“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.
I wasn’t really going to move out. Bree knew this. I knew this. Asher, however, called me in hysterics on the walkie-talkie I’d given him for his birthday, begging me not to leave like his dad.
That was the last big argument Bree and I ever had. We all slept in Asher’s room that night. The binder was trashed the very next morning, and I started folding towels the way Bree liked—the wrong way, might I add.
Together, we were a team and those kids were our first, top, and only priority.
After that, things got easier. As we developed a mutual respect for each other, trust followed. And then somehow, through the chaos, a genuine friendship was born. I worked a lot of nights, writing music and playing anywhere that would have me. It was exhausting to get home at three a.m. then get back up with the kids at seven, but each time I stepped onto a stage, no matter how small, it felt like I’d found another piece of myself again. On the nights I wasn’t working, Bree and I would swap stories about Rob and Jessica. Sometimes we’d laugh, sometimes we’d cry, and on the one-year anniversary of the fire, we sat in silence, unable to even utter their names.
There was no rhyme or reason for the tides of grief. All we could do was hold on and try to keep our heads above the rushing water.
On Luna’s birthday, I’d felt like I was drowning, knowing Jessica would never get to see her grow up.
On Christmas, while watching the kids laugh as they tore through presents, I smiled until my face hurt and felt like maybe I’d finally climbed out of the depths of devastation.
On my wedding anniversary, I felt like I was trapped in an undertow, unable to reach the surface no matter how hard I fought.
Over time, Bree hit the same heartbreaking milestones, but day after day, week after week, month after month, we swam the often-turbulent ocean together.
Flat on my stomach, I ran a hand back and forth under the couch, still searching for my illusive phone. “How, in this huge house, do you not have one single radio?”
“Um, because it’s not nineteen ninety-nine,” she answered. “Here. Just download the app on my phone. I’ll meet you out there. I need to start story time.”
On a groan, I pushed up off the floor, vowing to never let Luna and Madison play with my cell again. Or so I told myself at least twice a day. Those girls knew I didn’t have any follow-through.
Bree and I made fast work of getting the kids in bed, and like a team of trained professionals, we made it to the backyard with time to spare. We spent a lot of nights huddled around that firepit. For obvious reasons, we’d never lit it, but I’d added a strand of white lights inside the burn basin. Partly because it added a nice, relaxing ambiance to our late-night chats. But mostly because I hated the way Bree stared at the fireless pit as though she could see the flames. God knew I still could.