Chapter 12

I looked up at the grey building and hesitated. If I didn’t go in then I would be late, and my dad never appreciated that. Also, the summer sun was searing into my skin and despite Addie’s fervent wish for another outcome, we all burned terribly instead of tanning. I was also thirsty, and my water bottle was empty…

So I made my feet move again, carrying me to the glass double doors. He’d had this same office since before I’d been born but I hadn’t ever spent very much time here. On a few occasions, we’d come with him on weekends and while he’d worked, we’d played. The building had been dark and quiet and had felt deserted. I remembered inventing an elaborate game about the Curran kids being the last survivors after an asteroid strike. We’d been forced to survive in an accounting office, trying to keep safe from the wild animals that had taken over Detroit. We’d built shelters under desks and made interesting meals for ourselves using the materials we’d found in the office kitchen: powdered creamer, old ketchup and mustard, pepper, and lots of coffee grounds. Nicola had stepped in before we’d actually eaten anything.

That had been fun, but my mission today was not going to be. I had left Esme in my big sister’s care, telling Nicola that she could get in some baby practice, and then I had come to talk seriously with my father about Patrick. We had to figure out a plan: either Dad needed to convince his son to grow up, or he needed to be on my side (Team Normal) as I made difficult decisions about Esme’s future.

So far, there weren’t a lot of people from my family on Team Normal with me. In fact, it was currently a team with only one member: Sophia Genevieve Curran. I’d had dinner with Nicola and Addie to discuss it, and they were not on board but for different reasons.

“I think Patrick should do this himself. I think he will,” Addie had avowed. “JuJu says that he’s back from Chicago.”

“He still doesn’t have a job,” I had pointed out.

“It was a good first step,” she’d argued back.

“Addie, is your air conditioning broken?” Nicola waved her hand to direct a breeze over her flushed face. She had gone from “you don’t look very pregnant” to “holy Mary, what is in your stomach?” She was due anytime, so that made sense, and apparently she was the ideal specimen of a pregnant woman. She’d let us know (in an extremely cranky manner) that she had gained the recommended amount of weight and that the baby was perfectly healthy. She’d added that if Brenna said one word about stretch marks or calories they were going to come to blows, and nine months pregnant or not, Nicola would end her.

Addie had turned down the thermostat and we’d resumed our meeting. “I don’t want you to do this either,” my big sister had told me. “I don’t want you to try to adopt Esme.” We’d all turned to look at the little girl in the bouncy seat that Addie had purchased because her house was filling with gear for all the kids that she wanted to have in it, her own and her nieces and nephews.

“Seriously?” I’d exploded. I’d been trying to remain calm and dispassionate, but how could anyone stay calm when Esme’s future was at risk?

Nicola had her reasons for withholding her support, which she’d made clear while chewing on ice. For one thing, she also thought that Patrick should step up, although she didn’t have Addie’s faith that this would occur. She was worried that if I went after legal custody, it would completely torpedo our family, and I understood that fear because I had it as well.

“I’m worried about you, too,” she’d told me. “This would totally change everything in your life. Like, it’s a total course-correction. Is that really what you want? Because between us, we can work this out. All of us will step in to take care of Esme, even Grace,” she promised.

“My life has already changed course,” I’d argued back, and no, I didn’t want the rest of them to “work this out.” I kept thinking of when Grace herself had put the picture of the baby in front of my face, making her real to me. She wasn’t some old box of ephemera to get tossed from garage to garage. She was Esme, a baby, and she needed permanence and continuity, not a deadbeat father and a bunch of aunts doing part-time care. In short? She needed me.

But I’d told them both that I would exhaust all my options first, so here I was doing some exhausting. I was personally exhausted, too, because the baby had started teething and was back to being awake a whole lot. My mom looked like a half-dead zombie and my car’s rearview mirror had demonstrated that I wasn’t looking much better, myself. I was beginning to understand why my cat-walking neighbor, Vanda, had used a little whiskey on her kids’ gums. No, I wasn’t going to, but I could see why a sleep-deprived, half-zombie could have considered it as an option.

My option right now was to stand in the sun and burn to a crisp or to talk to my dad, a person who had generally supported me in the past. I walked to the door and made myself enter, and I waved to the receptionist who said she’d call back to make sure he was ready for me.

His door was open and he stood in it, waiting. He smiled as if he were glad to see me and he said how nice I looked. On the other hand, I was startled when I saw him. He seemed about as tired as I currently felt and more than that, he suddenly looked…old. I’d never put much thought into my parents’ ages and Mom acted young. She was always twisting herself into torus knots and balancing her body in the air her fingertips as she did yoga. She had energy, too—no, not at the moment due to the teething, but in general.

My dad, leaning against the doorframe, looked fragile and elderly. It shocked me into walking over to hug him, which in turn shocked him.

“Sophie? Are you all right?” he asked.

“Totally,” I answered, and released him. “Are we going to lunch?”

“I knew there was a reason you wanted to see me,” he said, which was the joke he usually made. We were there to eat his food and run up his electrical bill by charging every device we owned, that was what he always claimed. In the case of my sister Brenna? It was true. “How about the Coney Island?” he suggested.

The restaurant was within walking distance of his office, but it felt far away in the sticky heat. I was glad to be wearing the new dress that I had bought on my shopping trip with JuJu, which might have been the last time we would ever do anything together. She would certainly never speak to me again if I tried to get custody of the baby.

Sugar.

We made it to the restaurant and ordered, and I thought about my dad’s lunch. This place was so close to where he worked and provided so many delicious options for meals. I’d always viewed eating as an enjoyable method of preventing my stomach from growling, but lately I’d also been considering it in terms of my own longevity and how nutrition factored into that. Esme would need me around, and maybe it was selfish, but I needed my dad.

“You don’t come here every day, right?” I asked. “You mostly eat healthy stuff from home, don’t you?”

“Your mother doesn’t pack a lunchbox, if that’s what you’re asking. But I keep the hot dogs to a minimum.” We both ordered them today, of course, and they were so good.

We kept the conversation to lighter topics while we waited for the food and while we were plowing through the Coney dogs, but when we were finished and before reaching for his wallet, my dad asked me why I had wanted to have lunch today.

“Patrick,” I answered. “I figured you already knew.”

He sighed. “Juliet seems to think that he’s doing better.”

“I mean, having a wad of gum stuck to your shoe is gross but it’s better than stepping in dog crap. That’s about the difference in his behavior. He moved from resembling smelly poo to being more like a stranger’s pre-chewed gum that you have to scrape away.”

“Sophie, please,” he admonished, and I said that I was sorry. “Patrick is a grown man. He’s twenty-six years old,” he reminded me, and I knew very well that we were all aging rapidly. “What am I supposed to do about him?”

“You’re right, Dad,” I shot back. “The time to do something about him was ten years ago, or even twenty. That was when you should have laid down the law and told him to stop being such a jerk, but maybe it’s not too late. He might listen to you now if you tell him to start acting like an adult and to grow a pair.”

“Sophie!” he admonished again, but this time I wouldn’t apologize. Balls were exactly what my brother needed, and I wasn’t sure why all the women in our family had ended up with them but Patrick hadn’t. “What, exactly, do you want from him?”

Where should I have started? “I want him to spend time with Esme. Not just coming in and saying hello, but getting to know her so that they can love each other. He needs to be there for the fun stuff, like tickling her to make her laugh, but also the bad stuff, like new teeth. Those really suck,” I stated. “I want him to be a part of everything that makes a parent.”

My dad didn’t verbally agree but he wasn’t telling me to be quiet, either, so I kept going.

“I want him to get a real job so that he can support her. I know that Addie and Nic came into money, but it’s not fair that they’re funding so much of their niece’s life. They’re happy to do it and so am I, but there’s no reason that Patrick can’t be the major contributor. He should pay for his kid.”

Now my dad nodded slowly as if he were coming around to my side. Team Normal might have been gaining a recruit.

“I want Patrick to stop focusing on how things are so hard for him,” I continued. “He looks at Esme and sees a problem that was dumped into his lap but his choices led us to where we are today. I know that’s hard to accept. Recently, with my own job, I was in a situation that made me angry and feel like I was the victim. I was, to some extent, but I also made some bad decisions. Patrick is a victim to some extent, too, because Mom shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t blame your mother for his behavior,” he said, but his words lacked urgency and sounded rote.

“I’m not totally blaming her, or even mostly blaming her. She did contribute to him acting like a spineless snail, but he’s also old enough to have changed his ways by himself. You know, some people didn’t have any parents to provide a good example or even to provide love. And those people turned out great. They’re helpful, and caring, and sweet, and hardworking. Those are the kinds of people that a woman…” I trailed off. “I think I switched topics.”

“I’m not sure what we’re talking about,” he concurred.

“We’re talking about me asking if you’d please approach your son and let him know that he has to do better. And if you’re not able to do that and he doesn’t improve, then I’m going to have to take some drastic steps and I’d like your support.”

One of my father’s eyebrows quivered, as if it was about to rise up; it was an ominous sign. “What ‘steps’ are you referring to?” he asked me.

I was in too deep to stop now. “Someone has to be in charge of this baby, in a permanent, serious way. Not the way of ‘I’ll hold her but if she cries or poops I’m giving her back’ and not in the way of ‘I always wanted a grandchild, but now I don’t want to do the work.’ Someone has to be a real parent, in other words, and if it’s not going to be Patrick, and since it can’t be Mom? Then it will be me.” I emphasized that by jabbing my thumb towards my own chest and then repeating, “Me. Actually, ‘I’ is grammatically correct in that sentence.” I had been doing more writing lately and was paying attention to pronoun usage.

My dad was dead silent, impressed by neither my grammar nor my logic. He only stared at me.

I folded in my thumb and continued. “I know that you’re not happy with the current situation. It’s not fun for you to have extra people in your house, and one of that crowd has a serious screaming problem due to teething. It’s not nice to hear me getting up and clomping around the room above where you sleep, it’s not fair to have your driveway clogged with cars so that you can’t park the way you’d like. I’m trying to come up with a solution. We have to do something because I don’t think it can continue in this half-baked, loose way. You don’t like things like that and I’ve realized that I don’t, either.”

He was still looking at me, but seemed less angry. He didn’t say anything and I picked at the fries left on my plate. I looked out the window to the street, too, and thought about getting Esme from Nicola. My sister tired very easily now and it was so hot…it had been a bad idea to leave the baby there. I checked my phone but she hadn’t texted lately, despite how I’d specified that every half—

“I don’t know how this happened,” my dad suddenly remarked.

I’d thought a lot about it, so I had an answer. “From the time he was born, everyone treated Patrick as if he was a diamond among dirty pebbles. It sucked for the pebbles and it didn’t help him at all, either.”

“I’m not talking about your brother and the mistakes I made with him. I mean, I’m not sure how you ended up like this.”

I slowly put down a cold fry. “Like what?” I asked carefully.

“You turned into a mature and thoughtful young woman,” he answered, and I relaxed.

“Thanks, Dad.” I smiled at him. That was a very nice compliment.

“And just like your sister Nicola, you seem to have learned that self-worth is dependent on how well you take care of others.”

“What?”

“Sacrificing your life for this child will only make you resentful. That’s what happens when you give up your dreams for someone else. You’ll grow to hate her.”

“I will not! And I don’t like how you’re talking about Nicola. Do you know why she took care of her siblings and sacrificed her dreams? She had to, because back then, both our parents acted exactly the same way that Patrick is acting right now. The example you showed him was of adults who were selfish and immature. You loved Mom, she loved herself, and that left us out in the cold.” I got out my wallet and put some money on the tabletop. “This should cover my lunch.”

“Sophie,” he said, but I was walking away. Despite looking old, he moved fast enough to catch me before I got back to my car. “Sophia Genevieve, stop.”

I paused slightly, that was all. “What?”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. He was panting a little. “Sorry, Sophie.”

Sure, but what difference did that make? For me, none. “What are you sorry for?” I waited. “Well? What?” After a moment, it was obvious that he didn’t have an answer for that, so I nodded. “I’m sorry that I called you selfish and immature. I still think it but I’ve been working on not saying what’s on my mind, since it makes me a lot.”

“A lot?”

“Too much,” I explained. “I’m too much, so I’m trying to make myself less.”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Let people in on everything. When they show themselves in return, believe what you see in them. Make an informed choice.”

I nodded again. “I need to get going,” I said. “Goodbye.” And good luck to me, because I was on my own. My dad walked back to his office and I went to my car, angry enough that I was even hotter than before. Who was he to give advice about love?

I called Nicola the moment I got on the road. She had told me that she would text every half hour to give me updates and it had been thirty-seven minutes since the last message. “You’re very annoying, Sophie. We’re fine,” she said when she answered.

“You were late.”

“I know, because she had a truly repulsive diaper and I didn’t feel like transferring any of its contents onto my phone while I wrote to you. What solids are you giving her?”

We got into an involved discussion about Esme’s diet, which Nicola (of course) had strong opinions about. I did, too, but she was the nurse and also my big sister. I listened to her.

“What did Dad say?” she asked when she’d stopped telling me what to do.

“What do you think? Nothing.”

“I figured,” she sighed. Our father was pretty notorious for his ability to remain evasive at all times. “So he’s not going to talk to Patrick?”

“I don’t think so. Probably not, because I did end up lobbing a few insults at him.”

“Great, Soph. Well, that was a choice.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t great at all.” I sighed, too. “I’m going to try to talk to Patrick myself and to Mom again, too, but if they won’t listen then I’m going ahead with this, no matter what anyone thinks.” At least Daniel was on my side. He also believed that Esme should have a little normalcy.

“When has anyone in our family ever listened? That includes you, by the way.”

I fiddled with the air conditioning, trying to make it flow from the vents. “We can talk more when I get to your house, but no, I’m not going to change my mind.”

“I thought you were meeting Daniel today.”

That was something I’d mentioned to Addie, but the gossip loop in our family ran quickly. “If you’re tired—”

She said that she wasn’t, and anyway, Jude was on his way home and wanted some practice with Esme, too, and the kids who lived across the street from her house were fascinated with the baby. “Go do something else,” my sister ordered, so I drove north on the Lodge.

The house in Palmer Park was a hive of activity, with trucks everywhere and a lot of sweaty guys walking around drinking water. The afternoon was so dripping hot and there was hardly any breeze to lift the heat away from this construction site. I spotted Daniel’s truck down the street and, using the parallel parking skills that I’d honed since high school, I wedged mine in behind it. Then I followed the noise of hammers and buzzing saws back to the house, texting to say that I had arrived and then picking my way up the right side of the yard to where he said he’d meet me.

“Hi,” Daniel said as he emerged from what would be, I believed, a door. Currently it was only a hole several feet above the ground. “Thanks for stopping by my shitshow.”

“It looks good to me,” I called up.

“You’re the one with the hole in the roof, so that rings true.”

“Hey! That tarp is very sturdy.” Roofers were coming, actually, to replace the tarp with actual shingles.

“Holes in a house are a problem,” he remarked. “This jobsite was robbed last night.”

“Oh, no!” I glanced around, on alert for someone walking up on me.

He jumped down. “No, they’re gone, and it was just punks. Nothing organized.” He wiped off his face on his t-shirt sleeve. “I wouldn’t have you come somewhere dangerous.”

No, he wouldn’t. “I brought you a gift.” I handed him the bottle of iced tea I’d gotten on my way, still cold because I’d put it right beneath the struggling air conditioning vent in my car.

“Thank you. I needed this,” he said, and took a huge swallow before offering it to me. “Want to see the house?”

I did, and he climbed back into the opening and then stuck the drink in his jeans’ pocket so he could use both hands to haul me up, too. There was a roof here (maybe better than the one I currently had covering my house) and it did a good job of blocking the hot sun. Unfortunately, the extant walls mostly blocked any breeze which was faintly circulating outside them. It was dusty and dim in here, and it looked a lot like something that Brenna could have drawn if you’d given her the prompt “haunted house.”

But Daniel was looking around and smiling. “We’ve made a lot of progress.”

“Wow.” If this represented progress, I hated to think of where it had started. “This is the place that needs a mantel? It seems like you’re a way off from installing that.”

“We’re getting there,” he said confidently. He removed a piece of plywood so that I could see the one leaded glass window that hadn’t been stolen or totally broken over the years, and which they planned to replicate and repair. Then he showed me how the stair treads, now protected by paper, had a curved indentation in the middle from all the feet that had climbed them. “It’s like in your parents’ house, how they have everyone’s height marked on the trim around the door to the basement. You can see what living there meant to your family. This house meant a lot to people, too, and it will again,” he told me. I found myself agreeing.

I also found myself thinking that while my parents were actual jerks a lot of the time, they also did things like keeping track of our heights. Recently, my mom had stalked Addie’s boyfriend to make sure he was good enough for her. My father had been the one who’d talked me out of taking a job I didn’t like, and he’d dropped everything in his day to convince me of that. In their weird way, they did love us, and I felt the same. “I love you,” I quickly texted to my dad. “I’m not saying that because I’m in despair or anything, I just wanted to tell you.” He wrote back to make sure that I was really all right, and then he said that he loved me, too. And he repeated that he was sorry.

Daniel walked me through the broken rooms and as he talked, I could envision how they would be beautiful when the holes were patched and there were things like lights and doors, and more windows with glass. I could imagine furniture, curtains, appliances, family pictures, and kids’ voices, too.

“Would you want a house like this?” he asked.

“I can see how nice it will be, but I like our street,” I said. “I like the neighbors a lot.”

“I hope you mean me and not the woman with the cat who keeps leaving notes on my door, saying that my magnolia tree is diseased.”

“I did mean you, and you’re welcome. But Vanda’s not that bad,” I argued. “I probably won’t take a lot of child-rearing advice from her, but she may be right about your tree. While I’ve been up at night, I’ve read a lot about landscaping and plant care.”

“Esme still isn’t sleeping?”

“Not very well. Maybe she is right now, though, because Nicola has her and they’ve been playing with some big kids. They could have tired her out,” I added hopefully.

“You look a little tired right now, yourself. You’ve also sneezed about ten times. Want to go outside and get some fresh air?” he asked.

I did, although it wasn’t as fun as I expected because we used the front door, where there were temporary stairs. It meant that there was no need for anyone to lift me down, which was a shame. I did meet Connor Hayes, Daniel’s boss and the owner of the company, who seemed as nice as I’d been told. We were talking to him under the shade of a tree (maybe a maple?) that had been carefully fenced off to protect it, when I got a call. The last update from Nicola had said that everything was fine, but it was her husband this time.

“What’s wrong? Is it Esme? Oh, holy Mary! Is Nic having the baby?” I yelled into my phone.

Jude was having a hard time with his response and in a moment, my sister came on. “Everything is fine,” she announced. “I’ve been in labor for a little while but the contractions are getting closer together, so we need to go to the hospital soon. You still have plenty of time to get here so—”

“Nicola! You’re having the baby right now? Why didn’t you tell me to come before? Are you ok? Are you breathing?”

“You’re handling this as well as Jude,” she said. “Are you all right to drive here?”

“Of course! I’ll drive over right now!”

“Sophie, I hope you’re not inside somewhere, because you’re yelling.”

“I’m coming right now!” I hollered at her. “I’m coming, Nic!” She made me promise not to tell our mom and to be very, very careful behind the wheel, and then hung up. I dropped the phone, looked for my keys in my purse, tried to use them to text Addie, and then dropped them, as well. “Nicola’s having her baby,” I told Daniel. “I have to go pick up Esme. I better go right now. Right at this moment, there’s no time to waste!”

“We can go together,” he suggested, and gave me my phone since the keys were no good for texting.

I grabbed his arm and gripped it fairly tightly. “Nicola’s having the baby!”

“Yeah, we should go,” he agreed. His departure seemed to be ok with his boss. In fact, Connor handed me a tissue because I had started to sniffle slightly. He also said his wife’s deliveries had gone fine and he was sure my sister’s would, too.

“I’m worried,” I said, once we were in the truck. I pointed the vent toward my face and the well-functioning air conditioning blew back my hair.

“I can tell. You know that you’ve been holding my leg?”

“Oh.” I let go, but he took my hand and put it back.

“No, that’s ok. I don’t mind that you need me sometimes. It’s a change that I enjoy.”

“Is it?”

“You were the ringleader when we were in high school,” he said. “You were the boss. I was just happy to be there, so I went along with things. Now, you don’t mind when I’m a ringleader, too.”

“Right now, I’m very glad that you are. I didn’t think I’d be someone who sucks in a crisis, but I guess that I am. I nearly passed out when my house got broken into and now I’m crying because my big sister is having a baby.” My voice broke, too. “I’m worried about her. Nicola is…” Well, she was my big sister and I loved her. I thought about Esme and realized that she might be a big sister someday. She could be if I…what was I thinking?

“Nicola having a baby seems like a very valid thing to get emotional about,” he told me. “Did you get ahold of Addie yet? Is anyone going to be able to find Grace?”

I tried to do those things without, of course, letting our mother know. Nicola did not want her there, not under any circumstances, but it was going to be a thing. Mom had already been talking a lot about her role in the delivery—meaning that she wanted to be present in the delivery room, possibly as the first person to hold the baby and definitely as the one to cut the cord. My sister had told her no, she was not invited there and the nurses would not allow her in, but words like that didn’t always mean a lot to our mother. I vividly remembered her showing up at a graduation party when Juliet, Patrick, and Liv had been seniors, although she was (of course) not an invitee and no one had asked her to be a chaperone. Mom had snuck her way inside to get some candid pictures which she was sure they would enjoy later, but Juliet had been very upset. Even my little sister had acknowledged that it wasn’t normal behavior, and also, JuJu had been drinking and had gotten in huge trouble because her uninvited parent had immediately smelled it on her and dragged her home, where she’d been grounded.

So while I tried to round up my sisters, I kept Mom out of it. I also delayed telling Juliet, which was a shame but was also necessary. Yes, she’d been mad when her uninvited parent had shown up at the party, but she also had a tendency to tell on us. She really did want to be friends with Mom, even if she had been grounded for most of the summer after her senior year for drinking (and it had been rum mixed with a sports drink, so really, I felt like she’d already punished herself).

“Ok, everyone knows except for JuJu,” I said now to Daniel.

“Because of the Gros Cap thing?”

That was just one of the times that my little sister ratted on me: I’d had a semi-secret plan to hitchhike to the old Gros Cap Cemetery up north, and Juliet had found out.

“To be fair to her, that was an awful idea,” he continued. “I had just about succeeded in talking you out of going when Juliet told on you. Then your mom flipped out that you wanted to visit a historical cemetery, which meant that you had become a satanist.”

“And she said that once, a satanist had tried to kidnap her from church, but she waved a cross and repelled him with the power of Christ. I think that was the plot of a movie.”

“I think I saw that,” he agreed.

“I still want to see that cemetery,” I mentioned. I looked out the window. “We’re close to Nicola’s. Can you go faster?”

“Yeah. Is there anywhere else you want to visit besides the old graves?”

“Sure,” I said. “Now I can take Esme and show her new places, too. Is there anywhere left for you to see? You already got to travel a lot.”

“Some,” he said, nodding.

“I was really glad. You used to look…” I thought about the dog in the shelter, the one that had reminded me of Daniel. He probably wouldn’t have been thrilled by the comparison. “I was glad,” I repeated.

“Were you?” He put his hand on top of mine—an easy reach for him, since my fingers were still digging into his knee cap. “There are plenty of places left for me to go, too.” We talked about them and I did relax slightly, but I still didn’t release my grip.

We really weren’t far at all from Nicola’s house, though. Some of her friends, whom I recognized, were loitering on her lawn when we stopped at the curb. “Are you here to pick up your damn baby so Nicola can get her ass to the hospital?” a man in a wheelchair yelled when I opened the truck’s door.

“Stow it, Eddie,” my sister barked. She emerged from her house with her husband and we all froze. The little girl from across the street, the one who’d strewn rose petals for Nicola to walk on at her wedding, started to cry.

“Tam, come here,” Nicola told her, and she ran up the steps to be comforted. Then my sister made a general announcement. “Everyone needs to take a breath and remember that more than two hundred babies are born every minute in this world. It’s a natural process and I’m going to be fine. I need all of you to remain calm and positive. That’s what will help me the most. Also, it will help me if no one tells my mother that I’m giving…sugar.” She bent and started to breathe pretty hard.

“Is the baby coming out?” the little girl wailed, and her brother also ran to Nic, just as I booked up the steps. Calm? We weren’t. The baby wasn’t coming, but she did need to get to the hospital and her husband got her, her bag, and himself into his car and swore to the man in the wheelchair that he wouldn’t let anything happen to Nicola. The kids said that their mom was on her way home and that they needed to stay with Eddie, who was cursing to beat the band. I hugged my sister and lied through my teeth, saying that of course I wasn’t worried! Then I swore to her that over my dead body would our mother step into the hospital until I’d gotten an all-clear from Nic or from her husband, and that part was entirely truthful.

They left and the rest of us looked at each other, with several of us trying not to cry.

“Where’s Esme?” I managed to ask, belatedly remembering the baby I loved so much, and it turned out that she was in the arms of the man who had officiated Nicola and Jude’s wedding. He was an older guy who resembled Charles Darwin if he had spent a lot of time in a tattoo parlor rather than exploring the Galapagos. They were in the new nursery, rocking together in a chair that Jude had made. Esme was yanking on his beard, fascinated, and he was very good-natured about that (although it must have hurt). I thanked him for his help, took her, and felt immeasurably better once I had her close enough to kiss and cuddle. Daniel put his arm around me, too, and he put his hand under Esme’s little butt as she snuggled against my shoulder. I had to figure out what to do with her without cluing my mom onto the fact that something was happening with Nicola. I wanted to be at the hospital with my sister, but that wasn’t the place for Esme.

“I’ll take her to my house,” Daniel suggested when I said out loud that I didn’t know what to do. “I got a little bed, a crib, and I put it together a few days ago.”

“You did?” I looked up at him in surprise. “For her?”

“Last time you guys visited, I was thinking that it would be a good idea to have a better set-up. Just in case. We can go over to your parents’ house and grab whatever she needs, then get your car and split off. If your mom has questions, you can divert her suspicions by telling her that you’re in love with me, so you’re staying the night. I’ll stick around and fill in the story for her.”

“Oh.Well.I…well…”

“Sounds like a plan,” the illustrated Leonardo da Vinci said from the rocking chair. “Is Eddie having a shit fit outside?”

He was, but eventually the neighbors and friends calmed down and went home, or went to the hospital. Daniel, Esme, and I went to my parents’ house first, where we got her supplies packed into a bag that was much larger than the one Nic had brought with her, although Esme’s clothes were quite a bit smaller. It was easy enough to accomplish the packing because there was no one home—not my dad, brother, or sister Grace, which was to be expected, but not my mom either. I wasn’t going to text her to ask what was happening, but I really wondered what was happening.

“Ok,” I said. “Ok. I’ll go, and you two will be fine.”

“We will,” he said. “I promise.”

“Oh, I know,” I answered. “I really meant it. I trust you completely.”

He looked at me and then a huge smile lit up his face. “I’m glad to hear that.”

“I’m glad you came home to Detroit. I didn’t know how much I missed you when you were gone.”

If it was possible, his smile grew larger. “This is a good night for me. It will be a good one for Nicola and your family, too. Keep me up on what’s happening.”

“I will.” I went to kiss Esme, cuddled in his arms, and for just a moment, I let my head rest against his chest. Maybe this was my chance, like a new beginning. I hadn’t needed one—I hadn’t thought so, and I’d told Addie that Daniel and I would never be together. But I found that, holy Mary, I really hoped I’d been wrong.