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CHAPTER EIGHT
BYLUNCHTIMEHERHEAD was swimming.
Leave a baby to cry it out. Never leave a baby crying longer than a minute. Leave them to cry but stay in the room so they can see you at all times. Put toys above the bed to distract them and comfort them. Never over-stimulate a baby at bedtime: remove all toys from their line of sight.
So much contradictory advice, all from reputable-seeming parenting authorities, none of them particularly good at agreeing about how to soothe an unsettled baby.
‘And you’ve definitely ruled out medical factors?’ she asked, tapping her pen against the thick pile of pages she’d printed off the internet. Going back to her law school roots, she’d spent Danica’s fitful daytime naps with a highlighter and notepad, intending to distil what she’d presumed would be a sort of parenting manual onto paper—a guide for both of them to ease Danica into a better routine.
‘Cassandra had her checked over by several paediatricians,’ he said darkly. ‘None could find anything wrong with her.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ Bea said, returning her attention to the pages because it was preferable to looking at Ares. She was still angry with him, she reminded herself, even when the image of him shirtless and comforting Danica was now imprinted on her eyeballs. ‘With Nikki, it was just about routine,’ Bea murmured thoughtfully. ‘If we missed her naptime by even ten minutes, she’d be a nightmare for days. It was hard because Priti and I were both trying to study, but we ran the house like clockwork. It meant we could have a semblance of a normal life,’ Bea concluded. ‘I wonder if Danica is the same?’
Ares’s only response was to lift—by a degree of millimetres—his shoulders.
Bea compressed her lips. ‘Did Danica’s nanny keep to a tight schedule?’ she prompted.
Something flickered in Ares’s face. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, were her daytime naps all at roughly the same time? What about bedtime?’
‘I am not someone who sticks to a strict routine,’ he said eventually. ‘The reason I hired a nanny who was so highly regarded was because I’m often away from home. Xanthia would be better placed to answer any questions about that.’
Bea shouldn’t have been surprised. She tried to keep the judgement from her expression but unfortunately his remark hit way too close to home. How familiar that was to her! The notion of an adoptive parent outsourcing the parenting and consoling themselves with the fact that they’d hired ‘the best’. Ares wasn’t Danica’s adoptive father but he was her uncle, and he was—for the moment—her closest family.
Ice chilled her heart as her own experience of familial rejection spiked through her, paining her all over again.
‘I’ll speak to Xanthia then.’ She scraped her chair back, walking towards the door with a spine that was ramrod-straight. Unusually for Bea, she had the strangest sense she might cry.
‘Wait.’ His voice was commanding and insistent. Oh, how she’d have loved to ignore it! But that would be petulant and childish, and she refused to indulge either emotion.
She half turned to face him, her neck swan-like, her brown hair piled onto her head in a loose bun.
‘What time will you put her to bed tonight?’
Bea had drawn up a schedule which seemed to contain a lot of overlap from the various parenting sites and books. ‘Six-thirty. Why?’
‘Once she is asleep, we’ll go to Athens.’
She gave up on the half-turn and spun back to face him completely. ‘What for?’
‘You’re here for a month. You’ll need more to wear than a ballgown and Xanthia’s husband’s clothes.’
Bea looked down at the misshapen outfit with a raised brow. ‘Really? I had wondered...’
‘Meet me on the roof at seven.’
Bea pursed her lips, jolted back to the present. ‘I can’t do that.’
A scowl darkened his face.
‘I don’t know if she’ll go to sleep straight away, and if she doesn’t I’m not going to leave her to have another exhausting and traumatic screaming episode. It’s not fair to Xanthia either.’
Tension arced between them, an argument in their eyes, and then finally he relented—after all, he could afford to lose the battle. He’d already won the war. ‘I’ll be waiting. Come up when you are ready.’
Bea should have been relieved that Danica went to sleep so easily. Surely that was a good sign that something about the routine she’d implemented was working? In the end, she’d followed her instincts. An early dinner, a warm, lightly fragranced bath, a calm book-reading in an almost dark room, followed by a bottle with Bea singing softly as Danica fed, a quiet cuddle and burp and then into bed. Bea kept her hand on Danica’s chest lightly, as she’d done the night before, watching as the baby’s beautiful blue eyes grew heavy and finally dropped closed, her breathing rhythmic as sleep swallowed her.
Xanthia was hovering on the other side of the door, her face lined with worry.
