Chapter 4

* * *

ERIS

Wednesday

Eris was just as cursed as her name.

Her name meant strife, discord, trouble, a mountain of bad decisions… and all of it followed her like her own pack of invisible demons nipping at her heels. Heels that were currently in socks, because her roommate had stolen her freakin' shoes before leaving her with the bills.

Bills she was already past due on, but she had to work. There was no choice, and she'd made her way painfully along. Except things were getting harder, her pool of people to draw from for help was dwindling much too quickly. In fact, she was lying there on a mattress on the floor of her apartment with Zane beside her.

Her son was sleeping soundly, and all he knew was that Mama would keep him safe and fed – and that was how it should be, she thought, smiling as she touched his cheek. He was three, the apple of her eye, and her entire world, since it had collapsed.

That single thought was interrupted by a piercing shriek above her head and a flashing light in the distance. Zane made a noise and sat up as Eris got up from the mattress and paused.

Smoke.

"Oh my word…" she whispered, horrified, and literally grabbed Zane, the blanket that he'd been sleeping on, and put the exhausted toddler on her shoulder. Grabbing her purse and keys, she left the apartment and saw others spilling into the breezeway of the building.

"Do you think this is a mistake?" her neighbor across the hall asked, pulling her robe tightly around her, and she saw several others asking the same questions, but before she could say anything. A woman appeared, crying, with a cell phone in her hand.

"Yes… it's on fire. Building six."

Eris's mouth dropped open in shock as she realized it was the neighbor upstairs, farthest from her – and looked around.

"Where's Sorcha?"

"I knocked on her door, but she didn't answer."

"Isn't she dating some young man?"

"Maybe she's not home?"

"Can you knock on it again?" Eris asked bluntly, only to see the people look at each other warily. She was halfway up the stairs with Zane to go knock on the woman's door when a fire truck pulled up. Continuing her trek, she banged several times on it and could see smoke from the other apartment, billowing in their direction.

Zane.

She had to get him away from the toxic smoke and prayed wholeheartedly that Sorcha had indeed spent the night at a friend's house or was still out on a date. They were both coughing as she descended the stairs again with Zane in her arms. One of the firefighters grabbed her by the arm, pulling her away from the building haphazardly as he was speaking to the others.

"All right, listen up, fellas!" the man began. "Listen up – time is of the essence. We hit it and hit it hard. My ‘walk' is gonna be a ‘run' – and I want water up on the southeast unit immediately to buy us some time. We've got a friend in there and…"

"What?"

"We do?"

"Who's up there?"

There was such chaos, and she felt like she was in the way, taking her purse she'd dropped into the grass and moved to go get into her vehicle. With the amount of smoke, lights, and flames going through the roof, she knew it was not going to be cleared up anytime soon.

No, she was going to be really lucky if she had a home in the morning.

Trying not to panic, she leaned her car seat back all the way and carefully held Zane against her. The blanket was laying over the two of them, and she cracked the window slightly, locked the doors, and held her son. He was everything… in more ways than one now.

* * *

As the sun rose,Eris stared at the hollowed-out frame of a building that eerily ended with stairs going upward into nothingness. The people on the other side of the building were having to move into other apartments due to water intrusion and smoke. However, that was not going to be the case for her.

She couldn't prove she had renter's insurance. The building was covered, but her meager number of things would not be replaced, nor would they rent her another apartment without it or a fresh lease with a deposit. She had a hundred bucks until payday and needed to get diapers, food, and clothing for Zane.

… And fuel apparently.

Her car decided to announce as the fuel light illuminated with a tell-tale chime when she started her car to look for a place to stay. Her neighbors said no for a variety of different reasons – most of which was that they were having their whole life turned upside down, too.

"Okay, breathe," she thought, turning off the car once more. "Think, think, think," she muttered aloud and heard Zane's laugh beside her from the passenger seat.

"Tink, tink, tink," he beamed, tapping on his head and scrunching up his brow like Winnie the Pooh did on one of the VHS tapes she had for him to watch. Ruffling his hair, he laughed, and she smiled sadly.

"That's right, little pooh bear. Mama needs to think for a minute, okay?" she explained and moved back into her ‘I'm not having a breakdown yet' form, clutching the steering wheel, taking several deep breaths, while trying not to cry.

Priorities first, she thought bluntly. A hotel was too expensive, and her credit card was maxed, but she really did not want to drive into Tyler to look for a women's shelter. No, the less she drove, the better. She could put two gallons of gas in her car, get a pack of diapers, a few small items to snack on that were cheap and paused.

How am I getting to work?

That bubble of panic started again as she started sucking in air, trying not to burst out crying, but that little voice inside of her was screaming awfully loudly.

Commencing nervous breakdown in three… two… one…

"Okay, Zane, Mommy needs to get some gas for the car and a pack of diapers first thing, then she's going to probably go fold over like a deck of cards, press her face into the passenger seat bottom and scream bloody freakin' murder so she doesn't need a looney bin. Okie dokie?" – and the only reason she was saying that was because her son wouldn't understand, and it felt good to at least get it off her chest.

"Tink, tink, tink, Mama?" he questioned happily, smiling up at her.

"Yup, sweetie. Think, think, think…" Eris whispered tearfully and sighed heavily. Getting out of the car, she buckled him into his car seat to start figuring out what to do next and where to go.

Thirty minutes later, she had the smallest pack of diapers possible for her son and wished with all her heart that he was potty trained already, but it was hard to teach him when you were working all the time and picking up extra shifts to pay the bills.

Putting ten dollars of fuel in her car gave her a little over three gallons and she would need to be very careful until Friday. She had to buy a bra at Target because people were looking at her funny and a pair of jeans on clearance. Yeah, strutting your stuff through the local Target in pajama pants and a Transformers T-shirt got you looked at – not to mention watched. She was pretty certain the ‘mall cop' at Target was watching her to make sure she didn't shoplift anything… not like she had a place to hide it. Yeah, she could get by wearing her clothing a few times before it became a real issue.

Looking up, she happened to look around, and she did a double-take. There, at the next pump on the opposite side of the gas station island, just out of clear view, was a license plate she knew like the back of her hand. The memories washed over her, and she remembered laughing so hard at him because his vanity plate on his jalopy of a pickup truck said, ‘PRTYGRL'

Colton.

She had teased him so much about that. To her, she read it as ‘Party Girl,' and he thought he was soooo clever putting ‘Pretty Girl' on the back of his truck that he'd dubbed ‘Ariel'. He named the truck after The Little Mermaid because she was sea green with green tweed upholstery on the bench seat. Oh, they had laughed and laughed together, had such fun being around each other, before it all fell apart.

Putting on the gas cap, she watched that truck like a hawk, her mind working overtime. She couldn't ask him for help, because she never told him about Zane. That was the fight that had started it all – and ended it.

One mistake had created life.

When Colton had flipped out about the broken condom and said things that couldn't be unsaid, she'd grabbed her purse and left. Ignoring phone calls, ignoring text messages, she'd even quit her job when he showed up at her work demanding to talk to her. No, if he wasn't ready for a commitment, then he wouldn't be a part of the biggest one a woman could make, one that would change her whole world.

"Mama? Oooh Mama?" Zane whimpered, shoving his thumb in his mouth. "'Nana?"

"Mommy doesn't have a banana right now," she whispered, horrified at the thoughts rolling through her mind. Could she talk to Colton? Could she turn to him for help – at least for a day or two? And then she heard the loud exhaust on his truck start up as it began to roll forward.

"Yikes!" she hissed and ran to jump into her driver's seat, quickly following the truck. "Oh, please still be you driving that piece of rusted hunk of metal…" she whispered openly, praying with everything in her.

The back glass of his sea green old pickup truck still had that American flag across the back and there was a Maltese cross sticker there, too, now. Surely, if he'd sold the truck, the new owner would have pulled that off unless he was a firefighter, too.

The truck turned down a residential road not far from the fire station in Ember Creek, and she hesitated to see one brake light illuminate – and fought back a nervous smile. That was so strangely ordinary in what felt like a nightmare to her right now. As he pulled up to an old house, she held her breath, waiting, and not a moment later, the door opened.

Colton.

Oh gosh, he hadn't changed much at all. Same faded blue jeans and same worn-out old cowboy boots, but he was sporting a black T-shirt that said something boldly across the chest that she couldn't read from here. She watched his arms flex as he pulled out a bag of things from the back of the truck and walked up to the front door. She hesitated as a horrifying thought hit her hard.

Was he married?

It had been almost four years, and he now lived in a home instead of an apartment. She'd moved into a bigger one-bedroom apartment because she knew the baby would be coming eventually and couldn't afford a two-bedroom… but obviously, he'd moved too.

"Mamaaaaaa, I hungry… ‘nana? Hmm? ‘Nana, pweeese?"

Tearfully, she stared at the house and felt despair choke her. If the shoe was on the other foot and she was married to Colton – things would go badly if some woman came up to the front door with a child that looked just like her husband. That did not sit well. She couldn't be the person to destroy his marriage, if he was married.

"Let's go get you a banana and Mama needs her head examined," she whispered, putting the car in reverse and glancing back at the cross streets, tucking that nugget away in her mind. Right now, she needed to feed Zane and figure out if she was actually going to bravely knock on his front door. Could she risking upsetting his world… or maybe something else would fall into her lap, solving all her problems.

She didn't know what to do anymore.

* * *

Hours later,her phone was dead because her charging cords had been in her apartment, and she didn't have one in her car. She also couldn't call into work; she would need to drive there and that required gas. Her next shift was Friday, so she would talk to them then, but there wasn't much more that could go wrong in her life – until now.

Drip.

"What the…"

Drip, drip, drip.

"Are you kidding me?"

"You tiddding me, wady?"

"Zane, don't say that," she chided – only to have three more drops fall directly on her forehead from her sunroof and one on her knee. "My sunroof is leaking now, and it's raining? Seriously?"

"You tiddding me, wady!" Zane grumbled, saying exactly what she had always hollered in the car when she was driving. Yep, chip off the old block, except this blockhead was getting wet. It was water torture to try and fall asleep like this.

"Oh noes…" Zane suddenly hollered, causing her to look up as he pointed at the light on the ceiling of her Jetta, which was currently dripping, too. There was a steady stream coming out of the visor where it screwed into the headliner, dripping from the map light and dropping on her head. "I wet, mama."

Yeah, this wasn't going to work, she thought as a massive crack of lightning hit a light pole nearby, causing her to shriek as Zane flung himself at her across the center console, crying.

"Okay, Big Guy, I get it. Figure my stuff out, right?" she wept pitifully and had no idea where to go, what to do, except to ask Colton for help. "Get in your booster seat, Zane… okay?"

She started the car, put it in reverse, and started toward the street where he lived, praying the truck was still in the driveway, so she picked the right house. As she pulled onto the street, one wiper quit working on her windshield and she finally snapped.

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" she wailed – and let out a manic laugh as Zane mimicked her immediately.

"You tiddding me, wady!"

She had found her breaking point.

Parked in front of Colton's house, she was about to do something she had never imagined would ever happen in a million years. With nowhere to go, no money and no family, she was officially stuck and dangling at the end of a very flimsy rope. The drop from ‘okay' to ‘on the streets' was pathetically short. She had no clue exactly how small that drop was until yesterday. Her last vestibule of security had burned to the ground.

"Come here, Zane," she whispered, trying to ignore the trembling in her voice and clung to her son, hoping she didn't drop him or trip. If it was nice out, she'd let him walk beside her – but with the storm getting worse and her nerves only lasting so long— urgency was key.

Get to the door, cough up an excuse, ask if he's married, and then throw yourself at his feet, prostrating yourself for help, twenty bucks, whatever, she thought wretchedly, sobbing. How low can you limbo, bimbo? She practically sang in her head, because she was about to sink lower than the lowest low – a negative limbo-esque event.

She was going to beg.

Beg.

Racing up to the doorway, with the blanket covering Zane to keep him from getting soaked or chilled, Eris knocked and waited. It was a few moments later that she shushed Zane softly, knocked again… and saw a light turn on in the distance.

"Oh gosh…" she whimpered, drawing in a deep panicked breath as she heard the deadbolt unlock, a chain dragged against the wooden door, and the hinges creaked slightly.

Colton's shocked face stared at hers.

"Eris?" … and his eyes slid to Zane less than a second later. "Are you kidding me?"

Her son, not to be outdone by Fischer-a-la-Prime, sat up from her shoulder where he'd been leaning, covered with the blanket, and he yanked it off proudly, grinning and exposing his little teeth as he wrinkled his nose.

Hazel eyes stared into hazel eyes. Like looked upon like… and her son exclaimed happily in the silence echoing between them.

"You tiddding me, wady?"

"I couldn't have said it better," Colton said hoarsely – and laid a hand on the door to steady himself. "Eris, what's going on?"

"Can we talk?" she said shakily, trying not to cry if he said ‘no.' "Are you married? Am I disturbing you? Colton, can we really talk – I have no one else to turn to and…"

"If he's who I think he is, then yeah… we really do need to talk," he said simply and held open the door for her.