Forevermore Page 4

  Briony pulled back to look at me but didn’t let me out of her arms. “You did make a mistake, kiddo. You lied about not having any homework. Was it too hard? Did you need help?”

  “We’ll always find time to help,” M added.

  I swallowed hard. “You said I couldn’t cook with Helen if I didn’t finish my homework.” And I never would have gotten it done in time. Reading takes forever.

  “School comes first,” Briony insisted.

  My shoulders dropped in defeat. I knew that rule, too. I’d broken two house rules in two days. “I didn’t want to let Helen down. She had so much to do and she needed help.”

  Briony tipped my chin up to meet her eyes. “You should have told us, sweetie. Helen and Willa could have figured something out, but missing two days of homework hurts you a lot.”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted to help so much.”

  “We know you did,” M said, joining us in a loosely held hug. “But you need to be honest with us. If we ask about homework or anything that might stop you from doing something you want to do, you have to be honest. We might be able to find a solution that works for everyone. Okay?”

  “Yes.” The heavy boulder lifted off my stomach. I shouldn’t have lied, but I really thought I could get the assignments done this weekend before the teacher talked to me about it. That way I could help Helen and keep my grades up.

  “Good.” M let out a sigh and rubbed my back.

  “Just talk to us from now on, okay?” Briony’s hands patted my shoulders. “I don’t like doing this, but you broke the rules, so no video games for a week. And you’re starting those two homework assignments tonight.”

  That was it? I lie and flunk two assignments, and she’s only taking away video games that are her son’s anyway? They weren’t going to call my social worker and have me taken to another home for being too much trouble? It was too good to be true.

  “Okay,” I managed weakly.

  Briony hugged me again while M grabbed my duffle bag and tossed it up onto a rack in my closet. I’d never be able to reach it without a step ladder now. M turned back and winked at me, knowing that she’d put the bag out of reach.

  “If you need help with the assignments, let us know,” Briony told me.

  When they left, they kept the door open, which made me feel ten times better. If they’d shut the door, I’d feel like I couldn’t leave without permission. One of my other foster families always made us ask to leave our room.

  I went right to my desk and pulled out the first assignment I hadn’t completed on time. It was a worksheet on sentence construction. After reading, this was the hardest thing for me to figure out. The word order confused me sometimes, but I’d try to get through everything on my own before asking for help.

  Three minutes later, Caleb knocked on my open door. He came inside and dropped onto my bed. He did this most nights when he wanted a break from his homework or wanted to talk or wanted to get me to watch TV or play a game with him. He liked to break up his time doing homework. I sometimes joined him, but mostly he just needed a distraction before he’d go back to it.

  “Hey,” he greeted. “What’d ya do?”

  My face got hot. I hated being in trouble.

  “Can’t be half as bad as when Hank and I snuck a dog we found into the upstairs bathroom for a day without telling them. I’m lucky to have my Xbox back.” That sounded like something Hank and Caleb would do. M could hear a pin drop from another room. There’s no way she wouldn’t hear a dog upstairs.

  “I told them I didn’t have any homework so I could keep working with Helen.”

  He whistled, shaking his head. “Oh, man, lying’s a big one for Mom. You could accidently set fire to the entire house and she’d say it’s no big deal, but lying gets you punishment every time. What’d you get?”

  “A week without video games.”

  “Bleh,” he groaned. “Not fun, but you can make it. We’ll play board games or throw a ball around outside instead.”

  He was so nice, just like his parents. “I thought they’d…”

  “What?” he looked curious.

  “Nothing.” I didn’t need to let him know how I thought his parents were going to be like the other families I’d stayed with. I knew they weren’t, but I wasn’t sure how they’d be if I caused trouble.

  “C’mon, tell me.” His hand nudged my knee.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged, but I did know and maybe if I told him it wouldn’t be so scary anymore. “Other places would have kicked me out.”

  He jerked back like my words smacked him or something. “Harsh! No way, Liv. Mom and M would never do that. You’re stuck with us.”

  That sounded great. Better than great. I crossed my fingers, hoping that was true.

  M / 6

  Briony gripped my hand as we walked downstairs. She took us straight to our bedroom and closed the door behind us. Tears welled in her eyes. “Did you see her? Did you see what she did?”

  “Yes.” I had. I’d seen almost the exact same thing when I was a kid. Whenever the parents or worse, the social worker, would break the news that it was time to move to another house. Every excuse would be given. They were moving or they lost their jobs or they had a niece who would be coming to live with them and they needed the room back. Whatever the reason, the resignation settled in just as fast as the disappointment. Yes. I’d seen it. I just didn’t think Olivia thought that could happen to her here. My head hurt like someone had stomped on it after I’d already been beaten to the ground.

  “She thought we were going to make her leave.” A tear escaped before Briony wiped it away. “I need a hug.”

  I held up my arms and she slipped into them. She squeezed tight like she was afraid I’d evaporate. Her lips brushed against my neck as she settled in for what would likely be a hugging marathon.

  “This is awful. It feels awful. You didn’t warn me that it would feel so awful.” She pulled back and stared at me with her golden eyes.

  “I know.” Dread filled my chest. From the second we got the teacher’s phone call, acid seemed to be churning in my stomach. She’d never lied to us, not that we knew of. Other than a minor scolding that usually applied to both kids, we’d never had to discipline her. I knew why. I could see it when we first met her. She would do everything she could to please us. She’d been tossed from one home to the next, seven in all and three temporary group home stays. She volunteered to help, she stayed quiet, and she didn’t cause problems, all to avoid having to move again. She’d come out of her shell so far since getting comfortable with us. I hoped this wouldn’t make her retreat again.

  “Do you? That was just awful.”

  “I tried to warn you that it wouldn’t be all rainbows and puppies. Taking in someone else’s child can be difficult, especially when they’re older. We’ve been incredibly fortunate so far.” I reached up and tucked the bangs that always fell over one eye behind her ear.

  “But why would she think we’d make her leave over something like this? I don’t understand. I thought we made her feel at home here. Haven’t we done that?”

  “That’s just the way it is in the foster system.” I cupped her cheek. Briony had no experience with feeling unwanted. “She probably liked living at a few other places, but all of a sudden, she gets told she’s going to be placed somewhere else. It happens for a lot of reasons.”

  Briony finally stepped back and pulled on my hand to have me sit beside her on the bed. “Is this hard for you, honey? When we agreed to do this, I didn’t think how hard it might be for you.”

  I drew in a calming breath and let it out. I suspected that offering Olivia a home would bring back some difficult memories. Mostly, though, it’s been a lot of joyful recollections about how safe Kathryn had made me feel. She’d taken me in when I’d been ditched as a baby and loved me as her own for my first nine years until she died. For my entire adult life, I’d wanted to provide the same for another girl. I just never felt sure enough of my so
cial abilities until Briony. With her help and love, I could accomplish my dream of giving a safe, caring, happy, and permanent home to a parentless child like I’d been. Based on how Olivia reacted to our first real attempt at discipline tonight, I realized she didn’t yet think of our home that way. That didn’t sit well with me. Not well at all.

  “Mostly it’s made me remember how much I adored my time with Kathryn. But, sweetheart,” I started, turning to face her fully and gripping both of her hands. “I know this whole foster thing was my idea. You agreed because it was so important to me, but we never really talked about the long term.” My throat started closing up. When I first brought up fostering a child, I thought we were on the same page and wanted the same things. Now that it’s been several months, she might be thinking something different, and I didn’t know how to express just how much I wanted what I was going to ask for.

  Briony smoothed her fingers down my cheek. “What are you thinking?”

  That I wanted Olivia with us. That I wanted her to experience home again. Not a home like we’d been providing. But home like the place in your heart and head and soul when you think of the best most permanent place you can go. That I wanted it always, but I didn’t know how to ask my partner for such a huge want and didn’t know what I’d do if she didn’t want the same thing. I loved Briony so much, but I couldn’t compromise on this.

  She gripped my chin and skimmed her lips against mine. “If the next words out of your mouth aren’t, ‘I want us to adopt her,’ I may not speak to you for a whole month.”

  My eyes flooded and my throat closed completely. Briony was the only person who could do this to me. Before her, I rarely cried, and as happy as she made me, I shouldn’t need to cry ever again. But with Briony I’d learned what tears of joy meant.

  “You couldn’t even make it a full day, sweetheart,” I teased and received a hard shove before she righted me and seized my mouth in a demanding kiss.

  When she pulled back, her thumb swiped along my lower lip. Her eyes traced the movement like she wanted to follow it with her mouth again. “It would be a really long day for you, M.”

  “Is that what you want, Bri?” I watched her face for any of the usual signs that she didn’t really mean what she was saying. She had one of the best poker faces around.

  “To adopt her? Yes, honey, of course. I love that girl.” She shook her head and smiled. “I admit when you first suggested the foster program I thought it might not work out, but I knew how important it was for you. When we went through all those program classes, I had a lot of doubts about it. I didn’t like the idea of basically being considered a temporary caretaker with no real parental authority. I mean, we can’t even let her go on a sleepover. We had to ask four of our friends to get background checks just so we’d have a fallback if we needed a sitter. Even medical care needs to be preapproved by her social worker for anything other than an emergency, and if an emergency ever happened, we’d probably have her taken away from us. It wasn’t how I thought it would be.”

  I threaded my fingers through hers. Everything she’d just said was right and while we liked to think of her as our daughter, we couldn’t make long lasting decisions about her. “And now?”

  “It hasn’t been the glorified babysitting experience they made it out to seem, which I’m very glad about. I’m also glad you were so insistent about who we took in. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if she had a parent who was able to come back and take her from us.” She shuddered and leaned forward to take me in her arms again.

  “You really want to adopt her?” Hope filled my heart.

  “Don’t you?”

  “Very much,” I whispered, feeling the relief as if it were a tangible object. I knew I could have talked about it with Briony before this, but I was still getting used to having everything I’d never even thought to dream about.

  “I’m so glad you said that,” she breathed out. “Do you know how to start the process? Do we talk to a lawyer?”

  “Her social worker first.”

  “Can we tell her now?” She shivered in excitement. “She was so hurt tonight.”

  I shook my head, not liking that I had to disappoint her. “We need to wait. I know it’s exciting, but we need to wait and see if it’s possible first. Then we decide when to ask her.”

  She frowned. “Don’t you think she’d want to know?”

  “Yes, but I also think that a kid whose first reaction to doing something wrong is that we’re going to make her leave may not be in the same place as we are on this. It may be best to wait until school’s out.”

  “That long? Why?” Confusion pinched her beautiful features.

  I let out a breath before stating what would be hard to hear. “What if she doesn’t want to be adopted?” Briony’s confusion deepened. She’d always belonged to a loving family and couldn’t imagine voluntarily leaving it. “You know how much she loves her mom. She might think it’s a betrayal of that love.”

  Her eyes widened. “I didn’t even think of that.”

  “If she decides she doesn’t want to be adopted, then she may ask to be placed somewhere else. I’d rather her finish the school year before we put her in that position so she doesn’t have to change schools if she decides she doesn’t want to stay with us.”

  “Oh God.” Panic flashed on her face. “Do you think she doesn’t want to be ours?”

  I smiled trying to reassure her. “I think she does, but on the small chance that she doesn’t, let’s be smart about the timing, okay?”

  She sighed and brought a hand up to her heart. “I’m so happy you brought her into our lives, but now I’m terrified that she won’t want to stay.”

  “Didn’t you always say that parenthood is a combination of happy and terrified at all times?”

  “Don’t throw my logic back at me when I’m freaking out, M.” She pursed her lips and shook her finger at me. “I never thought I’d want another child, especially one who will become the scariest thing on the planet sooner than we can imagine.”

  I tilted my head in question.

  “A teenage girl? There’s truly nothing more frightening.” She smiled bright enough to light up the whole room. “She’s worth it, though.”

  Yes, she was. The girl who would hopefully become our daughter would be worth any heartache her teenage years might cause.

  M / 7

  The grocery store wasn’t too crowded this morning. I wondered if Briony and Caleb were having the same luck. Olivia and I wandered through the empty aisles selecting our groceries for the week. Months ago, Briony and I decided to split the errands on weekends to keep the kids from getting too bored. It worked well enough, but on busy weeks like we’d just had, it meant less time with my partner on the weekends.

  “Hi there, M.”

  I turned to find Lauren pushing a full cart down the aisle toward us. She wore a bright smile that competed with her bright red hair. Almost always bubbly, Lauren took a little getting used to when I’d first started seeing Briony. Nothing as bad as some of her other friends, but I’d wanted to like Lauren immediately because of how she was and who she was in the group. I made every effort to drop my defenses around her.

  “Hi, Lauren,” I greeted.

  She nodded and touched Olivia’s shoulder. “Hi, Livy. It’s nice to run into someone I like today.”

  “Uh-oh,” I murmured, wondering who else she’d seen this morning.

  “Jessie keeps telling me to represent less skeevy people so I won’t mind seeing clients around town” She chuckled at her joke. “What are you up to today? Got any big plans?” She directed her question at Olivia, which was one of the things I liked about Lauren and Jessie. They talked to the kids, not at them or around them whenever we all got together. They were always offering to sit the kids if Briony and I needed a night out. They didn’t even bat an eye when we told them it would require a background check. For that reason, I tried very hard to be as social as I could with Lauren.

  “W
illa invited us over for a swim,” Olivia told her, looking every bit the clone of Lauren’s bubbliness.

  “How fun.”

  “What is, honeybun?” Lauren’s mom asked as she walked up behind her with a carton of eggs. In her eighties, she still seemed as spritely as her daughter whenever I saw them together. “Oh, hello, dearies,” she greeted us. “I heard you’re going to be a chef, sweet girl.”

  Olivia’s eyes grew wide. She looked over at me. I brought my hand up to cradle the back of her neck showing the support that Briony always showed me in social situations. All it took was a brief touch to calm the panic I could work myself into around people.

  “Helen wouldn’t stop talking about how talented you are,” Lauren told her. “I think she’s planned out your entire career for you.”

  Olivia smiled and laughed nervously, stepping closer to me. She wasn’t okay being the center of attention either.

  “Knowing Helen, she won’t wait until you’re done with culinary school, Livy,” Rena told us.

  “She won’t even wait until you’re done with high school,” Lauren joked and looked at me. “One day you might come home from work and find a kayak in Olivia’s room. It’ll be a nice kayak, one that Helen’s husband made by hand, but it’ll be a kayak instead of a child with only a note telling you she’s recruited Olivia for her restaurant.”

  “Oh, you,” Rena brushed off her daughter’s tease. “Now listen, sweet girl, if you want to learn how to make an Irish feast, you come see me.”

  “Take her up on it. Nobody makes corned beef and cabbage like Mom,” Lauren bragged.