Real Fake Love (Copper Valley Fireballs #2)(91)

Luca.

My Luca.

Is he alone? Is he afraid the Fireballs will trade him? Is Nonna scouring dating sites for him? Is his mother the type who’ll find his favorite cannoli to console him, or will she even be here with him?

And what if they wouldn’t have lost last night if I’d just said yes and sorted everything else out later, after the season was over, instead of running away like a panicked woman who thought that being left by five fiancés meant she’d also be left by the sixth, when it’s the sixth who’s settled deeper into her heart than she thought a man could ever get?

“Aunt ’Enni, you cwying?” Tatiana asks.

“No,” I sob.

Talia cries harder with me. Titus starts crying. The babies both erupt in baby wails, which are soft and scratchy and so, so perfect, and I’ll never have babies of my own, and then Elsa’s sobbing, which makes Tatiana sob again too.

“That woman was so right.” Elsa flings her phone across the room, where it bounces gracefully off the wall and tumbles to rest against the Boppy on the floor, never in danger of hitting anyone, because despite her marriage crumbling, she is still Elsa. “It’s never right to pretend things are okay when they’re not, and it’s never okay to fill your love well with hobbies and causes that won’t love you back.”

“What woman?” Crap. Dang it. Now I’m going to start hiccupping.

“TikTok Nonna,” Elsa wails.

I freeze.

My eyes go wide, and I choke on a hiccup. “You met TikTok Nonna?”

“I didn’t want to tell you because you hate when I talk about meeting celebrities.”

We’re both bawling, yelling over her children crying, and a nurse pops her head in. “Oh, gosh, we need to take the babies to get their bloodwork. And then we have a special surprise!” She squats down to Titus’s level. “Do you like baseballs?”

Baseballs.

I sob harder.

Not baseballs.

Two more nurses rush in and relieve me of the babies. “We’ll send up someone from the new mom support program,” she whispers. “It’s always nice to talk to someone when all those post-partum hormones hit. Completely normal and natural, sweetie.”

“I didn’t have a baby.”

“I know, honey, but family needs support too.”

We are such a disaster.

“Baw?” Titus asks.

The first nurse beams at him. “Yes, you handsome little devil. We’ll get you a ball. But you all have to put your privates back in your diapers, okay?”

“She means put your penis away, Titus,” Tatiana says through sniffles. “Can I have a ball too?”

“Oh, yes, of course!” The nurse points to Titus’s shirt. “I only asked him first because he’s wearing one.”

The nurses all depart, and we try to pull ourselves together. “You met TikTok Nonna?” I say again to Elsa.

“She was filming outside my mommy-to-be yoga class, and she stopped and looked at me and said, Do what you need to do for your own happiness, not what everyone else is doing for theirs, and it was like, oh my god, I have to leave Roberto.”

Oh my god.

Oh my god, Luca sent his Nonna to ambush my sister. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“Because I meet all the cool people and you just have this virtual life where you don’t do anything, except you seem so happy with it.”

He sent Nonna.

He sent Nonna to make Elsa not write romance novels.

“Oh, god, Henri, don’t do that. Don’t start crying again. I take it back. You have the coolest life ever because you don’t have to fit into anyone’s mold and you’ve been jilted five freaking times and you still have this unstoppable optimism and I kinda hate you for it, but I also want to be you so badly because you don’t apologize for being who you are even when Mom and Dad shit on your dreams—don’t say shit, Tatiana and Thalius and Tittia—and oh, fuck, I can’t even say your names right.”

“Fuck,” Talia yells.

The door opens, and a large man in a baseball uniform with perfect hair and worried green eyes cautiously pokes his head in.

I gasp.

Elsa sits up straighter, then winces and adjusts her donut.

Luca’s gaze connects with mine, and god, do I ever not look like I’m having a breakdown when he’s around?

Check that.

Am I ever not having a breakdown?

“What are you doing here?” I whisper.

He visibly swallows. “Heard there are some future sluggers in here.”

I blink, spot Francisco out in the hallway with Darren too, and I realize this isn’t Luca coming to find me and forgive me and tell me he loves me and can’t live without me.

It’s horrible, terrible, very bad timing for a public relations visit to the hospital by the home team. He pulls out three baseball stress balls adorned with various mascot contenders from a drawstring bag and goes down on a knee entirely too close to me to hold them out to Titus.

How do I always forget how much room this man takes up? And how good he smells? And how fabulous his ass looks in—and out—of his uniform?

And how much I want to touch him and apologize for running out of the biggest celebration of his life, and how sorry I am that I wasn’t there for him in Seattle last night, and how much I cried when they lost, and how hard it was to hold Elsa’s hand through her contractions and pretend I was crying for her pain, and not my own?