Page 52 of Single Pucking Orc

That night he couldn’t sleep.

He lay in the dark of a hotel room in Montreal, with a strip of light from the corridor under the door, and a city he didn’t live in humming faintly outside. He did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep. He thought about how long it would be before he was home. The nine o’clock flight tomorrow. The drive from the airport. And, out of a habit he’d developed and would deny developing, how long it had been since he’d last heard her voice.

Charlie. He was missing Charlie. That was allowed, the ache of a new father three days away from a seven-month-old. Korvash had warned him about it and said it never fully went away. He couldn’t decide if that was good news.

But it wasn’t only Charlie.

He let himself think about the house eight feet from his. Dark now, with the travel crib up in the office and the giraffe standing guard. The baby asleep at seven-fifteen because someone knew she went down at seven-fifteen. And Nora in the kitchen, or the living room, or wherever she was. Both of them under one roof that wasn’t his roof.

My girls are both home, he thought, and a half-second later he heard the words. They didn’t sound like him at all. He tensed under the hotel sheets. He hadn’t chosen that my. He hadn’t chosen both. He had certainly not chosen to file a house he’d didn’t own as home.

He got up.

He didn’t decide to get up. One minute he was in bed and the next he was simply standing at the window, with the curtain pushed back and the cold glass under his hand, looking out at a Montreal street. Eventually he realized he didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, and his stomach turned over. Because he’d been staring in one direction. Not at anything. At a direction.

At home.

Home was southwest. He’d known it without a map, the same way he knew up from down in the dark. His body had turned him to the window and aimed him at a house two hundred miles away and held him there like a compass needle that had found true north.

He let the curtain fall.

New father, he told himself, walking back to the bed and lying down. Three days out. Missing my kid. That’s all this is.

He was very good at telling himself things. He’d had years of practice being the one who never needed telling anything at all.

New father, he thought again. Protective instincts.

Except there were other instincts too. The kind he'd watched turn Tarmek into a complete idiot the previous year. He refused to think about those, closing his eyes and rejecting the possibility with his full stubborn strength.

He fell asleep facing the window in the dark. He did not turn over.

CHAPTER 18

The travel crib went up in the office, between the desk and the window, in the exact spot where Nora kept the basket of client folders she was going to sort out in the spring. She moved the basket and put it in the hall. She stood in her office at six in the evening and looked at a crib where a filing project was supposed to be. She didn’t feel about it the way she had spent her life expecting to feel about things arriving unannounced in her space.

Charlie went down at seven-fifteen, because Charlie went down at seven-fifteen, and Nora had known that for weeks without deciding to know it.

She prepped the bottles on her counter the way she’d watched Rognar prep them—the scoop, the level line, the water first, then the powder, the irritating little shake. She lined them in the drainer. Two for the night, in case. Her kitchen, which she had spent four years arranging into precisely the kitchen she wanted, smelled faintly of formula and cow-udder balm and the warm-milk sweetness that clung to everything the baby touched.

She stood at her sink and breathed it in like it belonged there.

She heard the four a.m. wakeup on the monitor—the wind-up snuffle, the trial cry, the decision—and she was up and across the hall before she’d finished being asleep, which she had not known her body could do. Charlie was furious in the dark and hungry and warm. Nora scooped her out of the crib with a competence that surprised her a little, carried her to the kitchen, and warmed the bottle. She sat in the good chair by the window with a green-skinned baby heavy and slackening against her chest.

She started to sing. She didn’t decide to. It just came out, low and tuneless, some half-song she couldn’t have named, and it was bad, genuinely bad, off-key in a way she’d have been mortified for anyone to overhear. She caught herself and stopped, looking around the dark kitchen for a person who might have heard. There was no one to hear her.

So she kept going. And then—a beat later, the honest beat, the one she’d have edited out of any account she gave of the night—she kept going because she wanted to.

Charlie’s eyes went to slits, then shut. The bottle emptied. The little green fist that had been gripping Nora’s collar loosened, then opened over her heart. Nora sang the bad song to the end, in her quiet full house, at four in the morning.

It was exhausting.

It was disruptive—the crib in the office, the basket in the hall, her whole schedule shot, the sleep in pieces.

She loved it.

She got two of the client calls done the next day around the naps. She rescheduled the third and told the client something about a technical issue. It was true, in the sense that the technical issue was seven months old and chewing a giraffe’s ear off in the next room.

Rognar’s plane was the late one. She knew because it was on his fridge in her handwriting. She knew what time it came. And at some point in the last hour, she’d begun listening for his truck.