“No, darling, why would you think that?”

  “Because Kenny said he has been sad all week, too.” Lyric sniffed and then wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  Candace quickly grabbed some paper napkins from off the dining table. “There you go, baby girl,” she said as she patted her daughter’s button nose dry. “Everything’s going to be all right, okay?” She tried to muster a reassuring smile the little girl’s benefit, and then she glanced at Kenny.

  This lively, little girl, whom she had begun to love as her very own, was unusually quiet.

  “Kenny?”

  “Yes, he has been sad,” the girl said, her chin quivering slightly. “He doesn’t smile anymore and he wasn’t even like that when mom died. I don’t want to lose you, too, Miss Parker. I don’t want to stop seeing Lyric.” Kenny’s lips wobbled.

  Candace got up from the chair and rushed to her side. Stooping so she could be at eye level with the girl, she said, “Come on, Kenny, your dad and I only had a small quarrel. We will fix this in little or no time.”

  “Sure, mommy?” Lyric asked. She looked like she was trying hard not to cry, too.

  Candace felt her heart break all over again as she tried to reassure the girls when she really knew nothing with certainty. She had no idea what would happen from here, had no idea where Aric had gone off to. She could only hope and pray that no matter what happened, the girls were spared from any heartbreak, especially Kenny, as she was still grappling with the traumatic loss of her mother.

  Aric arrived when they were clearing the dishes from off the table. He looked like he just came from the shower but she didn’t fail to notice the bandage wrapped around his hands. The girls did too.

  “What happened to your hands, daddy?”

  “Just a minor accident, girls,” he said reassuringly. “Nothing to worry your pretty heads about.”

  Only Candace saw the pain deep in his eyes and observed that he would not look at her directly. She had stopped being angry with him for accusing her of deceiving him. She simply hugged Kenny goodnight and waved until he drove away.

  He hadn’t said a word to her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  His daughter’s eyes were huge as they stared at him. He’d known she wouldn’t be able to bottle up her curiosity for long; not his Kenny. All through the drive to their house, he felt her painful silence and wished there was something he could do to reassure her. Kenny hadn’t been her usual chatty self and he knew it was his fault. He was just about to kiss her goodnight when he noticed the tears on her cheeks.

  “What’s it, honey bear?” he asked.

  “Daddy, don’t you like Miss Parker anymore?” His daughter was crying because she thought he wouldn’t marry Candace.

  “I love Candace very much, Kenny,” he said, gathering her up in his arms. “I love her so much I don’t know if I could live without her.”

  “Then why aren’t you talking to her? She’s nothing like mommy, you know. She would never yell at me and she doesn’t drink and pass out on the couch, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  Again, Aric was amazed at how much his daughter knew about Shawna’s condition, even though he’d tried to shield her from the reality as much as he could.

  “I know that, honey bear, believe me, I know,” he whispered into her hair. After knowing the truth years ago, he still couldn’t believe this girl wasn’t his biological child. She felt so right in his arms, made his whole life complete. How could she not be his?

  “Then why are you afraid?” his daughter asked. “I want her to be my mommy. I want Lyric to be my sister. Why don’t you want us to be a family? I know Miss Parker and Lyric love us, daddy.”

  His daughter was crying earnestly now and he never felt this helpless. He wished it was that simple, simple to walk up to Candace and tell her that he wanted to marry her tomorrow. But he had said stupid things, behaved irrationally when he should have trusted her. Of course, she wouldn’t have had sex with Geoff willingly. He should have known. But the way he’d handled the situation, it was almost as if he’d called her a slut to her face. He didn’t know if he would have been able to forgive him, if he were in her shoes.

  “Shhhh, everything’s going to be all right,” he crooned to his daughter. But she only cried harder. He could feel his own cheeks get wet, too.

  There was nothing he could do but rock her gently until she cried herself to sleep. It was the first time he saw his daughter so devastated. Not even when her mother died had she cried, not even once. It told him just how much Candace and her daughter had come to mean to her.

  Leaving her room, Aric asked himself if he could do this again. He knew it was never a question of loving Candace or loving her daughter. He still loved Candace like he did when they were teenagers – even more so. And her daughter had grown so much on him, he couldn’t separate the love he had for her from the love he had for Kenny.

  But could he really do this again? He had accepted his fate when he knew Kenny was Geoff’s. Could he do it again for Lyric? Could he raise two girls as his own? Would Candace accept him back after all the terrible things he’d said?

  ****

  Four hours later, he was nursing a half-empty bottle of beer in his library when his front doorbell rang. It was almost two in the morning.

  If that’s Geoff…

  But it wasn’t. It was a policeman staring at him solemnly. “Aric Simmons?” he asked.

  “Yes?” His heart thudded against his chest even though he had no idea why there was a policeman on his steps.

  God, no! Let Candace and Lyric be safe.

  “You are listed as Geoffrey Simmons’s next of kin. He had an accident about an hour again… DUI… Hit a truck.”

  The words ricocheted off the walls of his brain and it took a while before Aric understood the policeman.

  “He is dead,” the officer declared. “He died on impact.”

  Aric heard a gasp behind him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Candace had a rough night. Lyric wasn’t able to sleep, too, and her baby girl had crawled under the sheets beside her, around midnight. Candace knew it was because she was worried and scared; so she did her best to hold her, comfort her. Still, Lyric slept fitfully. Her heart went out to her.

  It was the first time Lyric had become attached to any man enough to want him to be her daddy. Her little girl just couldn’t get over the possibility that Aric and his daughter were not going to be their family anymore. She wasn’t alone. Candace’s heart was breaking into tiny pieces each minute that passed and the reality seemed set in stone.

  Lyric began to sleep soundly at dawn, but Candace could not find solace in sleep so she got up to read a book, trying in vain to get her mind off Aric, off Geoff and off every damn thing that’d happened to her. The sound of a car jarred her out of her thoughts.

  Within a few minutes, she was opening her front door to allow Aric and Kenny to enter. It wasn’t even six yet.

  Father and daughter looked worse for wear now. Kenny looked like she had been dragged from bed with her teddy clutched to her chest and her eyes wide.

  She tripped into Candace’s arms and Candace knelt to hug her. The girl was sobbing quietly, holding Candace’s neck like a life line. She murmured something that sounded suspiciously like, “First it was mommy…”

  “Hush baby, hush,” Candace said soothingly, even though she had no idea what was going on.

  She led Kenny into her room where Lyric still slept and put the girl in bed. Lyric sleepily reached out for her and Kenny quieted, her breathing going slower until she fell asleep. Candace marveled at such bond between the two as she watched them hold on to each other in sleep. She wished every problem could be solved this way – with a touch.

  She sensed Aric’s presence in the room. She looked up from the sleeping girls and saw that he was standing just inside the entrance of the door, watching them. Wordlessly, they returned to the living room. Under the glow of the lights, she was able to observe his features more closely. He seemed to have aged ten years since she last saw him. His eyes were lifeless and he seemed to struggle with some demons in his head.

  “What happened?”

  “An officer came to tell me that Geoff was involved in an accident,” he said.

  Her hand flew to her mouth as she gasped. “Oh, Aric!”

  He shook his head. “He was drinking; he crashed into a truck, died… I had no idea Kenny was behind me. She heard everything, started crying.”

  “Poor thing!” Candace said. Suddenly she recalled what she thought the little girl had mumbled when she just got here. “Must have reminded her of her mother.”

  “Yes!” Aric sighed.

  Candace didn’t know who she should feel sorrier for – Aric for his loss or Kenny for the trauma that was too much for a little girl to have to bear. While she was no fan of Geoffrey Simmons and hated him the more for what he did to her, he was dead now and she could not hold a grudge with a corpse. More so, Lyric was his; the earlier she accepted that, the best it would be for all of them.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  She yearned to move close to him, hold him like she’d held his daughter, soothe his pain away, but he held himself aloof. It was plain as day he didn’t want her consolation.

  “I need to go identify his body; shouldn’t take long,” he said.

  She saw the suffering in his eyes, the guilt. She needed no one to tell her that the plaster around his knuckles must have been from a fight with his brother. She could imagine his pain, the pain of losing Geoff right after a fight.

  “I will keep the girls busy, take all the time you need,” she told him.

  Only then did he look at her. Their eyes held for all of five seconds and she got the impression he wanted to say something. But he didn’t. He only nodded and left.

  She had no idea what that nod meant.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Death was an eye opener.

  While a person still lived, someone could hate them, judge them, love them. But it all ended when they died. Life was as simple and as complicated as that.

  Watching Geoff’s corpse wheeled away, Aric knew he had just learned the biggest lesson of all. Different memories assailed him. He remembered growing up with Geoff in different foster homes, getting bullied by older boys and Geoff coming to his rescue, beating all of them till they were black and blue. He remembered Geoff planning their escape from their abusive foster parents one night, having to club the man in the head when he caught them. They had ended back in the home after that incident, but Geoff said he wasn’t sorry.

  It was funny how much he remembered now, how much he had forgotten. Growing up, the world hadn’t treated him and his brother fairly and by the time he made something of himself, Geoff was beyond remedy. He’d become entrenched in the path he chose for himself.

  And now, he was gone.

  The last thing Aric had said to him was that he would kill him if he came near him again or family again. He left the room and walked blindly out of the morgue. He had spent the last several hours going through police procedures and then making arrangements for his brother’s burial. He wondered if that was enough to atone for everything.

  He figured it wasn’t.

  Geoff was dead; he didn’t have a brother anymore.

  He’d lived most of his life without the benefit of having parents who gave a damn about their kids, who didn’t abuse and sell illegal drugs and who didn’t overdose on said drugs on the same night.

  Having both parents dying at the same time sucked, but that was only their second death. They first died when they got their first high, made their first unlawful business transaction. Their physical death was just a formality. He’d hardened himself to the pain over the years. He had to, or else he could have found himself tumbling down into the same rabbit hole as his parents did.

  Both his parents were only kids, so he didn’t have much of an extended family. But now, his one and only sibling was gone, too

  He expelled a breath and shook his head. The pain hit him deep. He had never felt so alone, so clueless about what to do.

  He drove blindly, almost unseeing because of the tears in his eyes. With Geoff’s death, he had discovered that no matter how much you hated a person, how messed up you thought life was with the person, the ties of kinship, of relationship, would weigh heavily in the heart, weighing it down like a huge boulder, bringing regrets for things that could have been done differently. He wondered what he could have done differently for Geoff.

  But I can still do some things differently, can’t you?

  The thought took over his brain. Geoff had unwittingly fathered two girls even though he never took responsibility for them. Aric was certain he had no way of knowing for sure that Candace’s daughter was his. He just wanted to make sure Aric give him cash, and at the same time throw some verbal jabs at him, make him doubt Candace’s love and loyalty to him.

  “I can make this right,” he murmured.

  He had been a fool to question whether he could raise another one of his brother’s kid as his own once. He had been doing fine with Kenny for eight years, hadn’t he? What was one more adorable girl whom his daughter already loved? And he had the most caring, most amazing woman to be their mother. What did it matter if both girls were Geoff’s? Wasn’t Geoff his blood? Why had he let it weigh down so heavily on him?

  Of course he had thought Candace had deceived him but he should have known better. Candace would never hurt him, not deliberately. But he had hurt her. And like Geoff, she could be gone in the next instant. He could be dead in the next minute and the last words he had said to her would still be hanging between them.

  He drove extra carefully on his way back to her. In the car, he thought of a million things he wanted to say, a thousand apologies he wanted to give. Deep down, he’d always known Candace was the best woman for him, the only woman for him, but he’d gone and fucked things up. And it had to take Geoff’s death to make him realize what a fool he’d been, what a fool he’d always been. He should never have let her go the first time. And here he was, on the brink of making the same mistake again. He couldn’t afford to let pride come between him and their happiness.

  Would she forgive him?

  Her house smelled of baked goodness when she opened the door to him. Without saying a word, she led him to the kitchen where he was greeted by his daughters’ laughter. True to her words, she had been keeping the girls busy. They had flour all over them and looked happy. He glanced at Kenny; she didn’t seem like the girl who had been sobbing her heart out before she came to Candace. Candace’s magic of love seemed to have worked on her.

  He wanted that magic for himself too.

  “Daddy!”

  “Mr. Simmons!”

  The girls spoke in unison. They flew into his waiting arms. He hugged both of them fiercely, unwilling to imagine a life without them being in it.

  “Kenny told me what happened,” Lyric said. “I’m sorry Mr. Simmons. I never knew you had a brother.”

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said.

  He asked the girls to excuse him and Candace and they gladly did, throwing him warning glances as they left.

  “I’m sorry, Aric.”

  He dragged her into his arms. “I am the one who’s sorry,” he whispered. He could feel the tears in his eyes but he didn’t care. “I didn’t mean any of those terrible words, please believe me,” he said urgently as he pulled her away from him so she looked into his eyes. “I was a coward, a damned fool, but I was a fool in love. Please, forgive me and I will spend the rest of my life making it up to you, I swear. I don’t care if the girls are not mine. I love you so much, Candy. I love you so much.”

  He was kissing her hair, her face, everywhere. Her cheeks were wet and he had no idea if they were his tears or hers or both. He trembled, partly because of the overwhelming feelings of love and guilt and grief. Partly because he was scared to death that she wouldn’t forgive him, that she would turn him away.

  “Please, forgive me.” It wasn’t quite how he’d rehearsed it in the car but it was from the bottom of his heart, his soul. He could only hope it was enough. He prayed that it was enough.

  “I forgive you, Aric,” she cried softly. “I didn’t know if I could, but I do forgive you. I’ve been thinking how stupid it would be if I didn’t and one of us ended up dead – it’s all I’ve been able to think of.”

  He rested his forehead against hers, so grateful for her kind spirit that he was weak with it. “Me too,” he said. “Me too. I swear I will make it up to you, I swear.”

  They stood that way, looking into each other’s eyes.

  “You know, what happened to Geoff isn’t your fault,” she said very quietly.

  He sighed. How did this woman know him so well? “One part of my brain knows that,” he allowed. “It will take some time to come to terms with it.”

  “That is good enough, for now.” She smiled a little.

  “And what happened with Geoff nine years ago isn’t your fault too, you know?” he said tenderly, kissing her forehead.

  She nodded. “It will take a while to fully accept it.”

  He smiled. “Fair enough.”

  “I think we should tell the girls,” he said, expecting her to oppose. But he had his argument ready; he didn’t want any bad blood between his girls in the future.

  But she supported his idea.

  First, they told the girls they were getting married in December. The girls whooped with delight and hugged them both fiercely. Surprisingly when they told them they were real sisters, they didn’t ask questions. They simply looked at each other and said, “We know that already.”

  Aric looked at Candace and she shrugged. She had no idea what the girls meant.