Reading Online Novel

Just One Regret(46)



Leaning down, I press my lips to hers, not giving a shit about her morning breath even though it drives Kennedy crazy. “Happy Easter,” I mutter, my lips against hers.

“Happy Easter.” Her smile is soft and lazy.

Pushing back and sitting up, I resist the urge to get her turned on all over again.

I have a surprise for her waiting downstairs.



Kennedy


“Are you ready for this?” Grayson asks, holding the envelope that has arrived a week earlier than normal.

My eyes had widened in surprise as soon as I saw it, and in the twenty minutes it’s taken us to fill Emma’s and Mitchell’s tummies with breakfast and then corral them in the kitchen so they can listen, too, I’ve barely been able to take my eyes off the package.

Just like every year, the twinge of pain pinches my heart.

“Come here, munchkin.” Grayson nabs Emma around her waist and pulls her onto his lap.

Her crazy mop of blond curls is so similar to Thad’s and an exact mirror of Grayson’s when he was a boy. Her eyes are all mine, though, all light brown and sparkling with unrestrained energy. If there is something that can be climbed or scaled or jumped off of, Emma finds it like a homing beacon.

“Mom, are you sad?”

I shake my head at my perceptive, quieter son, Mitchell. He looks exactly like me, and some days I wonder if he’ll grow up to look exactly like my father. I push those unwanted thoughts out of my head, because I quickly realize they’re irrelevant.

He might look like a man I haven’t spoken to in a decade, but he’ll never become him. Mitchell has too much sweet, inherent goodness inside of him to ever want to hurt anyone.

“Not sad. Anxious to meet your new little sister, though.”

His pink lips push out into a pout. “I still want a brother.”

Grayson’s laugh is full and loud and rumbling as he says, “Next time, kiddo.”

I feign a scowl even as my chin begins to quiver slightly as I stare at the letter.

It does every year, and it always will.

Thad’s letter—the one we still receive every year from the Matsens. Other than meeting him that one day in Millennium Park, we have had no personal contact with them.

However, after speaking with them through the adoption agency, they have allowed us to contact Thad once a year—on his birthday.

Someday, as the Matsens have promised, Thad will know that the man he still calls his hero even if Grayson’s traded in his fighting career for a training and coaching career, and the man who sends him a birthday card every year on his birthday with photos of his own family…is his real dad.

And every year, we wait. We’ll continue to wait to see if he wants to contact us, see if he wants to get to know us, and until then, we celebrate the new blessings we’ve been given—treasuring every moment of the new family we’ve created, never forgetting that our original child is just as loved, just as taken care of, as the ones we’ve brought into the world.

I remember all of this, that someday we will hopefully be able to have a relationship with Thad, and fight back the tears that blur my eyes.

With a fortifying nod, I stare directly into Grayson’s knowing eyes and bite down on the inside of my lip. “Okay,” I say, my lips stretching into a wide smile. “I’m ready.”

I have nothing to be sad about. Not today. I have a future and a family of my own that I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.

Finally. I have everything I’ve always wanted, and it’s better than I could have possibly imagined.