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“Okay.”
“Okay?”
He nodded.
“I’ll need to take a quick look around to make sure the house is safe enough for a child. She’s not very mobile yet, but you’re going to need to baby-proof the house.”
She took a clipboard and pen out of her bag. “May I?”
His mouth hung open for a moment. “It’s—kind of a mess. I fired my last cleaning company and haven’t gotten around to replacing them yet. And there are the renovations.”
He followed her through the house as she talked about putting away power tools and locking up medication. She handed him a list.
“If you’ll come with me . . .” She led him back outside.
Another woman stood on his front lawn, jiggling a blanket-wrapped bundle.
“Now?” he asked Sue, frozen in horror at the top of his steps.
“Now, Mr. Ellis.”
“But I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“No new parent does. Call your family. Call friends with kids. Look things up online.” She patted his arm. “You appear to have a lot of resources at your disposal, I’m sure you can figure out how to take care of a child, or hire someone to do it for you until you get the hang of things.”
Oh God.
The woman moved down the stairs as though she hadn’t just changed the course of his life, at least for the foreseeable future.
“She woke up, Stella?” Sue asked the other woman.
“She started to fuss not long after the car stopped.” The woman gave him an appraising once-over. “Beau’s babysitter didn’t know who you were, Mr. Ellis. Does your daughter know you?”
“No,” he replied, not elaborating. Not his daughter, but the rest was accurate. He’d only seen the kid once, not long after she was born. At the time, she’d looked a lot like a tiny, wrinkled old man version of Beth.
Beth. She was gone—just fucking gone out of the world forever, and there was nothing he could do about it. The awkwardness between them had been a canker on his consciousness for months, and now there’d never be a chance to fix it.
“I see the resemblance,” Stella nodded, looking him over.
He gave a short, slightly hysterical laugh, but didn’t correct her, and neither did Sue.
The older woman gripped his arm and gave him a reassuring look. “Mr. Ellis, you’re making the right decision. You seem like an intelligent man. You’ll figure things out soon enough.” He let him go and went to the car to pop the trunk. “The babysitter packed up some of Beau’s things. The playpen, some clothes, diapers, bottles, formula. You’ll have to go to the apartment to get the rest of it before the end of the month. There’s a key in the diaper bag.”
He already had the address, but he’d never dropped by after Beth brought the baby home from the hospital.
Stella handed him Beau and went to help her colleague, not listening to him when he tried to tell her he didn’t know how to hold a baby.
How old was she? He couldn’t even remember.
From the blanket, Beth’s dark, displeased eyes looked up at him from under a wild patch of black hair. She’d be even less pleased when she found out he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
* * *
* * *
“What are we going to do?” Grant was clutching a rattle he’d found in the diaper bag. Shaking it hadn’t helped. Beau was still fussing.
Will kept forgetting the kid’s name, and it made him feel like a shitty person. It didn’t come naturally yet.
