it before stomping upstairs.
