Read Online Never to Keep (Accepting Fate #1) by Aimie Grey - Free Book Online

stairs for the third time. I knew she didn’t want to go. Watching the other kids with their moms and dads would be torture. Olivia had been gone for over two months, and time didn’t make it any easier on Peyton. Starting a new school only added to her anxiety. I hated that I couldn’t afford to continue to send her to private school in the city.
    I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the house Peyton used to share with her parents. It was the same house I used to share with mine. Memories danced through my mind as I ran my palm up the banister that Ryan and I used to slide down two decades ago. The old plaster walls reverberated with the joy and laughter of years gone by, which was equally comforting and painful.
    I found Peyton perched on the end of her twin-sized bed desperately clutching the teddy Ryan gave her a few days before he died. Kneeling on the shaggy rug next to the bed to get to eye level, I took her small hand in mine. “Sweetie, I know this is going to be really hard, but I promise we’ll get through it.”
    With a sniff and a brisk nod, she squeezed my hand and got to her feet. “Let’s get this over with,” she said. She had always been so grown up for her age.
    *
    Peyton sat on my lap during the welcome assembly at her new school. After the hour-long presentation, we filed out of the gym and headed toward her classroom to meet her teacher.
    We each carried a plastic grocery bag full of school supplies in one hand and held on to each other tightly with the other. “I’m so proud of you.” I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze as she looked longingly at a little girl down the hall walking between both of her parents. I leaned down to whisper in her ear, “You know that I love you ten times more than most parents love their kids.” She looked up at me with a toothless grin that melted my heart. “Mommy, Uncle Ethan, Nana, and Abuela love you, too.”
    The second-grade classroom was the last room at the end of the west hallway. Peyton froze when we crossed the threshold; the room was flooded with a sea of kids and their doting parents. I gave her hand another squeeze to get her attention and mouthed the word ‘ten’, so she would remember our conversation in the hall. She relaxed enough to let me lead her further into the brightly decorated room.
    We surveyed the desks until we saw her name printed neatly in black marker across a laminated rainbow. She took the pencil box from her bag and placed it inside the tiny desk. After she unpacked the rest of her supplies, she picked up the science book that sat on top of the pile of texts on her chair. She flipped through its pages until she landed on pictures of outer space. I used her distraction to go across the room to put the tissues and hand sanitizer from my bag in the appropriate piles on a table in front of the windows.
    I immediately recognized the dad in front of me in the line to turn in the community supplies. “Hey, Charlie,” I said to one of Ryan and Ethan’s best friends from high school.
    “Hi, Maddie, what are you doing here? I thought you’d still be away at school,” he replied with a panty-dropping grin. I made a mental note of his bare ring finger.
    “I go by Madison now. I’m here with Peyton.” My smile fell. “You’ve probably heard about what happened with Olivia after Ryan passed.”
    “Yeah, Ethan told me. How is she doing?”
    “She should be able to come home next month. Peyton has adjusted well to our situation, but she needs her mother.”
    Charlie broke the tension with a joke about the volume of hand sanitizer needed for twenty kids as I placed my bottle on the table.
    “What’s going on with you?” I asked.
    “My wife passed away a few years ago, so I’ve been raising our daughter, Brianna, on my own since then.” He nodded toward a petite girl standing at a group of desks near Peyton’s.
    “She’s beautiful. She must look like her mother,” I joked. The laughter died in my throat when I