Gretchen glanced up and met the driver’s eyes. God, she wished there were some way of putting up a partition so the guy behind the wheel didn’t hear all this.

“I’ll introduce you to him and him to you. And we’ll just go from there.”

Vin’s mouth tightened and she braced herself for a no. “Thank you…I’d like to meet your son.”

“Good,” she whispered with a combination of relief and fear. “Let’s go.”

She paid the fare and got out of the cab first so she could help Vin—but he shook his head and grabbed the side of the taxi to pull himself up. Which was a good thing, considering the way the muscles in his forearm clenched. Given how much he weighed, she was more likely to fall on him than actually get him to his feet.

Once he was upright, she hitched herself under his good side, shut the door, and helped him up the front walk.

Instead of trying to find her keys, she knocked quietly and Quinesha opened the way immediately. “My lord, will you look at you two.”

The woman stepped back and Gretchen got Vin over to the couch, where he didn’t so much sit down as fall on the cushions—which led her to believe his knees gave out.

For long moments, everyone waited to see if he was going to need to be rushed to the bathroom.

When it seemed like he had himself under nominal control, Quinesha didn’t ask a lot of questions. She just gave Gretchen one of her quick, hard hugs, asked if there was anything she could do, and hit the road when she was thank-you-but-no’d from the heart.

Gretchen locked the door up and put her purse down on the ratty wing chair by the TV. As Vin let his head fall back and his lids crash down, she was not surprised when he took a series of long, deep recovery breaths and held otherwise completely still.

“You want the bathroom?” she asked, hoping he didn’t have to throw up again.

When he shook his head, she went into the kitchen, got a glass out of the cupboard, and filled it full of ice. Courtesy of her son, there were two things she always had in the house: ginger ale and saltines, also known as mother’s cure-all. Even though Robbie was homeschooled, he played with other kids at the Y, and the sitters all had children who came down with flus and colds and stomach bugs.

A mom never knew when she might need the magic combo.