Free Forever With You (Bayou Dreams Book 5) by Farrah Rochon Page A

bottlenecking in her throat and blew out a deep breath.
    She needed to meet with Stew. It was time she broached the subject of transferring to the office in The Woodlands, a suburb due north of Houston. She’d debated it back and forth for months, weighed the pros and cons.
    The cons were winning by a landslide.
    Aside from the upheaval that came with any major move, Leslie also knew that uprooting the girls right now would be hard on them emotionally. They were both enjoying school and their friends. Cass loved being one of the best players on her softball team, and Kristi had joined the Diamond Dolls, the adorable cheerleading squad at GEMS.
    But Leslie knew the hardest thing for the girls to endure would be leaving their aunt Shayla.
    Shayla had lived on the West Coast for two decades, seeing the girls only a couple of times before moving back to Gauthier after Braylon’s death. Since her return she had become an integral part of their family. It wasn’t just Shayla; Xavier had slipped so effortlessly into the role of being the male figure in the girls’ lives. The thought of taking Kristi and Cass away from two people who had come to mean so much to them made Leslie’s stomach hurt.
    But it was more than just her girls’ love for their aunt and uncle tying her to Gauthier. She couldn’t just pack up and leave during her term as president of the PTO, could she? And what about church? She’d been a member of the choir for eight years and had served on the finance board for three.
    Even Buster had climbed onto the list of cons. The puppy was just starting to acclimate herself. Who knew what moving to a new house would do to her.
    Yet, despite the horde of items crowding the con side of the list, there was one thing on the pro side that outweighed everything else. If she left Gauthier, then maybe she could finally,
finally
put these memories of Braylon behind her and move on with her life.
    Leslie knew she could not continue living this way. The memories were like quicksand, slowly pulling her down, keeping her in this mental space she no longer wanted to occupy.
    “Which is why you have to leave.”
    She turned up the volume on the radio and sang along to the gospel CD she kept in case of emotional emergencies.
    When she finally arrived at the office, she felt marginally in control of her emotions. She got out of the car and headed straight for Stewart Campbell’s office, the determination to finally make this move pushing her feet forward.
    “Where’s Stew?” Leslie asked when she walked into the darkened office.
    “He had to fly to New York this morning for an emergency meeting at headquarters,” Kianna Sims, her boss’s executive assistant, said as she breezed into the office and set a collection of files on it.
    Leslie couldn’t deny the relief that washed over her at the reprieve from asking for the transfer. She was
such
a coward.
    “Why the urgency?” she asked Kianna.
    The executive assistant shrugged. “Don’t know, but the quarterly report is due to be released next week.”
    Leslie grimaced. They all knew that an emergency trip to headquarters so close to a report release didn’t spell good news.
    With Stewart gone, Leslie was the most senior employee in the office and technically in charge, but in this office, which ran like a well-oiled machine, it didn’t really matter.
    She’d joined the financial capitalist firm as an analyst shortly after she and Braylon were married, and in that time she and her coworkers had become a family.
    The office was located in Slidell, but most of their clients were based in downtown New Orleans, requiring multiple analysts to make the hour-long drive several times a week. Everyone in the office had agreed that, as the only single mother in the group, Leslie should be exempt from making the trek into the city just in case her girls had an emergency at school that required her to return quickly to Gauthier.
    She loved these people. They had seen her through