“Fine, fine. I promise.” So what if he and a buddy got into it? Testosterone and competition don’t always bring out the best in boys. I didn’t understand why he was being so secretive about this.

“Mr. Fischer stopped me after baseball practice tonight . . . and had a few things to say to me—”

My hand flew up to my mouth, stopping Ryan’s explanation mid-sentence.

“Owen hit you?”

“He was angry about what happened with Aria, Mom. It’s understandable. I got what I deserved. Please just let it go. If you confront him, it’ll only make things worse.”

A grown man hitting a teenage boy . . . no, I couldn’t let Owen get away with this. But I couldn’t let Ryan know what I was about to do. He’d never tell me anything ever again. So I played it cool, as cool as I could as I lied through my teeth.

“Ry, you don’t deserve that, and technically we could press assault charges for what he did to you, but I’ll let it slide—for you. Because you asked me to. But if that man ever goes near you again, I’ll . . . ooooh, I love you, you know that?”

He sighed like he had just released the weight of a heavy secret. “Thank you for being cool about this and not killing anyone.”

I hadn’t made any promises on that.

“Moooommy!” Lucas’s tattletale voice called from my bedroom. “Someone threw leaves all over the floor and made a huge mess! They’re gonna get a big spanking!”

The flower petals. I’d forgotten about tonight’s romance fail. It looked like I wasn’t going to be the one getting a spanking tonight after all.

Ryan looked at me quizzically.

“I better go deal with the munchkin,” I said.

I kissed Ryan goodnight on the cheek, then headed back downstairs. Grant was wiping off the counter from the chocolate-covered strawberries I’d probably forget to eat, so I tucked Lucas into our bed—Grant would grumble about it later, but neither of us wanted to deal with the exhaustive effort of relocating him—and popped on a movie, Wreck-It Ralph. The kid could never fall asleep for long before he’d climb his way into our bed. We’d given up on ever having the bed to ourselves until Lucas reached puberty.

I grabbed my keys and told Grant the timeworn cliché that I had a quick errand to run, then off I went to pay Owen Fischer a little visit.