Leo and Ivy

Chapter 6 (Ivy): This Is On You

After Leo left the house, suitcases in hand, my sister and I got Samantha and Savannah ready for bed and down for the night.

"Where's Daddy?" Sam asked. Normally, Leo read her a book or two after I did.

"Leo's not here tonight, dolly. Do you want another book? A Princess Puffalumpalimpel one or the one about Addison Star?"

Distraction is the name of the game with a toddler.

"Addison!" she crowed, then settled in beside me again while I started her third and final book for the night. I read to her in a soft voice and she said the last word of every line for me.

Way, way, up in the sky,

Where the twinkling stars glimmer and the shooting stars fly,

Way up where the moon shines from afar,

Lives a small bit of light named Addison Star.

Before I could finish the next sentence, Sammy was out cold.

After tucking her covers snugly around her, Ana and I sat on the couch in the living room, eating pints of Ben & Jerry as I told her what fuckery had been occurring with Leo and his parents.

"So, let me get this straight," she said after I'd finished. "Leo instigated the whole adoption issue with Sam, and then he backed out after his parents talked to him?"

"Yep," I said, grumbling. "Second-class Sam."

"But it sounds like he hadn't decided one way or the other whether to adopt her."

"At first that's what I thought, too. But the more he talked, the more it sounded like he had decided not to. So that pissed me off, that he'd get that far in a decision without talking to me about it. Like, he hadn't even let on at all that he was thinking about it. Last we talked, it was a done deal the minute I married him."

"And his parents interfered?"

"Yep. They got to him and so he was talking about how he'd be upset if he died and I let another man adopt Savannah. So he was concerned he was taking something from Brian and it wasn't fair."

"OK, well, help me understand why you threw him out because that kind of sounds like a legit concern. Why not talk to him, try to work through this with him? Maybe he really was worried about how he'd feel if he kicked it and then you let some rando adopt his daughter."

"It's possible," I said grudgingly. "But he kept saying he hadn't decided for or against it yet, but then the last thing he said was he had decided, and I just lost it and kicked him out."

"You and you temper," Ana said, shaking her head with a smile.

"Well, he hasn't exactly been Mr. Calm himself. But I'll call him now to make you happy."

Taking a deep breath, I called Leo...and was sent to voice mail. That had to be a mistake. So I called him two more times, with the same result each time. Then I sent him a text.

He read it, but he didn't respond.

I didn't hear from him for two days. He was out of touch for two freaking days before he finally called me back.

"Leo, you can't just ignore me like that. What if something had been wrong with Savannah?"

"Did you call to apologize?" he asked. "Or just accuse me of more shit?"

Seriously? I looked at my phone in disbelief.

"I wanted to talk about what happened," I told him. "We went two days without talking, Leo. We've never done that before."