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“I’ve been dumbstruck for a long time now, little monster.” I have no idea why I say it, and clearly, she is taken aback and confused.
The baby stops moving then, and I clear my throat. Mercedes looks away first, slips her nightie on, and climbs out of bed.
“I need breakfast,” she says and hurries from the room.
I sit there for a minute, wondering what the fuck just happened. What I just admitted. Wonder what I’m doing.
I get up to pull on yesterday’s clothes, stiff from drying on the radiator. I pick up my phone from on top of the dresser where she must have set it, and I see several notifications but ignore them. They can wait. I wash my face and work my fingers through my hair.
She’s in the kitchen scrambling eggs and toasting bread when I get there. I set our mugs on the counter and pour us more coffee while I watch her, this strange, new Mercedes standing at the stove scrambling what looks to be a dozen eggs.
“I didn’t realize you knew how to cook.”
“It’s eggs.” She rolls her eyes. “But there’s a lot you don’t know about me, Judge. You’ve never bothered.”
“That’s neither true nor fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
The toaster pops.
“Can you put more bread in?”
I take the two pieces out and put two more in.
“There’s juice in the fridge.”
The dynamic between us is strange. Different. Domestic. But off. I remind myself that Mercedes and I do better when we fight, but I find I don’t want to fight. Not now.
So I set the juice and the toast on the small table, and when the eggs are ready, I take the frying pan from her to serve us.
“Sit down,” I tell her.
“I can do it.”
“I know you can. I just want to. Please let me.”
She agrees but only after a long minute, and I wonder if we can ever get back on the right track. What that track is. I wonder if she can forgive me because I have made mistakes with her. I applied the rules of The Society to us, to our lives at home, and I forgot that she’s human. That we’re both human. And that humans feel and have their hearts broken far too easily. And only when they're broken do we realize how hard it is to put the pieces back together again.
“The doors and the locks, was that you?” she asks as we eat.
I nod. I had them upgraded. “Your house was too easy to break into.”
Vincent Douglas. We’re both thinking it, but neither of us says it.
“How are things between you and your brother?” I ask.
“Okay, actually. We’re doing well. Ivy and I, too. She’s a little crazy when it comes to shopping for the babies.” She smiles, and I’m glad to see it, glad to hear this.
My phone dings with a message, and I remember all those notifications but ignore it. “I will take care of you. All of you, you know that, right?”
She tilts her head, eyes scrutinizing me. “What makes you think we need taking care of?”
“I’m their father.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to acknowledge them. I don’t need your money. I don’t need your name. I don’t need anything from you.” I’m not sure if she intends that to cut, but it does. It cuts deep. “Besides…” She sets her fork down, her face closing off, that woman upstairs who was giggling vanished. “I know it would be difficult, what with you being the next councilor of The Tribunal and—”
“I don’t give a fuck about The Tribunal.”
