Chapter 91

Charles made a funny noise in the back of his throat, squirming a bit. “I’m not ready for kids now.

I swallowed hard. “Hold on there. Slow down. I’m not ready for that either.” I shook my head. “No, that’s not really what I was suggesting. But the idea of kids and you and I playing around with when and whether or not we’d have them with each other made me think.”

“About?” Charles asked.

“About the fact that we really haven’t solidified much between us. I mean, we agreed to date, but what kind of future do you want together? Are we exclusive or casual? Do we have an understanding to try long-term? Or is this a fly-by-the-seat of our pants and just see where things go sort of deal?”Charles scrunched up his nose in thought. “I suppose now that we are officially boyfriend and girlfriend, deciding whether or not we want to be serious with one another is normal.”

He gave a little shrug. “We’re a scent match. We get along. What else do we need?”

I fiddled with the bottom of my shirt shyly. “I don’t know,” I demurred. “I never grew up with parents, so I don’t really have a good example of domestic life. I don’t know what that realistically looks like. I know it’s not like you see on TV. I didn’t expect some man would come swooping in and give me a giant rock of a ring and propose to me and take me off for wedded bliss for the rest of my life. But…”

I looked up at him again. “What was your childhood like growing up? What were your parents like together? How did they know they wanted to get married, or be serious, or even be together?”

He nodded. “You know what? That’s an excellent place to start. If we’re going to do anything serious or long-term, then you need to meet my parents. And maybe if you see my family and hear the stories about my mom and dad from my mom, you’ll have a better idea of what kind of family you’re looking for. What a real family looks like.”

He wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tightly. “Sometimes I forget that you missed out on these things. You should do this more often. If you find yourself adrift in our relationship, point that out to me, and I will see if there’s any way that I can help you.”

“I’m not claiming to be a relationship expert, but I can help you find your way as you take on these adult responsibilities that you never got to see play out at home.”

I nodded against his shoulder. “Thank you for understanding, or at least trying to, as best you can.”

He said, “I know I’ll never fully understand what it was like to grow up without a family. But I’ll do my best to see that you’re not lost while you’re trying to start your own.”

“And we’re back to the having kids thing,” I said.He chuckled. “Families don’t come just with two parents and a child. You’ll see that when we visit my family. My mother lives very close to my sister and her kids. But my father is gone.”

“So it’s multi-generational?” I asked.

“Not the same house,” he clarified. “But, yes.”

“I would very much like to meet your sister, your nieces or nephews, and your mom,” I said. “I’ve never known any of my family. It’s more than not having parents. It’s not having anyone. I don’t have grandparents or siblings. I don’t have cousins, aunts, uncles, none of it. Where do they live?”

“In a small town on the coast, not too far north of here,” Charles said. “Brindle Cove.”

He turned around and grabbed my hand, pulling me down the sidewalk in the direction of our apartment building. “Not that I want to go back and be under the noses of our jailers again, but this is a fantastic idea. I want to go straight up to my parents’ place.”

“Wait, what?” I garbled, trying to catch up both physically and in my head.

“I want you to spend the weekend with my mom right away. It’s not like we’re doing anything else.”

I laughed, letting go of a giddy feeling. Somehow, that morning seemed like an entirely different existence. I’d gone from under the nose of overbearing security guards and trapped within the world that they allowed us to maneuver to seeing everything through rose-colored glasses and talking about getting serious with Charles and meeting his family.

Maybe, maybe, things really were sunnier in Lupinton. Maybe I didn’t need to go looking for the shadows. I should just take time to enjoy the sunlight while I was in it. As if agreeing with me, the sun broke through between two of the tall buildings, casting its warm light over the pair of us. It was like a sign.

After a week of tense negotiations and hostile conversations with our security detail, we finally got permission and the proper arrangements for them to accompany us to go and visit Charles’ mother, Gwenivere Rafe.

We were taking the train up the coastline on what was going to be a short 40-minute ride. That ride seemed to transport us to an entirely different world.

We left the steel, concrete, and glass of the city. First, we went through smaller towns and sprawling suburbs of houses, apartments, parks, and shops, then tucked-away urban farms.

Eventually, those farms began to spread out and became less of an urban garden and more of an actual functioning farm. Here and there, animals would dot the fields, grazing happily on the grass in the lush and idyllic countryside. Picturesque farmhouses overlooked the properties. It was all very cute. It looked like a postcard or something from a feel-good movie.

I’d never actually been to a farm. I’d lived in the city all my life. But I’d seen them on occasion when we would take outings with the orphanage where I grew up, sometimes to the seaside, sometimes to the mountains to go see a lake or go hiking. Excursions like that hadn’t happened very often, so watching everything go by was still novel and exciting for me.

By the time I’d gotten the freedom to be an adult and move around as I pleased, I’d been working, and I just didn’t find the time to leave the city all that often. And even if I did, Cathy wasn’t really the outdoors sort of girl. She didn’t want to go hiking with me or anything like that.

Charles sat next to me, working on his laptop, trying to get as much work done as possible before we arrived at his family’s house. He wanted to be able to spend the weekend focusing on the people that mattered and not business.

Agent Tang sat across from us, flipping through whatever he was looking at on the phone. Probably more ways to look menacing without actually changing his expression.

Since we were going to a small town, it had been agreed that just one of the four security officers would come with us to cut down on costs and to make the burden of housing them less on Charles’ mother. Besides, I think they didn’t believe that Charles or I could go too far away from each other in a small town like Brindle Cove.

Or maybe after we’d ditched them in the city, they’d seen the futility of trying to pin us down so brutally. I couldn’t speak for Charles, but I, for one, was ready to ditch our lone security agent the first chance we got.