Best Friends Forever

Ayla laughed. “Work was work. Yucky. But we got done early, so that’s cool, right? Want me to make pancakes? Lupe, would you like to stay for breakfast?”

Lupe agreed, and Ayla whipped up a batch of pancakes that the three of them ate while Lupe continued Preston’s crash course in Spanish.

Day three of learning Spanish had Preston excited about going to daycare to play with his “friends,” Gilberto and Luis, and Ayla’s morning at the call center was as close to “not terrible” as it ever got.

Her first break rolled around and she checked her phone on the way to the vending machine to grab a Mountain Dew for a caffeine burst.

She opened a text from Desiree, in all caps:

MICK MERRYWEATHER. HIS NAME IS MICK MERRYWEATHER. TEXT ME ASAP!

Ayla stopped in her tracks and stared at the phone. Her palm covered her mouth and her eyes struggled not to bug right out of her head.

Mick Merryweather. Preston Merryweather. Ayla Merryweather? She thought of the three names and then spoke them aloud.

Ayla slumped down against the wall in the hallway outside the breakroom, laughing and crying simultaneously. She replied to her roommate’s text.

“Tell me more!”

Moments later, Desiree replied.

“About time! I asked around and one of the managers here worked at Watterson. The guy is Winston Watterson’s bodyguard. Mick Merryweather. He’s British. That’s all I know, I’ll keep poking around.”

British? Ayla knew he had an accent of some sort, but it was slight. Maybe he’d lived in the United States for a long time?

“THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!”

Ayla sat and stared at the name until several co-workers went rushing by, anxious to avoid the wrath of Teri Palermo.

“Shit!” Ayla exclaimed, and she rushed back to her cubicle, sans caffeine. She didn’t need it. She was high on Mick Merryweather.

Teri glared at Ayla’s smile; nobody was supposed to be that happy on her watch.

Chapter 11

All Ayla wanted to do was stay put in Las Vegas and scheme up a way to cross paths with Mick, but she’d promised Preston a trip to California and a Dodgers game. Ayla knew that nothing short of Santa Claus could get between a six-year-old and a Dodger Dog, with a mini-batting helmet hot fudge sundae to wash it down.

As tricky as it would be to introduce herself, and the idea of Preston, to Mick, she hadn’t yet even begun to dissect how she’d bring a father into her son’s life.

A father and… grandparents?

Her own parents had made it clear from the moment Ayla knew she was pregnant that they wanted nothing to do with her “bastard child.”

Ayla had never had such a visceral reaction to spoken words in her life. When she’d mustered up the courage to tell her parents that she was expecting, her father gasped and looked li

ke he might faint. Her mother, on the other hand, seethed with rage and told her that there was “no place for a bastard grandchild in our lives.”

It felt like being hit with a sledgehammer, right in the gut. She knew they’d be disappointed, possibly upset, but she figured that the reality of a baby would soften them. But when that awful, horrible word crossed her mother’s lips, Ayla decided then and there that her parents deserved no place in the baby’s life, either.

Preston knew he had a mommy who loved him, and that Auntie Desiree was “family.”

He had his aunt, uncle, and cousins in California, and that was enough. Ayla’s little brother, Allan, had snuck in a few visits to meet Preston when he was a baby, but he’d left for the Air Force after high school, and he hadn’t been back since before his nephew turned three.

Preston had once asked why he didn’t have a grandma and grandpa like the kids he saw on TV, and Ayla explained that just like some kids have brothers, others sisters, some both, or, like him, neither, it was the same with grandmas and grandpas.

And daddies.

As brave as she was when she explained it to Preston’s evident five-year-old satisfaction, she cried and cried that night.