Page 72 of From the Embers
I could have called a nanny agency and gotten a temporary sitter. I could have worked from home, burning the candle at both ends. But none of that felt right in my heart.
I’d given Eason a talk about how taking care of the family meant taking care of yourself. And there I was, the hypocrite, in a job I’d come to despise when all I truly wanted was to be at home with my kids. Depending on who you asked, people had very strong opinions on the age-old working-mom-versus-stay-at-home-mom debate. But in my experience, there was no right answer. Or wrong answer for that matter. It all came down to what worked best for the individual family.
And over the last few months, watching my kids grow up in the one-to-two-hour window I got with them every night just wasn’t working for me anymore.
“Cheese!” the kids shouted, but I didn’t get to take a picture before the phone lit up with an incoming FaceTime.
A massive smile spread across my cheeks. I hit the answer button and then held my breath as his handsome face filled the screen. “Hey!” I said, turning the phone so the kids could see him too.
“Daddy!”
“Eason!”
“Eeeee-sin!”
The house hadn’t been the same without him. Too boring. Too quiet. Too healthy. Who would have thought there would be a day when I missed him smuggling cookies in?
He’d called as much as he could, but with the time difference on the West Coast, it got challenging. But not a day had passed where he hadn’t made time to at least check in.
“Daddy, where are you?” Luna asked, standing up on her stool as if it would bring her closer to him.
“I’m still in San Francisco.” He spun in a circle, showing off the soundboard in an empty studio. “Everyone just broke for lunch. What are you guys doing?” He leaned in close, the top of his blond hair falling into his tired eyes. “Is that slime?”
Asher launched himself forward and took the phone from my hand. “Listen, listen.” Precariously balancing the phone, he started shoving his finger into the container, and in the next beat, Luna and Madison joined him for a symphony of fart sounds.
“Wow!” Eason exclaimed. “I bet your mom is just loving that.”
“Totally,” Asher replied.
And if I was being honest, he wasn’t wrong.
After that, the kids took turns carrying the phone around the house, talking Eason’s ear off, and showing him everything from the same pictures they’d shown him yesterday to a lone sock Luna had found Oreo carrying around the house. About a half hour later, Madison brought me back my phone and then disappeared into the playroom with Luna.
I settled into the corner of the couch, lifted the screen up into my line of sight, and asked, “You got any time left for me?”
He leaned back on a couch and waggled his eyebrows. “For you, I’ve got forever.”
“Smooth. You should work that into a song.”
He quirked an eyebrow. “Who says I haven’t?”
I sighed. “So, how’s it going out there? Tell me, Mr. Famous. Have you bought a mansion and decided to abandon us for celebrity life yet?”
Levee had not been wrong about the world taking notice of Eason Maxwell. For days after the Grammys, his name had been plastered all over social media. Women were going nuts over him. Stills of him smirking at Levee on stage had gotten the gossip mill running. Paparazzi images of them out to dinner and leaving Downside Up studios together only fueled the media frenzy. It had gotten so bad that, by the end of his first week in San Francisco, Levee’s husband, Sam, called me to see how I was holding up. He was a really nice guy who assured me that nothing was amiss and this was just how things went in the industry. Especially with someone as new and captivating as Eason.
Truthfully, Eason’s newfound fame had been a little hard to swallow. Photos of us on the red carpet were circulating, and while I’d printed and framed a few, I’d strategically cut out all the headlines of our “scandalous affair.”
While digging into his past, trash media outlets had found out about the fire. Oh, what a juicy day it must have been for them as they’d flashed a photo of me, Rob, Eason, and Jessica at a charity fundraiser Prism held once a year beside an arial image of Eason and Jessica’s demolished house. They harped on the fact that Rob had been Eason’s best friend and even managed to find a cell phone video of me holding Luna and forcing a smile outside of Jessica’s funeral as “proof” of our betrayal.
They didn’t know about Rob and Jessica’s affair.
Nor did they know that Eason and I had barely been friends before the fire.
They didn’t understand that our love had been slow like the seasons, built on a foundation of honesty and trust.
