“I don’t want to see you!” Josh shouted again, suddenly turning around and moving aside so he could look at the woman who had given birth to him. “I never want to see you again! You’re not my mom today. You’re not my mom tomorrow. You’re never going to be my mom!”

“Josh—”

“No! You didn’t want me! You can’t change your mind!” he yelled at her, his chest puffing.

Fucking shit. I placed my hand on Josh’s shoulder and turned him around, quickly leading him up the pathway to our house just as Dallas came storming out of the front door, his eyes going from Josh, to me, and finally to Anita. It seemed to click. He remembered her. “Take him inside. I’ll deal with this,” he told me firmly as he walked by us.

The last thing I heard as the door closed behind us was his low voice spitting, “Do I need to—”

Josh shrugged my arm off almost instantly, and before I could stop him, he took off running toward his room. The door slammed to a close, and all I could do was stand there, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Jesus Christ.

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I let out a breath for a minute, kicked off my heels, and went straight for Josh’s room. Partially expecting the door to be locked, I was surprised when the knob turned. I didn’t ask if I could come in. I was going to whether he wanted me to or not. I found Mac on the floor by the bed, his ears pinned back and his expression anxious and focused on Josh, who didn’t even glance in my direction as he plopped down on the carpet and reached for the controller to his game console. His fingers pressed hard into the buttons.

I swallowed. “J, do you want to talk about it?”

He was staring at the television screen, sure, and his fingers were moving across the controller of his game, but I could tell he wasn’t paying attention. I knew him too well to be able to ignore the anger and the hurt radiating off him. This kid was never the crying kind; he usually went straight into getting angry, and that was exactly what he was doing right then.

With that in mind, I wasn’t surprised when he snapped out a “No.”

I sighed and walked further into his room, taking a seat on the floor by the television, my dress forcing me to tuck my legs under me. “All right. Let me rephrase that: let’s talk about it.”

He didn’t look at me as he repeated himself. “No.”

“Joshua.” I moved my head to the side to block his view of the screen. I raised my eyebrows. “We’re going to talk about it. Now. Save your game. You’re not even going to play well right now anyway.”

Those little fingers hammered at the keys of his controller a moment before he sent it flying behind his head, the innocent remote hitting the wall before it crashed to the ground. His chest started expanding in and out, and he was breathing hard, his face turning red.

It was times like these I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do with him. What was the right thing to say? How was I supposed to soothe him? I didn’t fool myself into thinking that it wasn’t these moments that would shape how he handled bad things for the rest of his life. I knew it was. I knew that however I taught him to deal with shit would be the route he would most likely take from now on. And throwing shit was not something I wanted him to continue with.

“I get that you’re pissed off, J, and I don’t blame you.” I couldn’t tell him I understood he was hurt; it would immediately put him on edge and defensive. He didn’t get hurt. “But throwing your shit around is not all right. You want to deal with your anger? Do something productive. Scream your anger into a pillow to get it out of your system, but don’t bottle your shit, don’t break things, and don’t take it out on someone else. If your remote is broken, I’m not buying you another one.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy me another one.”

“Cut the attitude, Josh. Now. Talk to me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Too bad,” I told him as I watched him avert his eyes to the wall at his right. Fucking Anita. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to kick her ass, mother of my nephew or not. But I couldn’t and I wouldn’t. I had to be a role model and role models didn’t go around tasering people. “You can tell me anything, you know that.”

He said nothing.

“If you don’t want to talk, then listen. No one is perfect, J. No one. We’ve all made stupid mistakes in our lives, and when you get older, you’re going to make a ton of them yourself, but that’s what I want you to understand—you have to learn from what you do, the good and the bad. I will never forgive Anita for what she did when you were a baby, but I don’t know what it must have been like to be so young and get pregnant either, okay? Neither one of us will ever understand that. And God knows, every time I see her, I want to smack her in the face for getting into so much trouble after you were born, but that’s the thing: I remember your dad telling me she wasn’t close to her parents. She didn’t have anyone to love her the way that Abuelito and Abuelita loved me, much less the way that I love you and Louie. You know I would do anything for you. I’m going to be here for you for the rest of my life, J. You’ll always have options in your life, and I won’t let you fuck up, do you understand me?

“I’ve told you before, you don’t ever have to do anything with her if you don’t want to, but maybe one day you will. I’ve told her before that, if she wants a chance of getting to know you, she’d have to get her life together.”