“Jude? Is something wrong? Zach never asked me to keep Grace away from her mother.”
Jude pushed past Leigh and ran across the sawdust-strewn backyard. At the childproof gate, she manipulated the latch and kept going, racing through the trees toward the beach. There, she shuddered to a halt.
There were kids everywhere, laughing and playing. The day care’s other supervisor was over by the driftwood, watching the kids.
Calm down, Judith.
She scanned the shoreline.
There she was—a little blond girl alongside a dark-haired young woman.
Lexi.
Jude ran forward, almost falling in her sudden fury. She grabbed Lexi by the arm, spun her around.
Lexi paled. “J-Jude.”
“Hey, Nana,” Grace said. “This is my new friend.”
“Grace. Go over to Tami,” Jude said tightly.
“But—”
“Now,” Jude yelled.
Grace flinched at the harshness of the command. Her little shoulders hunched forward and she shuffled away, her head hung low.
“You have no right to be here,” Jude said.
As Lexi looked up, Jude noticed several things at once: Lexi was hard looking, almost stringy, but she was still very young. And when she noticed the girl’s frizzy, curly, untamed hair, she thought of Mia saying, she’s like me Madre, is that coolio or what? Jude stumbled back at the memory. She shouldn’t have come here, shouldn’t have approached Lexi. She wasn’t strong enough. “Go,” Jude said weakly. “Please…”
“I needed to see her.”
“And you have.” Jude felt frail enough to drop to her knees. It took concentration just to keep standing.
“She’s lonely,” Lexi said, looking toward Grace, who stood apart from the other kids and stared back at them.
“What do you expect?” Jude said bitterly. “She’s grown up in a broken family.”
“I told myself I’d see that she was happy and I’d leave. But she’s not happy.”
Jude opened her purse, reached in for her wallet with shaking hands. “I’ll pay you to go. How much? Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty? Just tell me how much you want.” Lexi’s face changed at that, but Jude was shaking too hard to focus clearly. A dull thudding squeezed her chest and she had the terrible thought that she might pass out. “A hundred thousand. How about that?”
“I gave her to Zach,” Lexi said. “Gave her. Do you know how hard that was? Can you imagine?”
“Losing a child?” Jude said. “Yes, Lexi. I know how it feels.”
“I did it because I loved her. And because I trusted you and Zach and Miles to be her family.”
Jude saw the censure in Lexi’s eyes, and she knew it was warranted, and that only made it hurt more. “We are her family.”
“No. She’s afraid of you, did you know that? She says you never hold her or kiss her. She wonders why you don’t love her.”
Jude felt exposed suddenly; fear bled up inside her, bubbled out until she was shaking so hard she dropped her purse. “How dare you?” But the words had no bite, no venom.
“I trusted all of you.” Lexi’s voice broke. It was the first evidence of real emotion, and Jude seized it.
“Zach has given up everything for Grace. Everything.”
“You mean USC, don’t you? Your Holy Grail. You never cared that he was happy, just that he did what you wanted him to.”
“That’s not true.”
“He loved me. But that meant nothing to you.”
“You killed his sister,” Jude said.
“Yes,” Lexi said, her mouth trembling. “And I have to live with that every day of my life. I did everything I could to make it up to you and Zach and Grace, but there is no making it up. I gave you my freedom and my daughter—and still you want more. Well, fuck you, Jude. You don’t get any more. Grace is my daughter. My Mia. And I want her back. My lawyer filed the petition today.”
As Lexi walked away, Jude just stood there, eyes stinging, throat tight, hearing Lexi’s voice say over and over again, my Mia.