Billie's POV
If I thought yesterday was bad, today was a whole new level of what the hell.
I barely had time to finish my coffee before the tornadoes Skylar and Mackenzie were tearing through the house like tiny, adorable wrecking balls.
Skylar had discovered the dog's stash of tennis balls and decided they were the perfect weapons for an indoor game of fetch.
Shark, my patient but clearly exhausted golden retriever, was less enthusiastic.
Mackenzie? She was fully engaged in her own mission painting every surface she could find with finger paints. That included my white walls.
I stood in the middle of the chaos, half laughing, half wanting to crawl back into bed and pretend this wasn't happening.
"Stop! No paint on the walls!" I shouted, but my voice was drowned out by their giggles.
They were like little whirlwinds, impossible to catch and impossible to be mad at.
Somewhere between cleaning up glitter and wiping paint off Shark's fur, I caught myself smiling.
Maybe this crazy mess wasn't so bad after all.
Because beneath the noise and the chaos, beneath the spilled paint and the tennis balls flying across the room, there was something else. Something quieter, but stronger.
A kind of life I hadn't realized I was missing.
Watching Skylar's proud grin as she showed off her "masterpiece" on the wall, or Mackenzie's excited chatter as she tried to teach Shark how to "play art," I felt this unexpected
warmth spreading in my chest. It was confusing. Scary. But it was there.
For the first time in a long time, I didn't feel completely alone.
Yeah, the house was a disaster zone. Yeah, my nerves were shot. And yeah, I was pretty sure I'd never sleep again.
But sitting there, in the middle of the mess, with two little girls laughing their heads off and a dog who looked ready to hide under the bed, I felt something else.
Hope.
Maybe this messy, unpredictable, exhausting thing was what I needed to find it again.
YOU ARE READING
Unexpected Family
AdventureBillie Eilish doesn't do kids. She doesn't like them, doesn't understand them, and definitely never wanted any of her own. But when her management team sets up a temporary foster care publicity stunt two toddlers, a camera crew, and a whole lot of c...
