Chapter 11
brODY
“I stopped listening to you ten minutes ago,” I tell Ezra as he recounts his weekend with the most recent ‘love of his life.’
The man falls in love every weekend, with a new woman from a new place, most of them found somewhere deep in the trenches of the internet.
Heaving a dramatic sigh, he slides against the counter next to me as I rinse my silverware from lunch.
“You don’t love me,” he whines.
“I simply have no interest in your penis or what you choose to do with it,” I tell him. “As long as you don’t need counsel as a result, it is none of my business.”
“She might be the one,” he says, pushing off of the counter. “I think I’m in love.”
I let out a laugh, bracing my hands against the edge of the sink, and I shake my head. “You wouldn’t know ‘the one’ if she was delivered to you in a glass box with a neon sign on the front of it. Ainsley?”
“Okay, so sometimes the radar’s off.”
“Send it to the shop, then,” I tease, clapping him on the shoulder as I pass. “And if I’m wrong about this one, I’ll foot the bill for the wedding.”
“You are the most jaded man I’ve ever met, Brody Montgomery,” he calls after me as I leave the room with a shrug.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe I am just some bitter, cynical asshole anymore.
As I reach the receptionist desk, I throw my hand up to Linda in greeting, moving past her toward my office.
“Mr. Montgomery,” she says, “Nia Cavanaugh is waiting for you in your office.”
My brow furrows. “Is she alright?”
“She seemed to be,” she nods.
With a nod and my thanks, I walk just a little bit faster than usual to my office, running through every possible reason she might have shown up again without an appointment.
She’s moved into the house, I sent her all of the information that I could dredge up about home visits and inspections; so I know she’ll have already made sure that she’s in compliance. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to contact her again, would he? I’ll draft a request for a no-contact order.
Maybe I can—
As I push open the door of my office, I see not just Nia seated in one of the chairs at my desk, but a small child who I can only assume is her daughter, as well.
“Nia,” I say, trying to gauge the situation in front of me.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “We were just gonna leave these with the front desk, but someone wanted to meet my friend who helped us with the house.”
“Right,” I nod in understanding. Turning to the little girl seated next to her with pigtails in her hair, I say, “You must be Katherine.”
“We maked you cookies!” She announces.
“ Baked , Katie-cat,” her mother corrects her with a chuckle. “B, not M.”
I find myself fighting a smile that pulls at the corners of my mouth. Nia’s daughter tears open the wrapping on the covered plate in front of her, reaching for one of the cookies inside.
I don’t eat refined sugar, if I can avoid it. I’ll make an exception for grain and dairy when it comes to my mother and her dinners, but I typically try to avoid those, too. I’m extremely careful about the foods that I put into my body; anything that I can do to protect myself.
Even still, when a tiny hand reaches toward me with a cookie grasped tightly between equally-tiny fingers, I find myself crouching on the floor in front of her with a smile.
“Are you going to have one with me?” I ask her with a raise of my brow.
Katherine’s eye shift to her mother, silently pleading with her until Nia’s already-flimsy resolve cracks and she reaches for another one of the cookies, breaking it in half.
“We’ll split one,” she answers.
The three of us touch our cookies together in a modified cheers, and my eyes meet Nia’s, just for a brief second. Just long enough to see her mouth ‘ thank you ’ before we each take a bite.
I can’t say that I’ve ever enjoyed the presence of a child in my office, or in my personal space at all, really. It isn’t that I dislike children – or maybe I do. They’re messy, they’re loud, they tend to have a penchant for ignoring the word ‘no’ the first ten times that it’s said to them.
Several too many children have turned my tidy and neatly-organized office into a state of disarray in the matter of mere minutes for me to enjoy them being here. It normally puts me on edge. I thought my wife was crazy for ever wanting them in our home .
Katherine devolves into a small coughing fit, a quiet wheeze working its way out between each cough into her cupped hands, and I tense.
“She has a cough.”
“She’s not sick,” Nia tells me, her caramel eyes meeting mine in a pointed gaze.
She reaches into her purse as I move for the small refrigerator for a bottle of water, keeping my eyes on the little girl at my desk. Nia offers her a small pill, which Katherine puts in her mouth and chews, scrunching up her face as if it disgusts her.
When I hand her the opened water bottle, she snatches it from me and sucks down enough of it that I’m certain she’s washing away an undesirable flavor.
“We should give Brody back his office, Katie-cat,” Nia tells her, squeezing her on the knee.
“You don’t have to—”
“It’s the middle of the work day,” she cuts me off with a smile. “I doubt you got this big, fancy office by keeping it empty.”
“R-right,” I nod.
I forgot for a moment that I was even in my office.
The two of them stand as Nia pulls her purse over her shoulder, and I can’t read what’s behind her eyes. I read people; that’s what I do . So why can’t I read her?
As Katherine leaves my office, Nia stops at the doorway, reaching to wrap her hand around my forearm.
“She isn’t sick,” she quietly tells me again. “I know you hear a kid coughing and your mind goes straight to IV bags and tiny coffins, but she’s not dying, Brody. She’s just allergic to the hydrangeas outside. She doesn’t need chemo; she only needed a Benedryl.”
With a soft smile and a squeeze to my arm, she trails after her daughter, and I finally release the air that I’d trapped in my lungs.
My hand lingers on the door for a few moments too long as I close it behind her.
What the hell is happening to me?