Page 19 of Single Pucking Orc

“I need a favor.”

“No.”

He blinked. “I haven’t asked yet.”

“You’re holding a baby on my porch at six-fifteen in the morning wearing a practice jacket.” Nora folded her arms. “I did the math while you were walking over.”

“I have practice at seven.”

“Congratulations.”

“Nora.” He hitched the diaper bag back up his arm. “The daycare can’t start before Thursday. The nanny does a background check first. There’s a woman named Deb but there’s a waitlist for Deb, because Deb has a personal brand and she is very in demand. I have to be on the ice in forty-five minutes and I have nobody. Plus you told me last night to keep new things to a minimum and she knows you now.”

Her mouth opened, and then it closed again.

“That’s a very effective argument,” she said. “I resent it.”

“It’s also true.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.” She pushed her glasses further up into her hair, which he had worked out was what she did instead of swearing. “Rognar, I’m going to say no, and I want you to understand why, because it isn’t about her.”

“Okay.”

“If I say yes today, I’ll say yes Thursday.” Her chin came up. “And then it’ll be Tuesdays and Thursdays because those are your practice days, and then it’ll be road games, and in six weeks I’ll be doing your grocery order and nobody will be able to point to the day it happened. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a pattern, and I’ve spent a lot of years learning to see it early.”

“I’m not asking you to raise her. I’m asking for three hours. I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you your rate. I’ll pay you double your rate. What is your rate, actually, do bookkeepers⁠—”

“I don’t have a childcare rate, Rognar, because I am not childcare.” She set the mug down on the little table by her door with a click that had a full stop in it. “I did last night as a neighborly one-time thing, because you were drowning and I have common sense. I’m glad she’s okay, I really am, but I have four clients closing their books this week. And I am not the person who becomes responsible for other people’s chaos. I’ve worked on it. I have a therapist, and she’d be so proud of me right now. The answer is no.”

It was a good no. It was airtight. He respected it, honestly, the way he respected a defenseman who’d read the play three moves early and closed the lane before he could even think about it.

He opened his mouth to say so, and that was when Charlie lifted her head off his shoulder. She’d been half-asleep, milk-drunk and heavy, but she came up now like a periscope, blinking. Her enormous dark eyes found Nora.

And Charlie smiled. It was the full production—the chubby cheeks going up, the two brand-new bottom tusks catching the light from the hallway, the delighted, gummy, unguarded joy of it. A baby who had decided the woman in the robe was the single best thing she had ever seen. She smiled at Nora like Nora was Christmas.

He watched it happen. He watched dry, armored, four-clients-closing, therapist-having Nora Bennett take the full force of it. She made a small strangled sound.

Charlie kept smiling. She reached out one small starfish hand towards Nora, opening and closing it, and made a soft interrogative noise. It was, he thought, genuinely unfair. His daughter was six months old and she had just executed a tactical maneuver he’d have been proud to run in overtime.

“That’s not fair,” Nora said quietly.

“I know,” he said.

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“She absolutely knows what she’s doing.” He looked at his daughter with something close to awe. “I think she’s a genius. I think we should be worried.”

Nora looked at the baby. The baby looked at Nora and did the hand thing again, the little open-close, come here, look at me, I chose you.

“Three hours,” Nora said. She held up a finger, and her voice changed into something crisp and itemized that he had never heard from her before and immediately wanted to hear again. “Terms. One, you bring everything she needs, and I mean everything, because I am not running back and forth across that grass. Two, you write down the last time she ate and the last time she slept, on paper, not in your head. Three, you answer your phone. Every time. If I call, you pick up, even if you’re in the middle of your little skating, and I don’t care what Coach thinks about it.”

“It’s not little skating, it’s the⁠—”

“Your little skating.”

“Deal.” He said it fast, before she could re-litigate. “Deal, thank you, thank you, Nora, I mean it. And listen—” He stepped closer, and he made himself say it plainly, because plain was the currency she trusted. “This is not going to become your thing. Okay? I know how it looks. I know it looks like I’m the guy who’s going to hand you the baby and then somehow it’s Tuesday forever and you’re raising my kid while I’m off doing my little skating. I heard the speech, I was listening. This is a bridge. Three hours, one time, because Deb has a personal brand. I’m going to figure the rest out myself. I promise you that.”

She studied him over the top of her glasses. It was the exact look she gave him across the fence, the one he’d spent a year trying to provoke because it was the most interesting thing on his block. Except this time it had something new underneath it. Recalibration. A woman revising an estimate she’d been sure of.