“Not at all. Cody was filling me in on some of the shit that’d gone down with his dad while he recovered from his surgery.” Alex shook his head.
“I’d be planning the same thing for him in y’all’s shoes. I don’t even know how you’re not going insane with Cody staying with him just now.” The way he said it implied he knew I wasn’t coping as well as I was acting for people.
All of the bluster and fakery I’d had left me in an instant. He’d pegged me.
“I hate it,” I whispered. “I don’t trust him to look after Cody. If he needs to see a doctor again for the same issue, I know for a fact that Neil would delay taking him as long as he could, or he’d call me and insist I collected him to do it.
“He accused Cody once of faking it when he was little and didn’t want to go to pre-school. In the end, the poor kid had a fit brought on by his fever in the middle of the classroom.”
“Jesus Christ,” Alex hissed. “Are you serious?”
Nodding sadly, I blew out a breath. “When they asked me why he was sent to school when he was so ill, I couldn’t answer it because I’d told Neil to keep him off and get his sister to babysit that day while I was at work. The poor kid had tonsils like golf balls, bronchitis, the flu, and sinusitis.”
“Fuck,” he growled. “I’d have arrested him out of principle.”
I wish he’d been able to.
“Neil’s callous with Cody’s wellbeing and his emotions. It’s hard to trust him to do the right thing while he’s there.”
Reaching behind him, he picked his cell up off the table on his side of the bed and tapped out a message on it, not loosening the arm he had around me once.
“There,” he said, putting it back in its place. “I’ve just texted him to say if he needs anything to let me know. Hopefully, if he knows he has other avenues available, he’ll reach out to at least one of us if something happens.”
That gesture was a relief for me, and when I fell asleep a short while later, I did it feeling slightly more relaxed than I had since Cody had left.
What neither of us had any way of knowing was, it ended up being the best thing that could have happened.
Chapter Nineteen
Alex
3:19am…
The sound of a phone ringing woke me up.
It wasn’t unusual for it to happen and to get dragged out of bed to a callout in the middle of the night, but it was uncommon for me to be curled around a woman in a bed that wasn’t mine when it did.
Not wanting to wake Evie up, I rolled over and looked at the screen, expecting to see a missed call from one of the guys on it. It wasn’t.
Rolling out of bed, I hit the number and quietly walked out of the bedroom, not giving a fuck that I was as naked as a jaybird.
Cody answered on the first ring.
“I need you. You said I could come to you if I needed anything.” He stopped talking as he began crying. “I— I need to leave here, Alex. Please.”
“Okay, bud, settle down,” I said gently as he started sobbing. “What’s happened? Are you sick?”
“No.” He swallowed loudly and took in a shuddering breath. “I just need to leave.” His voice broke on the last word, and then he repeated, “Please.”
It wasn’t a question. It was him begging me to get him.
“Okay, give me two minutes to talk to your mom, Cody. I swear I won’t leave you longer than that, but I need to speak to her. Is that okay? Can you hold on that long?”
“I left out the window and tried walking home, but I got scared,” he whispered. “I got as far as the truck stop.”
I swear it felt like my blood turned to ice. Evie had told me where Neil had moved to two weeks ago, and it wasn’t that far away from where I’d lived when DB was little.
What was far was the distance he’d been intending to walk on his own, and the fact he’d even walked some of it.
“The one that’s about forty minutes away from your dad?”
That was forty minutes in the car, so fuck knows how long he’d been outside on his own walking to it.
“I had to leave. The lady who runs the shop’s letting me sit inside and is really nice.”
Putting the call on speakerphone, I stalked back to Evie’s bedroom.
“I’m going to get your mom and talk to her, but I’m not dropping the call. It’ll go on mute so you can’t hear me, but I’ll still hear you,” I told him, picking up my jeans on my way back to the bed. “Give me a minute, Cody, and I’ll be on my way.”