“He-he…she wasn’t even in the dirt before he petitioned for custody. G-g-gram and Gramps t-t-tried to fight him but, money was tight, and our l-lawyer wasn’t very g-good and…and…her senior year! She’s with Dad!”

I gulped, choked, coughed, hiccupped, then kept bawling.

I shoved my face in his neck and used his skin to wipe my cheeks then pulled away and looked away, straining to get out from under him.

“I was so s-stupid to think you…just, you know, would want me and that you c-cared.”

I stopped straining, moving altogether, talking and crying when his big hands framed both sides of my head and he forced it to face him.

“You know better than that, Lyla,” he bit out.

I blinked tears out of my eyes.

“I was giving you space,” he clipped.

“I didn’t want space,” I shot back. “I told you to call me.”

“You were seventeen years old.”

“I know, that’s why you wouldn’t kiss me and…say, one of a myriad reasons why you wouldn’t call me.”

“Goddamn it.” He looked over my head. “Shit is real and she’s sayin’ words like ‘myriad.’”

“Preacher,” I snapped.

He looked down at me.

“I did not want to be that creep,” he stated.

That made me mad.

“You’re not a creep,” I retorted

“Not a creep, cher, that creep. That creepy twenty-somethin’ guy who preys on a seventeen-year-old.”

I blinked again for a different reason.

“Oh,” I mumbled.

“Yeah, oh,” he bit off. “And I did call.”

Uh-oh.

“You did?”

“On your birthday. After your birthday. At least a dozen times between your birthday and when we got back to Indy. And I’ll just say, your gramps thinks I’m a twenty-somethin’ creep.”

I rolled my eyes to look over my head.

“Babe,” he growled.

I looked back at him.

“Okay, just to say, we didn’t have a lot of time together so I might have been remiss in sharing my grandfather is a tad overprotective.”

He just growled with no words at that.

“And you know, I might have been so excited I met you, I told everybody, and well…he wasn’t a big fan of his granddaughter meeting some guy in a band.”

“You don’t say,” he drawled sarcastically.

“I didn’t think he would withhold your messages,” I told him.

And I didn’t.

“Well, I’m seein’ we both now realize, he did,” Preacher pointed out.

Yes, we now realized that.

But I also realized I had the answer to why Gramps was always racing to be the first to the phone for that stretch of time around my eighteenth birthday.

He lived with four women. He never raced to the phone.

I did not share that dawning knowledge with Preacher.

I just drew in breath and held it.

I let it go to say, “I didn’t come up here because you’re famous, Preacher.”