The day that Ryan gave up the twins had to be the hardest one that he had ever faced in his entire life. He dropped them off at their grandparents himself, hardly able to look Anna and Noah in the face as they received him into their house. His bodyguard brought Tyler and Taylor's belongings from the car into the house, while Margie busied herself with setting up the children's nursery, trying to make it as close to the one that they had at home. The week before, Ryan had had her come over to this house and remodel the room that was to be the nursery to look like the one back home. Now she was arranging their stuff the way they had been arranged back home too. The lump in his throat refused to go no matter how many times or how hard he swallowed to clear it, especially when he saw how uncomfortable the twins, especially Taylor, looked with the effusive petting of her grandparents. Tyler actually did not look too bothered and was busily chewing on a piece of cookie that Anna had given

“So, Sam and Sandra met each other while they were in the university. He was a very bad influence on her and everyone who loved her told her so, but it seemed that the more she was warned about him, the more she wanted to be with him. He was, and obviously still is a manipulator, but she turned a blind eye to all his faults. Eventually, she began to do drugs with him and it got so bad that she had to be sent to rehab. She barely managed to graduate, but by the time she did, she had managed to get clean, from drugs, at least. However, she still wouldn’t hear jack about how much of a bad influence Sam was on her, much like she keeps doing, even now.I remember the first time I ever met him. She invited him to an already strained dinner to meet our parents, whom we’re not all that close to. This asshole came to dinner high as a kite, and of course, our parents didn’t like him, which was one of the few times they and I ever agreed on something. Sandra didn’t care, of course, but did her b

The atmosphere in Becca’s house was sort of tense as she finished packing up her and Emma’s stuff. She zipped the last bag closed, the sound of the lock seeming very loud and final in her very quiet living room. The silence was broken only by Emma’s contented, soft coos as she rested on Dan’s shoulders and the latter patted her back gently in a bid to get her to sleep. It was working, albeit slowly. Now and then, the little child’s eyes would close, and then they would open again as she fought the insistent call of sleep. Finally, though, she succumbed to it, and only then did Dan pad out of Becca’s living room with the child in his arms, and went to drop her in her room to sleep.He came back to the living room to see that Becca had unzipped the smallest of Emma’s bags again and was slowly unfolding and refolding the clothes in it. This was no surprise. The woman was nervous as hell and was doing everything possible to avoid a confrontation with him, not that he wanted to have one wi

Phone calls from a hospital or even a nursing home, especially ones that came in the wee hours of the night would most often than not, cause panic among the receivers of such calls. Calls like this immediately threw one into a dire state of panic and had a way of causing one’s heart to pound, at least until the cause of the call was ascertained. Ryan for one, with all that he had been through, ever since people around him started dying, starting from his parents, his sister, her husband, and then her two vulnerable babies being hospitalized and at the brink of death, totally hated anything that had to do with hospitals.So when his phone began to ring in the middle of the night, and he saw that the call was coming from the nursing home in which his ex-wife’s aged grandparents lived, his heart started the now familiar pounding that it usually got when he got any calls from a hospital. He had not known Becca’s grandparents for very long, but in the short time that he knew them, they wer

Although Ryan tried his best to prolong his stay on the off chance that Becca would come, he had run out of things to say to Mrs. Laura. It probably wasn't a good idea for him to keep talking to her, even though left to her, she would have happily talked until she dropped. It wasn’t as though he didn’t want to talk to her, but she was only just recuperating, and she needed her rest. After some time, he asked her about Becca and if she was coming to see her, but the woman had shaken her head.“No, she hasn’t. I don’t like her traveling all that distance just to see me, you know. She tries to do so very often, but I know how difficult it is, especially with the b...” She trailed off, glancing unsurely at Ryan, and then glancing away guiltily, not finishing her sentence.“Especially with the what, Mrs. Laura?” Ryan asked, sensing that what she had been about to say was serious.“Especially with the busyness of her schedule, of course. You still love her, don’t you, Ryan?”Ryan averted his