A Forever Kind of Family Read Online Free PDF

parents again turned to their best friends, asking them to be godparents and co-guardians of their baby. They’d both agreed, neither of them willing to let a little bit of personal history get in the way of their friends’ wishes. Of course, neither of them had anticipated that the guardianship would ever mean anything more than their names on a piece of paper.
    Now, only a few months later, they had to figure out a way to work together for the sake of the little boy. Because the reality was that there wasn’t anyone else who could take care of Oliver.
    She was certain of that because she’d spent a fair amount of time over the past few weeks trying to figure out if there were any other options—and desperately hoping, for Oliver’s sake, that there were.
    Celeste Trivitt, his maternal grandmother, lived in France with her investment banker husband. She’d been devastated to hear of the accident that took her daughter’s life and immediately flew in for the funeral. Although she was happy to fuss over her grandson for a few days, she’d made it clear that her life was in Europe now. Oliver was lucky, she’d said to them more than once. He might have lost both of his parents, but he had Harper and Ryan to take care of him.
    Quentin Trivitt, Oliver’s maternal grandfather and Celeste’s ex-husband, also came for the funeral—with his thirty-four-year-old wife, who was seven months pregnant with their first child. They’d said all the right things, expressing empathy for the “poor little boy” and his situation but at the same time making it clear that their focus was on their own yet-to-be-born child. They had no interest in raising a grandson, too.
    On the other side, Oliver’s paternal grandparents were both living in an assisted-care facility in Greensboro. One of the attendants from the home had brought them to Charisma for the funeral and taken them right back again. Darren also had a sister, but neither Ryan nor Harper had ever met her and no one had known how to reach her to tell her about the passing of her brother and sister-in-law. Harper remembered Melissa telling her that Darren’s sister had been estranged from her family for a long time.
    Harper pushed away from the table and carried her plate, with half of her meal still on it, to the counter. “Do you ever wonder...?”
    Ryan began clearing the rest of the dishes. “What?”
    She hesitated to say the words out loud, as if doing so might be disloyal to her friend, but she finally said, “If maybe Melissa and Darren should have chosen someone else to take care of Oliver?”
    “Every day,” he told her.
    “Really?”
    He nodded. “But I figure they must have had their reasons for choosing us.”
    “Maybe,” she allowed. “I’m just not sure I’m the right person to do this.”
    “I have more than a few doubts about my suitability, too,” he said, surprising her with the acknowledgment. “But I’m not going to walk away without giving it my best shot.”
    She squirted dish soap in the sink and turned on the faucet. “You think I want to walk away?”
    “I don’t know—do you?”
    She considered the question as she watched the sudsy water rise in the bowl. “Yes,” she finally admitted. “There is part of me that wants to do exactly that.”
    “And another part?” he prompted.
    Harper plunged her hands into the water and began to wash the pots. “We had a long talk when Melissa asked if I would be the baby’s guardian,” she said, not directly answering his question. “While she was pregnant, when he was still ‘the baby’ and not yet Oliver. I thought it was strange that she would be thinking about such things before her child was even born, but Melissa always did like to be prepared, to run her life according to a specific plan.”
    “It’s a good thing she did,” Ryan said. “Because Darren wouldn’t know a plan if it bit him in the butt.”
    She smiled at that. “True. Anyway, I asked her—why me? Aside