Free Sweet Solace (The Seattle Sound Series Book 1) by Alexa Padgett

then the image I’d buried deep bubbled up: Doug looking down at baby Abbi, his smile so proud on his young face. “I’m going to love her better than any other man ever could, so she’ll keep feeling it even after I’m gone. Like I love you.”
    I missed what we’d had then, during the good years before unwarranted jealousy and sickness broke us. I missed feeling wanted.
    Hands pressed to my mouth, I tried to breathe myself back to safety. I wasn’t doing this.
    The Doug who’d killed himself hadn’t been the Doug who’d loved Abbi and me.
    “What is it?” Ella asked, gripping my hand.
    I shook her off. “Just tired.”
    I turned on my heel and walked quickly to the bedroom. I fell onto the bed and struggled to contain my breathing. Bad idea. I needed to get up and keep going or let the anger pull me all the way under.
    No way was I giving Doug the satisfaction of knowing I was still broken. Even if he was dead . . . No, he hadn’t broken me. Not completely.
    So I got up. Cooked dinner. Drank too much wine.
    Later, I struggled to stop the few silent tears that slid past my tightly shut eyes when I finally went to bed. And I hated my weakness nearly as much as I hated what Doug had turned me into.

8
    Asher
    “ L ift your back elbow more ,” I said. I lobbed another baseball toward Mason. His swing was jerky, but the crack of the ball hitting the wooden bat told me he’d finally gotten what I’d been trying to explain about using the middle lane.
    Mason whooped , jumping up and down as he watched the ball arc over the apple trees toward the house.
    “Home run!” he shouted, running in a circle like a flustered chicken.
    I chuckled at his enthusiasm. He didn’t know he was about to be in the middle of the next battleground between Jessica and me, the only fight I really cared about.
    I took off my ball cap and slapped it against my leg while I waited for Mason to quit celebrating. I resisted the urge to check my phone again to see if my lawyers had reached a settlement with Jessica about the house, our joint retirement accounts, all those messy details detangling lives that no longer meshed.
    I didn’t care about the money or the house. I never had, not like Jessica did. I wanted to make music and I wanted my son. No way Jessica was letting some asshole in pleated pants gain custody. When I’d made the mistake of telling her that, she set off higher than a firework on Fourth of July.
    I was still pissed she expected a percentage of future record sales. She was leaving me now, so I figured any judge had to consider what a well-regarded musician had to offer. I was more than happy to give her the paid-off house, a new car, and split time with the child we’d had the good sense to create. But Mason was my son, and he’d know I loved him.
    Even if she stopped the custody nonsense, I didn’t want to give Jessica sole custody of Mason because she would always have an excuse to keep me from my son. Especially if she found out I wanted to see Dahlia again. Jessica would assume I’d been having an affair, which would make these painful proceedings downright nasty.
    Didn’t matter that I’d worked hard not to look at other women for years because I’d determined at the age of eleven that I wasn’t going to be a cheating asshole like my dad.
    I’d read enough websites to realize judges liked continuity, and Jessica had been Mason’s main guardian for years. I wondered, not for the first time, if she’d pushed me to go back to recording and touring for this eventuality.
    I hoped like hell I was wrong because that made her even more calculating than I’d thought. And I knew she’d fucked around with the band, trying to break us apart or no longer trust each other. The guys and I, we’d worked through those issues years ago. We were in a good place now. I wanted it to stay that way.
    But if the media dug into Olivia’s death again . . . I couldn’t imagine what that story would do to my son. He