Kiss and Make Up (gxg)

Chapter 36

4th of July Weekend

Other than the house, the boat was probably the best thing we'd bought. We didn't wait till the summer to buy it but got it in mid-March instead because it turned out we could use it a lot more even without the nice weather. When Shiloh did her fishing research, she'd found out that there was year round fishing for some fish like cod and haddock, and even some of the more expensive things in restaurants like striped bass and bluefish started being more common in the waters in May, so we wanted to be used to the boat by then. Yes, we got cold on some days, but it was worth it!

No, we weren't expert fishermen, but when we got the boat, a gorgeous Intrepid 345 Valor that fit our needs perfectly, we also got a fish finding sonar that made it a lot easier to find schools of fish. Was that cheating? Maybe, but nobody snitched to the fish! We also invested in half a dozen saltwater fishing rigs, because we knew that we'd have a lot of visitors, and they might want to try fishing too.

As expected, we had a full house over the 4th of July week, which we thankfully anticipated and made sure we had enough sleeping spots. The family room got a futon, and the office up in the media room got a Murphy bed, so now we could easily sleep 12 with a few people on the couches. We'd probably need air mattresses once we started having kids of our own, but for now we were okay.

Currently we had all our friends and family with Harper's entire clan, Kate and Gloria from California, and Shiloh's mom, Carla, and her new girlfriend named Jamie. Carla hadn't waited long to ask Jamie out once Shiloh had moved in with me, and they were wonderful to see together. I'd invited Ruby too, who had become a fun friend too, but she had plans with a girl she had started dating. We'd also invited Nina, but she was ready to pop with Blake's baby, so she couldn't travel. We planned to go be there for her after the weekend and help her out for a week after the birth so she could ease into motherhood. She was in good spirits, and while I hadn't met her in person yet, we had made a few video calls with Shiloh introducing us when Blake finally got sentenced.

Ahh yes, my dear ex-husband is in jail. As his previous lawyer, Grant, stated to Shiloh and Harper before, he couldn't represent him in this case since he was a witness to the assaults. When he tried to hire other lawyers, with next to no money because he'd been spending all of his in anticipation of getting both companies and now had nothing, he couldn't find any that would take the case with everything on video and with him not having money for them to try some sort of expensive temporary insanity defenses.

Of course, that was when he tried to make plea deals with the district attorney. He was hoping to get the charges down to a misdemeanor, but when Harper accidentally reminded the DA that one of the victims was pregnant, they wouldn't do that. Even worse, he started ranting at the sentencing hearing about how he shouldn't be stuck with his lawyer, but it was because of the civil case results making him lose everything. When the judge in the criminal case talked to the judge from the civil case about what he'd try to do, then it was over. He had already pled guilty to the two assault charges, and had hoped to get five years, but the judge gave him fifteen and warned him if he appealed that, that any jury hearing about him assaulting a pregnant woman would probably keep him in there for longer.

I was happy with that.

Not that we were thinking about Blake over the 4th of July holiday. All our friends had taken the week off, though Reid had to show up two days late because of the amount of catering jobs he had over the holiday weekend, and we were having a blast. We'd gone water skiing on the boat, well Kate did, the rest of us just fell a lot, but we still had a great time. The fishing was fun, and we had bunches of cod, striped bass, and haddock to cook. Little Eden even caught a flounder right off the dock where the boat was moored and couldn't stop talking about it. She'd held it up proudly as Harper took some pictures, and we made sure to praise her when we cooked it that night. When Trey caught a fish later in the week, this time a cod from the boat, we were just as enthusiastic, and hopefully they would both remember those moments for a long time.