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At that thought, his stomach churned. Maybe Tadgh really wouldn’t think he was good enough. After all, his beginnings were less than humble. They were despicable. His family didn’t exactly have the track record of being faithful and honorable. If he were Tadgh... Just looking at him from the outside, he wasn’t sure whether he would give himself permission to pursue Ellen.
He thought he heard a vehicle, and he smiled, but no knock at the door was forthcoming, nor did he hear the front door open or Ellen call out.
That was odd.
He stood up, walking to the window looking out, seeing a little bit of dust like maybe there had been a vehicle, and he tried to remember if he had ordered anything where there might’ve been a delivery person at his house, but he hadn’t.
Strange.
He shook his head, and moved away from the window, getting ready for his day. Thinking to himself that maybe he needed to make a phone call to Tadgh before he did anything else, he called Tadgh and arranged a time for him to come out and talk.
He had made a lot of calls for business over the years, a lot of difficult calls, a lot of ones he didn’t want to make, or ones that had intimidated him. But, the call to Tadgh was by far the hardest call he’d ever made.
He dreaded the idea of facing the man, not because he wasn’t a good man or didn’t like him, but because he was so emotionally invested in the outcome and did not want to go see him.
But, for Ellen, he would do it.
He went down to the kitchen and had cracked a couple of eggs when he heard a vehicle. This time, he stopped what he was doing and walked to the window in time to see Ellen’s car coming down the driveway. He smiled before he realized that...it wasn’t Ellen driving.
He squinted, were those tattoos?
His eyes moved, and he realized that it was Ellen’s honey blonde hair in the passenger seat.
A slither of unease curled through his stomach, and he threw the egg shell that he had still held in his hand in the garbage can before he walked to the back door.
It took a couple of seconds watching Ellen’s car pull in and stop, before he realized there was movement on the stoop.
It took even longer for him to process what he saw.
A small child, young, sat at his feet on the stoop. He seemed agitated as he moved his legs from side to side, and his fingers clenched and unclenched. It was almost like he was forcing himself to keep his butt on the stoop, but his body just had to move.
Strange. Travis looked around. There were no adults in sight.
Ellen had gotten out of her car. The driver’s door opened a few seconds later, and he recognized, almost immediately, Alice’s mother.
What in the world was she doing here? And why was she driving Ellen’s car?
Still, despite all the things that seem to be really odd about the day, he could smile, because he remembered how his day had started. With Ellen, holding her. It wasn’t hard to remember the way she kissed him, and how perfect she felt in his arms.
He opened the door, as Ellen pulled Alice from the backseat and closed the door.
She smiled at him, but as her eyes fell to the bottom step, and she realized there was a child sitting on it, her smile faded. And her brows drew down, as though trying to figure out this newest development.
As he was. He had stepped out on the porch, and slowly made his way down the steps.
He wasn’t very good with small children, and in his experience, a lot of times they were afraid of him.
He didn’t want to scare this little guy off. Not before he figured out what in the world was going on. He was way too young to be anywhere without supervision. There was a small bag sitting beside the kid, and Travis made it to the step, hunching down beside the bag, as Ellen walked up the sidewalk.
The kid’s eyes were on the women, and he jumped a little at Travis’s voice.
“Hey there, Mister,” Travis said, using the most gentle voice he could muster up.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Where’s your mom?” Travis asked.
The kid’s eyes skittered from Travis to Ellen and back to Travis.
