The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 560

Chapter 560: 560 | Let Mommy Make Up for Lost Time

She stood. Smoothed her blouse. Set the water glass down with a soft click.

Then she walked around the island, and she took my hand.

Not the way she took my arm at agency events, all polish and performance. Not the way she’d steered me through a hundred difficult conversations over nine years.

This was different.

Her fingers threaded through mine, warm and certain, and there was a small tremor in them that she couldn’t hide and didn’t try to.

"Come on, baby," she said.

The word landed differently than it used to. There’d been a time when baby was maternal, warm, the thing a guardian said to the kid she’d raised since he was eight. It didn’t mean that anymore. Or it meant that and something else, layered together in a way that should have felt wrong and stopped feeling wrong somewhere around the third month. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Sloane watched us go with an expression I couldn’t fully read. Something possessive and something soft, holding hands in the middle of her chest.

"Two hours," she called after us. "I’m setting a timer."

"You are not setting a timer," Diane called back.

"I have a phone and a strong sense of grievance. I’m absolutely setting a timer."

I let Diane lead me down the hallway I’d walked ten thousand times, past the office and the theater room and the linen closet, toward the wing of the house that held her bedroom. I’d only been inside that room a handful of times before everything changed between us, and every time since had rewritten what the space meant.

She opened the door. The California king dominated the room the way it always did, all cream and gold and expensive fabric. The evening light came through the gauze curtains and turned everything soft.

She pulled me inside. The door clicked shut behind us. The lock turned.

And then she just stopped.

She stood there holding my hand, her back to me, her shoulders rising and falling with a breath that went too deep and came out shaky. The composure that had held for eleven days finally started to give at the seams, and I watched it happen without saying anything because some things you didn’t interrupt.

"Diane."

"Give me a second." Her voice was thick. "I’m having a moment. I’m allowed one moment."

I stepped closer. Put my free hand on her shoulder. Turned her around.

Her eyes were wet. Not spilling, not yet, but close. Diane Fitzgerald, the woman who’d rebranded Heroes who set buildings on fire and never once lost her cool in front of a client, stood in her own bedroom with her hand shaking in mine and tears sitting on her lashes.

"You were gone," she said quietly. "The bond didn’t tell me anything. I don’t have a bond. I just had a monitor and a green light and a room that got very quiet. And I sat there thinking about a promise I made to Reina, that I’d fill your life with happy tears, and instead I was sitting in a hospital watching you not breathe."

"I’m breathing."

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