Page 59 of Single Pucking Orc

Instead, she picked up the pen. She drew a single clean line under the column, the way she drew a line above every total she was done adding to. And under the line, in the space where a total went, she wrote nothing at all. Because there was no number for it, and she’d finally stopped looking for one.

She turned the lamp off.

The monitor she’d carried over from his house without noticing that she’d done it crackled once, softly, with the sound of a seven-month-old turning over and settling back down. She sat in the dark kitchen and listened to it, and did not, for the first time in two weeks, feel the need to write down how long she’d been listening.

CHAPTER 21

“Everything is in perfect order,” George said, and Rognar understood at once that he would be here for a while.

George had a particular way of delivering good news. He approached it the way a man approaches a cold lake—with respect, in stages, and with considerable narration. He had his reading glasses low on his nose. He had, arranged in front of him on the desk, three copies of the same document, because George believed that anything worth signing once was worth understanding thrice.

“The petition for permanent custody has been approved,” he said. “Which I want to stress is not a formality, although in your case it proceeded as smoothly as any I’ve handled, owing to the completeness of the documentation, the clarity of the mother’s expressed wishes, and—I’ll say this plainly, Mr. Stonebreaker—the fact that Ms. Prescott’s home visits produced reports I could frame.”

“Thank you,” Rognar said.

“There’s more.”

“I assumed.”

There was more. There was a great deal more. George laid it out with love. The guardianship recommended, the estate matters closed, the small trust from Val’s life insurance settled into Charlie’s name. George explained a set of provisions for a period Rognar did not measure in words but could have measured in shifts. Partway through, Charlie, in the crook of Rognar’s arm, decided she had heard enough about fiduciary responsibility and worked her fist towards his lower tusk with the patient determination of an engineer.

He let her have it. It was, he’d learned, the single most reliable method of keeping her quiet in a room full of adults, and he’d stopped caring what it looked like sometime in his first two weeks of fatherhood.

Mildred watched him do it.

She hadn’t said much. She sat to one side with a slim folder closed on her knee. She’d let George have the floor. George would take it regardless. Her face in repose was stern, the tired sternness of a woman who’d sat in a lot of rooms and seen a lot of arrangements come apart. It had softened over the months. It softened further now, and she didn’t bother hiding it.

“—and so, in summary,” George said, arriving at the coast of his sentence eleven minutes after leaving harbor, “everything is in order. The petition is approved, the estate is closed, and the order goes up for signature, which is the last thing standing between you and permanent.”

“But it’s not done,” he said.

“It is as done as paperwork gets before a judge signs it. Barring, of course, the ordinary future filings, which I’ll walk you through on a rolling basis, and which include⁠—”

“George.” Mildred stood. “It’s done bar the signature. Let Rognar take his baby home.”

She crossed to the desk, set her folder down on it, and put the pen on top of the folder with a finality that meant it was all she’d come to do. She’d carried Charlie’s file for months. She was closing it.

“I’ll sign off on my end today,” she said, to George in her schoolteacher voice, then turned to him. “I’ve closed a lot of these.”

He waited.

“Most of them I closed because the law made me.” She picked her folder back up, tucked it under her arm, and looked at him, and then at Charlie gnawing his tusk, and then back at him. “This one I’m glad to close.” She was already moving towards the door. “You’ll do.”

You’ll do. She hadn’t needed to say more than that, and George would have needed a folder and ten paragraphs to get there. She was through the door before he could respond.

He sat there holding his daughter and understood he’d just been paid the highest compliment he was ever likely to receive from anyone. And that he’d never see Mildred Prescott again because the best measure of her work was a case that no longer needed her.

He shook George’s hand for a while. He signed the three copies of everything. He got Charlie into her carrier and the file under his arm and made it out to the truck before the other thing arrived.

He’d got Charlie ‘s carrier clipped into the base and the file onto the passenger seat and the key in the ignition and he couldn’t turn it. The petition was approved and the estate closed, and only one signature remained. It was over.

He found himself going back over everything that had happened. He’d started with a woman next door who had helped him with a screaming infant when he had nowhere else to turn. She’d known him because his life had crashed against her fence and she’d been kind enough and competent enough to help—and now the crash was over. The file on the seat said so. Everything was settled. He had sitters and he had Deb and very practical thread that had ever tied Nora Bennett into the daily fabric of his life had been tied off.

He’d done that one purpose. I don’t expect you to keep doing it for me. He’d said it in the first week and meant it and proved it. He’d refused to make her the competent female who solved the charming male’s problem. He’d known that was exactly the type of male she despised.

It had worked.

And this was the cost. Because there would be no reason on earth—no crisis, no gap in the schedule, no small green person needing minding—for Nora to be woven into a single hour of his day.