I roll my eyes "you won't ever let me forget that will you" 
She looks to me amused, her eyes lighting up and her cheeks lifting "Jameson you are my heart, you know that don't you... you and your brothers are it for me, anyone else who comes along, they are the icing on the cake... but you guys are the reason I get up in the morning. I will never not put you first. So if it's not okay for me to date yet thats okay my love... just talk to me and let me know how you feel. Say I wanted to date Leah officially... let me know how that makes you feel... it doesn't have to be now but when you are ready to talk about it"
"Mom of course you can date... if you had someone I wouldn't always be so worried about leaving you behind. If anything Leah or whomever she is would be helping me out" she says quite by surprise. 
"Oh... I thought you were hesitant about it. I didn't realise you were ready to throw me at the nearest woman who did a double take at me...for the company"
"Mom go date, be happy, mommy is" she reveals.
I sit back almost immediately, taken back by that revelation. "She is?" I ask. "Dating?" I confirm.
Jamie nods and her dark blue eyes study me "she has this woman she's seeing. I don't think she knows I know but I see her turn up in the evening when we are in bed. The town car drops her in and then picks her up in the morning before she thinks we are awake" 
I don't know how to feel, it's kind of like someone has punched me in the guts, not just because it's my first taste of our child seeing Annie with someone else but also because she has been insistent on me not having anyone around the kids or dating at all. Yet she has a play thing to her house when the kids are home. I was infuriated with her, the double standards. My god Annie...
"What is she like this woman" I ask out of curiosity. 
"That's the thing mom... she looks just like you... well not as pretty as you mom, not at all but she's like you. She wears similar clothes and she has the same hair. When I first saw her in the dark I thought it was you coming and that's why I got out of bed and sneaked out to see. When she walked out of the elevator I realised it wasn't you... and she's young too... like college young mom" 
"God" I whisper shaking my head. How could Annie be so careless that my teen daughter was now telling me the ins and out of her dating life with this mysterious blonde girl, who was clearly a booty call. Annie took some lectures at the college on art and business. I had no doubt she picked her up there, trading me in for a younger model by the sounds of it. Now doubt she was a girl who had fallen under her spell, and was now massaging her ego. I wasn't jealous. I was just processing. I really didn't want her back, mentally, I had come to terms with that, but all the fiddly bits of divorce and separation still linger, the firsts, the letting go, the separating of lives, of friends and family, the bonds that kind of changed and morphed as the months progressed and your heart tried to heal from the trauma of a piece of it ripping away forever. When you add children to divorce and over a decade of marriage, it gets messier. The moat around it, it needs a larger drawbridge to cross on over and it takes years to build it before eventually one day, you place the last slat of wood and it lowers and you take your first steps onto the solid land. Safe and sure footing. The world outside of your little world together, the one you have longed to be apart of, you make it, arriving safely. Your heart is still pumping, life is still worth living whether you've told yourself for a year it's not, the kids are happier and so are you. Yes that's where I wanted to be... and I was so close... so close I could almost touch it. 
I wish when I look back now, that I knew on this day right here, the day Leah was due, the day Annie came to get the kids, I wish I knew she had eyes on me all the time. I wish I knew how this was all about to implode so I could have stopped it in its tracks. I wished I could have saved myself so much pain, pain I didn't know how to work through again. Leah, I should never have got involved with her. The whole thing just ... it was about to be taken by Annie and destroyed, because after all, if she couldn't have me, nobody could.