Free Breaking Hearts by Melissa Shirley

smiled. “Two hundred and forty minutes.”
    “How long is a minute?”
    This line of questioning I could roll with. “Sixty seconds.”
    “How long is a second?”
    “Faster than you can say ‘I have the best mommy in the whole entire wide world.’”
    He giggled as I reached down to tickle his ribs. He looked up at me with the sunset reflected in his light brown eyes. “Do they have a Quetzalcoatlus?”
    I tilted my head trying to picture which of the dinosaurs I should be imagining. Wings? No Wings? It didn’t matter if I knew. He only cared if the museum had one. “Probably.” I gave his hand a little squeeze. “But let’s enjoy this while we’re here. Look how big that hole in the Earth is.”
    “Do they have a T-Rex?”
    His lack of attention to the natural wonder before us was my own fault. I’d mentioned the D word and he grabbed on with both mental fists and wouldn’t let go. I sighed. “Maybe.”
    “And a Stygimoloch?” Thankfully, the books we had bought had been written with phonetic pronunciations and as I read them to him, we both learned to pronounce the names. His first word had been “dino.”
    I nodded and he smiled.
    “I love fossils.” And when he got stuck on an idea, nothing I did would shake him back to where I wanted or needed him to be.
    As far as I knew, he’d never seen one, but his enthusiasm brought a smile to my lips.
    “Did I hear someone say Stygimoloch?” A deep male voice, from off to our left had me gathering Kieran close to me. The words stranger danger flashed through my mind in bright red neon. Kieran looked up at me, and I turned to the owner of said voice.
    Ignoring the don’t-talk-to-strangers rule (probably because a dinosaur hadn’t said it), he wiggled free from my grasp and stepped forward. “Me, Kieran.”
    A very tall man stepped closer from out of the sun’s blinding glare. I blinked twice. No. No way. My skin grew warm. Of all the people in the world to be here, why him? Why now?
    I said, “Sean?” at the same time he said, “Danielle?”
    “How have you been?” He pulled me in for a hug. My arms stayed at my sides.
    Kieran stepped between us, and I stumbled out of the embrace. “That’s my mommy.” He folded his arms over his chest. “You’re a stranger. Don’t touch her.”
    “Your mommy?” Immediately, Sean’s face darkened. “And how old would you be?”
    “Three.” Sean held up his hand, counted on his fingers mumbling random words. “Arizona,” then “limousine” then “shit.”
    Kieran looked up at me with all the confusion a kid his age could possibly display--wide eyes, open mouth, crinkled forehead. “What’s he doing, Mommy?”
    “Math.”
    A range of emotions danced across Sean’s face before the equation morphed into an answer and his eyes popped wide open. He glared at the ground for the longest part of a minute, then turned his gaze back to my face and grabbed my arm. Before I could dig in my heels, he pulled me ten steps out of Kieran’s earshot.
    “Mommy!” He screamed a monster-under-the-bed kind of wail. He might have sounded all grown up, but seeing his mother manhandled brought out the baby in him. I shook free from Sean’s grasp, rushed back, and knelt in front of my son.
    “It’s okay, buddy. He’s just an old friend of Mommy’s, and he wanted to talk to me for a second.” I hugged him close.
    He swiped the back of his arm across his face, pushed me away, and walked over to stand in front of Sean, hands on his hips waiting for an explanation.
    Sean cocked an eyebrow at me.
    “Mommy says it isn’t nice to grab people.”
    Sean’s incredible height made Kieran seem even smaller. “Your mommy kept a secret from me. Does that make it okay?”
    “No.”
    “Should I say I’m sorry, then?”
    Kieran nodded.
    Sean grinned the most handsome grin I’d had aimed at me in a long while. “I’m very sorry.”
    Kieran hugged my leg.
    Sean glared and lowered his voice to an almost whisper. “We