CHAPTER 1

Vero and I herded the children upstairs for baths right after dinner, hoping to get the kids down for an early bedtime. Then Vero took Zach to his room, singing silly songs to hold his attention and keep him still while she wrangled him into his pajamas. I drew back Delia’s comforter and tucked her into bed. Her eyelids were heavy, still swollen from her crying jag hours ago, after we had left her principal’s office and emptied her cubby at school.

“Mommy,” she said, playing with a loose lock of hair that had slipped free of my elastic band, “do you still love me?”

I kissed the thoughtful wrinkle in her brow. “I’ll always love you, Delia. More than anything in this world.”

“Even when I do something bad?”

I tucked her stuffed unicorn under her arm and pulled the blanket over both of them. “Making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad person, sweetie. There is nothing you could do that would make me love you any less.”

“But Daddy did something bad, and you don’t love him anymore.”

Vero stopped singing in the next room.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“Cooper. He said Daddy is a cheater. I told Cooper my daddy never cheats when we play board games. But Cooper said he heard his mommy talking to Dylan’s mommy at the bus stop, and they called Daddy a cheating bag of dirt.” The crinkles in Delia’s tiny forehead deepened. “I tried to ignore him, like you told me to, but he just pulled my hair and kept saying it.”

“Cooper shouldn’t have said that. And neither should his mother.” The women in our neighborhood loved to gossip, but discussing Steven’s infidelities at the bus stop took gossiping a step too far. “Your father is a good man and a wonderful daddy.”

“But Daddy said it, too. He said he did something bad and that’s why you don’t want to be married to him anymore.”

A lump formed in my throat. I settled down onto the edge of Delia’s bed beside her, struggling to come up with the right way to explain the nature of my evolving relationship with her philandering father to my five-year-old without saying more than she was ready to hear. “Just because your dad and I aren’t married anymore doesn’t mean I don’t love him. I love your daddy very much—”

A muffled cough that sounded suspiciously like bullshit permeated the wall of Zach’s room.

I bit down hard and forced myself to smile. “—even if he made some very … very big mistakes.”

“Then why can’t Daddy live with us?” She picked at a thread in her frayed unicorn as I looked around her room at the frilly, pink curtains and watercolor rainbows and hanging kitten posters, searching for an answer.

“You love your brother, right?” I asked. Delia nodded. “You still love him even when he does things that make you angry, but you get along better with him when you each have your own room.”

“Like when he pooped in the bathtub and it made me cry, and now I don’t have to take baths with him anymore?”

“Exactly like that.”

“So now you take baths with Nick?”

Vero stifled a cackle. I resisted the urge to smack the wall.

“Yes … I mean no!” Detective Nicholas Anthony and I had only started dating a few weeks ago. We’d shared a bed (several times) but never a bathtub. “What I mean to say, Delia, is that just because your brother did something that made you angry doesn’t mean you love him any less. Because when you love someone, you love them no matter what.”

“Even when they poop in the tub?”

I fought back a grin. “Even when they poop in the tub.”

“Do grown-ups get in trouble?” she asked after a thoughtful pause.

A laugh broke free. Steven had made far worse mistakes in far bigger bathtubs. For that matter, so had I. “Grown-ups get in the most trouble of all,” I said through a heavy sigh. “The important thing is we say we’re sorry and learn from our mistakes. And we try to do better the next time.” One day, maybe I’d start following my own advice.

I smoothed the comforter around her and stood to go.

“If I say sorry, can I go back to school tomorrow?” she asked as I switched off the light.

“Not tomorrow, sweetie.”

“Then what will we do?”

“I don’t know.” That was a problem for future me. Present me had laundry to do, bills to pay, a house to clean, and a new book to write. Tomorrow, we would do what we always did. “We’ll figure something out.”

* * *

When the kids had both finally drifted off to sleep, I slumped onto the sofa beside Vero with a pile of take-out menus, too exhausted from the events of the last few hours to even think about cooking. We’d taken the kids out for ice cream after our meeting with Delia’s principal, then Steven had gone back to work and we had spent the rest of the day at the park. The kids had been exhausted by the time we got home. We’d fed them an early dinner of frozen chicken nuggets and instant mashed potatoes and given them both a bath; neither one of them had the energy to protest when we’d tucked them in for an early bedtime.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked, thumbing through the menus.

“Chocolate,” Vero said.

Copyright © 2025 by Elle Cosimano