"I am not ready to raise a kid."
"No one's signing you up for a Father of the Year award."
The universe is made of stories. And Maeve Fluer-Reyes had her own.
With pictured misfits in her life, the twelve-year-old was up for anything as long as she...
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SEBASTIAN REYES
It's funny—how people are never just tied to one person.
You think they are. You think you can draw clear lines between connections, keep things separate, keep them clean. But it doesn't work like that. People bleed into each other's lives, even when you don't want them to. Even when you try to pretend, they don't.
Althea was like that.
She wasn't someone I'd call family, not in the way most people mean it. She didn't offer warm hugs or gentle words, and she sure as hell wasn't mother material. But she was there. A woman on the couch, always part-occupied with something else, yet still always listening.
When I was younger, I would drop by their house, and she'd be there with a cigarette in one hand, flipping through magazines with the other, barely looking up as I asked whether fitted jeans were still considered cool or if chocolates made a shitty first-date gift.
I wouldn't call us close. She never let anyone get close. Not even her children. But she had her moments. Moments where she made you feel like she saw more than what you wanted her to see. And maybe that's what made this harder.
Because she wasn't just Althea. She was Sierra's mother. She was Kaiden's mother.
Kaiden? He was—hell, Kaiden was my best friend before I even knew what loyalty meant.
We did everything together.
We cut class together. Got into fights together. Got our first tattoos together in a dingy basement shop that probably broke a dozen health codes. And then later, when things started shifting—when people started treating me like someone to fear instead of someone to mock—Kaiden didn't flinch. Not once.
Not even when I started dating his sister.
Sierra was everything Kaiden wasn't. Reckless where he was steady. Dramatic where he was calm. And I fell for her in the kind of way that feels permanent until it isn't.
It didn't last. It couldn't. Not when she wanted things I couldn't give. Not when I wanted things she couldn't be.
But the breakup? That wasn't just messy. It was nuclear.
Kaiden took her side. And then I never found out about the baby, our baby, after the fact. After she was already gone. After I was already shut out, left to piece together fragments of a life I'd never be part of.
I don't even remember who stopped talking to who first. Maybe it didn't matter. Maybe we were both too angry to pick up the phone.
But that was the end.
Of Kaiden. Of Althea.
It should've been simple to leave it that way. It should've been easy to let them stay buried with the rest of their mistakes.
