Chapter 4
The honest answer was no.
Nora knew this about herself with the same certainty she knew her tax bracket.
She had no siblings, no nieces, no nephews, no maternal fog descending over her ovaries when she passed a stroller.
What she had was one screaming infant on her doorstep at half-past ten and a giant orc looking at her like she was the last helicopter out of a war zone.
“No,” she said.
His face fell so completely that it would have been comical under other circumstances.
“But,” she said, before she could stop herself, before the ruthless part of her that guarded her sleep and her schedule and her uncomplicated life could veto it, “I know more than you appear to right now, so come in.”
He came through the door sideways, ducking under the frame and turning his shoulders.
Her front hall had never felt small until that moment.
He filled it entirely, from the coat hooks to the bottom of the attic stairs, and brought the smell of cold air and cedar in with him.
The temperature seemed to go up several degrees, because orcs ran hot and there was a very great deal of this one.
She decided, very deliberately, to have no reaction to that whatsoever.
“How long has she been crying?”
“Off and on for a few hours. It keeps getting worse.” He was jiggling Charlie against his chest, fast little movements that looked almost unconscious.
“She settles for five minutes, maybe ten, then starts again. She’s not hot.
I checked. Twice. She won’t take much of the bottle.
Diaper’s clean. Brogan thinks she’s overstimulated. ”
Nora blinked. “Brogan?”
“Yeah.”
“The goalie?”
“Unless you know another enormous antisocial orc named Brogan.”
Charlie let out another furious wail.
“Right. Brogan later.” She put her hand on his forearm. The muscle beneath her palm was warm and about as yielding as a fence post. She ignored that too.
“Rognar.”
His eyes dropped to her hand, then lifted to her face.
“You’re vibrating,” she told him, and he tried to stop. But his hand was still rubbing Charlie’s back in quick, anxious passes, and one foot was tapping against the hardwood.
“You’re still doing it.”
“I’m standing still.”
“Your foot isn’t.”
He looked down, and the foot stopped moving.
She stepped back. “Come sit down.”
He followed her into the living room and lowered himself carefully onto the sofa. It made a sound she had never heard it make before. He took up most of one end, Charlie tucked against his shoulder, and she had the absurd thought that she should have bought sturdier furniture.
Not relevant.
She turned off the overhead light, then the lamp beside the window. The only illumination left came from the small light over the stove through the kitchen doorway, washing the room in a faint gold glow.
He watched her. “What are you doing?”
“When did she get to you?”
“Two o’clock.”
“And where was she before that?”
“The attorney’s office. The social worker had her before that. Somebody at the county before that.”
“And a store,” she said. “You took her to a store, didn’t you?”
“For two hours.”
“With the lights and the music and the—Rognar, honestly.”
“There was nothing in my house,” he said. “There was literally nothing. She didn’t have a bed.”
“I know. I’m not telling you off.” She sat down on the ottoman across from him, close enough to talk quietly. “Has she slept?”
“In the truck, for about twenty minutes.”
“What happened after you brought her home?”
“I built the crib.”
“You built the crib?”
“Yes.” A flicker of his usual expression appeared. “All the bolts are accounted for. I thought you’d want to know.”
She did, annoyingly.
“And after that?”
“Bottle. Diaper. Walking. Rocking. Crib. More walking. More rocking. Different room. Back to the first room. Internet. Team chat. Bottle again.” He looked down at Charlie. “I’ve been trying everything.”
She looked at the frantic movement of his hand against Charlie’s back and the rigid set of his shoulders. At the baby whose face had gone blotchy with exhaustion.
“I think that might be the problem.”
His head came up. “Trying everything?”
“She’s six months old. She got handed to you today by people she barely knows after being handed around between several other people.
Then she went to a store, then a new house, then a new room, and you’ve spent the last few hours trying a different solution every time she cries. She’s exhausted and overstimulated.”
His face changed.
“Brogan said that too.”
“Brogan was right.”
“I’m never telling him.”
Despite herself, she almost smiled. “That would be my guess. I’m not a baby expert. I want to be very clear about that. If she has a fever or seems sick or you think something is actually wrong, you call a doctor, not your accountant neighbor.”
“She doesn’t have a fever.”
“Then stop doing things.” He stared at her. “Bring her down into your arms so she isn’t looking over your shoulder at the entire room. Hold her against your heart and put your hand on her back.”
He shifted Charlie carefully until she was lying against his chest, her face turned towards the dark fabric of his shirt.
“No talking. No singing. No bouncing. Nothing new. You want to be the most boring thing that’s ever happened to her.”
“I can do boring,” he said. “Ask anyone. I’m a delight, but I can do boring.”
“You’re doing talking.”
“Right. Sorry.” He mimed zipping his mouth and it should have been irritating and it wasn’t, quite.
“Now this.” She showed him, patting a slow, steady rhythm against her own chest, heartbeat-tempo. “Not a drum solo. A metronome. Boring.”
He copied it. His huge hand covered Charlie’s back shoulder to shoulder, and he patted, slow and even, and looked at Nora the entire time like a male memorizing an exam.
“Now shush her. Not shush shush shush. One long one. Like the ocean. Like a—” she searched for it “—like a radiator.”
“You want me to sound like a radiator?”
“I want you to sound like a very boring radiator.”
He made a low, steady, rushing sound, a shhhhhh pitched somewhere in his chest. It was ridiculous, this enormous tusked male doing radiator impressions in her dim living room, and it was also—
Charlie’s crying hitched.
Another cry, weaker this time. Then another.
He kept the pat going, slow and even, and the radiator sound going, low and dumb and steady.
He didn’t look triumphant. He didn’t look at her for credit.
He just bent his head over his daughter with total concentration, and the crying came apart in his arms into shudders, and the shudders came apart into wet, exhausted hiccups.
“Don’t change anything,” she murmured. “You’re doing it. Just keep being the most boring male in the county.”
“Low bar,” he said, out of the side of his mouth, so quietly it barely disturbed the air. She almost laughed, and stopped herself.
I’m not doing it. He’s doing it. He hadn’t asked how she could make Charlie stop crying.
He hadn’t handed over the baby and waited for the competent woman to fix things.
Even standing on her porch, exhausted and frightened and desperate enough to knock on the door of a woman he knew disapproved of him, he had asked whether she knew anything about babies. Then he had listened.
She had been braced for a different scene, one she knew intimately.
The charming, disorganized person ran into a problem, and the competent person stepped in.
Everyone was grateful, everyone was relieved, and somehow, without anybody quite noticing when it happened, the problem became the competent person’s responsibility.
Tonight it would be the screaming baby. Next week it would be Tuesday and Thursday because those were his practice days.
Then road games. Then groceries and doctor appointments and diapers and everything else he hadn’t thought about.
Except Rognar had never handed her the baby.
Instead he sat in her dark living room and asked questions in a whisper.
“So less is better?”
“Less is almost always better. You’re going to want to do more, because doing more feels like helping. It isn’t.”
“Say that again,” he said.
She said it again. He listened the second time the way he had listened the first time, with his head tipped and his eyes somewhere in the middle distance.
She recognized the expression. She’d seen it through the window on Saturday mornings, when he watched game tape on his porch with a cup of coffee going cold beside him. It was a male learning a system.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Less. What else?”
“Same order every night. Babies like routine. At least that’s what everything I’ve ever heard about babies says.”
“How long before that works?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“You’re a terrible expert.”
“I told you I was guessing,” she said, and he laughed, silently, so as not to wake Charlie.
“Go through it again.”
She did. He listened to it a third time with exactly the same attention, and that unsettled her more than it should have.
Charlie’s hiccups slowed. Her fist, which had been clenched against Rognar’s shirt, loosened. Her fingers spread, then curled into the fabric again without any real strength behind them. Her eyes closed. Opened. Closed again. He didn’t move. Neither did she.
When Charlie finally went down all the way, boneless, one small hand still fisted in his shirt, he did not hand her over then either.
He sat in the dark holding his daughter and looking at her.
He didn’t know Nora was watching, and that’s what did the damage.
He wasn’t giving her that charming grin that her body liked way too much and her brain didn’t trust at all.
He was simply looking at Charlie.
His enormous shoulders had curved protectively around her.
One hand rested against her back, nearly spanning it, but he didn’t move it.
He looked exhausted, completely wrung out, and underneath that, astonished.
As though the day had cracked his life open and dropped this tiny person into the middle of it, and despite the terror and the screaming and the fact that he had no idea what tomorrow looked like, he couldn’t quite believe she was his.
Something turned over in her stomach, low and warm and entirely unwelcome.
Oh, absolutely not.
She looked away and took a few deep breaths. When she looked back, he was still watching Charlie.
“You did that,” she said softly, and his eyes lifted to hers.
The grin surfaced, automatic and familiar.
“I had a pretty good—”
“Don’t.”
The grin vanished.
She leaned forward, keeping her voice low. “Don’t make it a joke. You figured out what she needed and got her to sleep. Take the win.”
For a moment he simply looked at her, then he nodded.
“Okay.”
That somehow made it worse.
She stood. “Tea?”
“Yes.”
She escaped to the kitchen. By the time she came back, Charlie hadn’t moved. He accepted the mug with one hand, her perfectly normal mug looking ridiculous in his grip. She sat across from him again, and for a while neither of them spoke.
“Her mother’s name was Valerie,” he said eventually.
“Val. We were together for a few months last year. She was here on a contract. We knew it was temporary from the beginning.” His thumb moved slowly over the handle of the mug.
“It was good. Easy. When she left, she left. No hard feelings on either side.”
“She didn’t tell you she was pregnant?”
“She didn’t tell me anything at all. She had the baby in Rochester in March.” He studied the mug. “There was a car accident three weeks ago. Charlie was with a sitter.”
“Oh, Rognar.”
“She named me in the will. That’s the part I keep coming back to.” He looked up. “She didn’t tell me for a year. But she wrote down that she wanted me to have her. I can’t put those two things together.”
“You probably don’t have to do that tonight.”
His gaze came back to her.
“No?”
“No.” She tucked one leg beneath herself. “Tonight you have to get Charlie to sleep. Then you have to get some sleep yourself. Tomorrow you can figure out tomorrow. And tomorrow you have to buy actual food, because I’ve seen your recycling and I know what’s in your kitchen.”
He laughed again, quietly, and it changed his whole face.
“You’ve been watching my recycling.”
“It’s at the end of my drive every other Wednesday. I’m not conducting surveillance, I’m being handed information.”
“What’s in it?”
“Protein shake bottles,” she said. “Approximately forty every two weeks. Two pizza boxes, three if you’ve won. Beer. And the little foil trays from the place on Route 9 that does the chicken.”
“That’s a good place.”
“It’s a fine place. It is not a food group.” She put her mug down. “She’ll be on solids properly in a month or two, and you can’t feed a baby out of a foil tray. You’re going to need a vegetable in that house.”
“I have a vegetable.”
“You do not have a vegetable.”
“I might have a vegetable,” he said. “I’d have to check.”
She had assembled a version of this male over the past year.
She had built him out of loud driveways and morning-after teammates and a smile that had never once been aimed at her seriously.
It had been an extremely tidy version. It was coming apart on her sofa at eleven o’clock at night, and she was not at all sure what she was supposed to put in its place.
His smile faded into something quieter.
“Thank you.”
The sincerity of it caught her off guard.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean it.” He looked around her dim living room and then back at her. “You didn’t ask for any of this to move in next door.”
“No,” she agreed. “I really didn’t.”
His shoulders shook, soundlessly. Then he started the complicated process of standing without waking Charlie. It took nearly a minute. She watched despite herself as he shifted his weight forward, rose, and carefully adjusted his daughter against his chest without disturbing her.
When he finally reached the front door, she opened it for him. Then he turned around, and his face was tired and unguarded and about four inches closer than it needed to be, and she had a very clear and extremely unhelpful thought about his mouth.
“Nora.”
“Yes.”
“If she starts again at two in the morning, I’m not going to knock.”
She blinked.
“I want you to know I’ll think about it,” he continued solemnly. “But I’ve decided against it. I’ll figure it out.”
She should have let him leave. Instead she heard herself say, “Knock.”
He looked down at her, and she knew she could still take it back. She didn’t.
“If you really need help,” she said. “Knock.”
His smile appeared slowly. Not the grin he used across the fence. Not the deliberately charming one that made her want to throw gardening tools at him. This one was tired and warm and entirely real.
“Good night, Bennett.”
“Good night, Stonebreaker.”
He crossed the lawn in his bare feet, Charlie sleeping against his chest. She closed the door. Then she stood with her back against it for several seconds in the quiet hall, which still smelled faintly of cedar.
This is going to be a problem.