Page 34 of Single Pucking Orc

Then she carried the tote across the grass and knocked and handed it over. “Everything of Charlie’s,” she said, businesslike, when he answered. “I did a sweep. I kept finding her things in with mine. Simpler to have them all in one house.”

He took the bag. He looked into it. He looked at her, and a smile started, and then he seemed to decide against it. She’d never seen him do that before.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

And she went home, and she waited, because that was the point of the exercise. She had removed every reason he had to come to her house. There was now nothing of his in her possession. If the pattern held after she’d stripped it of every excuse, then the pattern was not about the baby, or the bottles, or the blanket that had lived on her couch for nine days.

He came over at ten past seven.

She heard his knock, and she knew his knock now, which was another item she declined to add to any list, and she opened the door. There he stood, enormous in her small doorway, and his hands were empty. Both of them. He had brought nothing. No diaper bag, no baby—Deb’s evening cover, a fact she’d absorbed without noticing—no crackers, no bottle, no problem.

She looked at his empty hands and then at his face.

“Did you forget something?” she asked.

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

And he opened his mouth to answer, and she watched him not have the answer ready. Watched him actually stop and think about it. This male who never had to stop and think about anything social and had a smooth reply for everything. His entire public persona was built on never being caught without a line.

He stood in her doorway and he genuinely did not know.

“Huh,” he said.

Just Huh, quiet and surprised. He wasn’t acting—she knew when he was acting and he wasn’t now. He was as surprised as she was. More, maybe. He’d walked across the grass on instinct and only now, standing empty-handed on her step, discovered he had no reason and needed none.

Something happened in her chest that she had no column for, warm and dropping, gratifying and alarming in equal and unhelpful measure. She stepped back to let him in. There was nothing else to be done with a male who arrived at your door for no reason and found himself glad of it.

He came in. He sat on the couch on the cushion that no longer had a blanket on it. He talked, eventually, about nothing—Fen, the 4T, Korvash and his four kids. She made two coffees, and his was correct without her having to ask him. She sat across from him, and the evening went the way her evenings went now. She never once looked at the clock.

When he left, near eleven, he leaned down in the doorway and kissed her, and didn’t check first. She counted it, six, in a doorway, and didn’t say anything about the count this time.

She shut the door and stood in the hall.

Then she went to the desk and opened the notebook to a clean page and sat with the pen over the paper, in the little pool of lamplight, the duck sock exactly where she’d left it beside the blotter.

She didn’t write anything.

CHAPTER 11

Now, this is the certified copy,” George said, tapping the manila envelope on the kitchen table without letting go of it. “The laboratory retains the original, naturally, and a second certified copy has gone to the court along with the guardianship filing, so what you’re holding is your copy, for your records, which I’d advise you keep somewhere secure. A fireproof box would not be excessive.”

“George,” Rognar said.

“The methodology is a standard buccal swab comparison—we did yours at the clinic in, ah, that first week, you’ll recall the cotton bud—and the result is what’s called a probability of paternity, expressed as a percentage, which for the layperson can be slightly counterintuitive, because you’ll see a number and think it means one thing when in the legal sense it means⁠—”

“George. It’s been four minutes.”

George Barrington Jr. adjusted his reading glasses. “I like people to understand what they’re signing.”

“I understand it. You’ve done a beautiful job. Mildred would’ve handed it over and said ‘she’s yours, sign here.’”

“Mildred,” George said, with the pained expression of a man who had colleagues, “is not always as thorough as the situation warrants.”

He handed over the envelope. Then he produced three forms and a good pen, and Rognar signed all three—acknowledgment of receipt, an affidavit, and a form whose entire purpose he’d already forgotten—and made the joke he’d been holding for four minutes.