Beautifully Knight (Jordan Knight Fanfic, Liadan #5)

Barks and Biscuits

-MARIA-

I breathed in deeply through my nose and out through my mouth in an attempt to calm myself and release the tension building in my body.

Once.

Twice.

A third time.

It still didn't work.

My pulse was racing and the walls of my own home felt like they were closing in on me as I knelt down and buried my fingers into Cocoa's curly fur. I was trying my best to get a handle on my emotions and not burst into a fit of angry, frustrated tears, but with every breath I took, that was becoming a harder and harder task.

Tony and I had created a family together. Through ups and downs across many, many years, we'd beat the odds and made a life together. We'd fought and cried and stuck in there through the toughest times as co-captains of the same team and we tried our best to make decisions together, especially when it came to our girls. If we didn't agree on anything else, we always found a way to come to a consensus when it came to them, but now all of a sudden, that idea seemed to have been tossed out of the window. After almost two decades of supporting my husband's decision that he didn't want his father around our daughters, in the span of a day, he'd done a complete 180-degree turn and announced that he was having him over for dinner.

There was already a massive rift between us surrounding the issue of a transplant. Following our discussion, Tony had hardly said another word to me. Instead, after marching into the bathroom, he'd trudged down to his mother's kitchen to get something small to eat and then he'd gone right back to bed to sleep off the remainder of his hangover. It wasn't until that morning right before I'd prepared to leave out to pick up the twins that he'd mentioned that he was having Antonio over for dinner and the look on his face told me it wasn't up for debate.

As if he thought that wasn't clear enough, he'd followed it up with, 'That was my father's only dying request. He wanted to meet the girls. I think we can both do that for him at least.'

I'd had no clue how to respond to that.

I understood that Antonio was dying. I did. And I sympathized. Whether Tony believed I did or not, I did. I just didn't believe that a sudden illness discounted all of the years of pain he'd caused.

I wasn't heartless. When Antonio needed rehab, I'd been more than willing to make all of the calls to get him what he needed at the best place I could find. I'd spent hours talking with my Meme's old social work colleagues until I found the perfect place. Even then Antonio's wife, Mallory, had tried to turn it into a money pit and convince Tony to just hand her over a blank check. I'd never once told Tony not to pay his father's bills, but I had stepped in to protect him and make sure she wasn't taking advantage of him.

Tony wasn't the kind of guy that knew how to push back. Not really. He'd pitch a big raging fit complete with harsh language that felt like a knife to the gut temporarily, but eventually, he always softened. It was that little voice inside his big heart that made him second-guess and try to make amends. He was hard on the outside, but soft on the inside and I knew that. I loved that about him, but it also worried me that it was that part of him that set him up for disappointment after disappointment.

Although he never said it, I knew a piece of Tony was always looking for affirmation from his father. As much as he said he was cutting him off time and again, he never could. He'd hurt him deeply—in ways I'd long come to the conclusion that I would never understand and he would never fully tell me, but he loved him. And I did understand that. I'd always been supportive and hopeful for them to repair their relationship, but I couldn't just flip a switch in my head and pretend like the past twenty years that I'd been around—and sixteen years before me hadn't happened. I couldn't just paste on a happy smile and welcome the man who'd broken my husband so many times into my home with open arms. Even if my husband could. I couldn't.