Cate was next to impossible to choke back, but she had to. Danny was so serious. This was a complication she hadn’t ever calculated. Cate knew Jessica Anderson’s parents. She’d sold them their house six months ago. She’d wondered why they’d wanted so much extra room. Now she knew.
“Sweetie, I’m pretty sure that getting a baby like Jessica’s parents did would be very expensive. Right now I can’t afford a baby that way. Plus, I also believe because they had a mommy and a daddy, the adoption went fairly well for them.”
“Hmm. Yeah. Jessica has a daddy.”
“A father is an important ingredient for an adoption.”
“But not for a family, right? Because we’re a family. Even if my daddy died. And he never got to see me.”
Cate’s heart went out to her little boy. There was so much he was missing because he didn’t have a father. Sure, there were thousands of boys without a father, but she’d never planned to be a single mother. She’d wanted the dream. A knight in shining armor. Happily-ever-after. Still, she’d been granted the most perfect child a mother could ever want.
Danny was her blessing. She’d take that.
“Yes. He never got to see you, but I know he sees you from heaven. Don’t you think?”
Danny smiled, as he always did when they talked about his father. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Time for your bath and pajamas. I’ll run the water. You pick out a book for me to read to you.”
“Okay!” Danny rushed off to his bedroom as Cate went to the bathroom.
She turned on the water, testing the temperature. She could feel fingers of gloom pulling at her. She always felt this way when Danny mentioned his father.
Brad Kramer could be dead. Should be dead if there was justice in the world, but she didn’t know for certain. She didn’t want to know.
“Mom! I found my raptor! He was under my pillow all this time!” Danny raced to the bathroom stark naked and jumped in the tub before she had a chance to slow him down.
Using a plastic tumbler, Cate doused his thick dark hair and built a foamy lather with tearless shampoo. Danny pretended his dinosaur was diving into the sea while she scrubbed his back, arms and legs. She rinsed his hair and took a towel from the wicker stand.
Danny hummed one of the songs he’d learned at school while she dried his hair and helped him into his pajamas. He was the sweetest thing, and it took a great deal of self-control to keep her kisses to less than a dozen every night.
He raced to his bedroom and scrambled between the covers. “Here,” he said, handing her a Shel Silverstein book. “You like this one.”
“My mother read that to me when I was a little girl.”
“Uh-huh. And she’s with Daddy in heaven.”
Cate felt a twinge of sorrow as she always did when she thought of her mother, who had died when Cate was seventeen. That was the year she’d met Brad.
Brad couldn’t have been more perfect if he’d walked out of a dream. He was dark haired, tall and handsome. He worked as a lifeguard at the public pool where she and her two girlfriends hung out on weekends. He was twenty-one years old and tanned, wearing the regulation black bathing trunks and aviator sunglasses. He looked like a mysterious, rock-hard model. When he asked her out for a burger one Saturday, she’d felt as if she’d walked on air. Even now, she could remember the heady rush of excitement and the thrumming of her heart when he got off his shiny chrome motorcycle at Smitty’s Hamburger Diner holding a single rose.
He worked two jobs, driving a truck during the week and working as a lifeguard on weekends—to keep up his tan.
Brad told her he’d watched her for two weeks before getting up the courage to ask her out. He told her he didn’t date much. He had to watch his expenses.
He told her she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He played old Johnny Mathis love songs on every jukebox in every diner they went to over that first month. And each time he did, he sang along, as if serenading her. He held her hand when they walked to his bike.
And he kissed her with so much passion she thought she would melt to the pavement.
Despite the fact that Cate was struggling with grief, trying to adjust to the foster home where the state forced her to live until graduation, she believed she was in love with Brad from that first night.
Cate didn’t understand the nuances of grief. She didn’t know that what she was feeling wasn’t love. She didn’t recognize that Brad was simply the force that filled the void left by her mother’s death. Cate didn’t know how to combat grief.
Over that summer, Brad offered her excitement and recklessness. She’d ridden on the back of his motorcycle, wondering if she could find her mother in the wind. They’d sped across downstate Illinois highways, through country towns, drinking beer and eating mini-mart food because they had so little money. He was wild, and she wanted to be wild, hoping the pain and grief would go away.
Brad pleaded with her to marry him. She’d been flattered. She’d felt special, even important, after months of feeling small and insignificant. Brad wanted her, and when he kissed her with so much fire and abandon, her reasoning turned to ash.
Because Cate had promised her mother she would finish high school, she kept Brad at arm’s length until she graduated. He’d been angry about that. Very angry. Cate had translated his outbursts as desire and passion. She was convinced she’d bewitched him.
The night they were married by a justice of the peace, Brad got drunk, started an argument and hit her. He swore it would never happen again. He begged her forgiveness.
He’d treated her like a queen—for five days. He bought her roses, ran her bath and brought her breakfast in bed. He said odd things that, at the time, she thought were endearments.
“You belong to me now,” he’d said. “You’re mine. All mine now that we’re married. You have my name, and I like that very much.”
A month later, it happened again. This time he was more than just drunk. His pupils were dilated, and he looked as if he had a fever. He’d told her that because they were married, he could do whatever he liked. He wanted her to be submissive. When Cate refused, he hit her and threw her against the wall. She’d hit her head and was stunned, momentarily unconscious.
The incident must have frightened him, because Brad apologized again. This time he brought home an expensive bottle of champagne and a silver bracelet she knew they couldn’t afford. When she asked him where he got the money, he told her that he’d started a “side business” to cover “extras.”
Cate didn’t trust a thing he told her.
Of all the things she was, stupid wasn’t one of them. It was as if the minute she’d agreed to marry, he changed. The challenge of winning her was gone.
She had to admit that she’d changed, too. She’d dreamed of a little house with children someday. Brad had argued that he didn’t have the kind of income to afford a house. Their very small apartment in a complex filled with people she didn’t know—who appeared to sleep all day and party by the pool all night—was not enough. She wanted more.
Each time she tried to discuss her dreams with Brad, he yelled that he would never be able to afford the things she wanted. Cate realized if she brought in a paycheck, she could make her dreams a reality. She applied for a data entry job at a nearby pool equipment company and was hired on the spot. Brad was furious. He’d stormed out of the apartment to meet his friends.
That night, Brad came home drunk, though now she realized he was high on some drug that his friends had sold him. He marched toward her with menacing eyes and balled fists. He screamed obscenities at her. Then he said, “I own you!” Before he took the first swing, Cate took action.
She