LITMIR.BIZ

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You know that. She’s due for her bath.”

      “I’ll drop Jodie home when she’s ready. She’s right. We need to talk. Have some space.”

      They’d worked it all out between the three of them, while Jodie was still struggling to lift an arm to brush a strand of damp hair from her eyes. She was staying here with Dev to talk. The baby was going back with Mom and Elin. Going back before she, the mother, had even touched her.

      She wanted to argue the plan, but the words wouldn’t come, so in the end she let it happen, and when the baby carrier was buckled into the car and Mom and Elin had driven away, she felt so relieved, and so ashamed of the relief, and so horribly, horribly tired. “I can’t—” she said to Dev.

      “I know you can’t talk yet. Sleep first.”

      “Two naps a day. I’m like—” She stopped.

      A baby.

      My baby.

      “Just rest.”

      “Why aren’t you in New York? Tell me why. In simple words. Because it seems to me that you didn’t have to still be here. Obviously DJ is being taken care of. Obviously she’s loved. Obviously I have the support. So why?”

      He looked at her steadily, with some of the anger he’d clearly felt toward Elin and Mom still simmering below the surface. He seemed to be thinking hard before he chose his words.

      “Because she’s my daughter.” The last two words came out with a simmering intensity. “Because we’re a family. You and me and DJ. Three of us. That’s not negotiable. Three of us, not two.”

      “A family …” Jodie echoed foolishly, tasting the word and not feeling sure of how it felt in her mouth.

      “Not a regular family, for sure.”

      “No …”

      “But DJ needs a family of some kind….” He paused for a moment, and she filled in the words he didn’t say, in her head. And not necessarily a whole cluster of over-involved grandparents and aunts. “I’m right here in the picture and I’m not going to go away. And we have a heck of a lot to do and talk and think about, to decide how that’s going to work.”

       Chapter Four

      Jodie woke to the smell of something delicious coming from Dev’s kitchen. The daylight had begun to fade, which meant she must have slept a good three hours this time. She felt disoriented and not in full possession of either her body or her brain. It was just the way she’d felt coming out of the coma. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane—eerily quiet, with a sense of danger all around.

      She gave herself a couple of minutes to regroup, then sat up and eventually stood, steadier on her feet than she would have expected. As before, Dev had left her walking frame within reach, and the quiet, considerate nature of this small gesture almost brought her to tears.

      She could hear him in the kitchen, chopping something on a wooden board. The delicious aroma announced itself as beef sizzled in a pan. She’d had a crush on him thirteen years ago, she’d slept with him three times, and she’d had no idea until now that he could cook. It didn’t surprise her, though. When Devlin Browne put his mind to something …

      He heard her—the rubbery tap of the frame on the floor—as she reached the kitchen doorway, and he turned. “Hi. Better?”

      “Think so. It’s crazy. To need all that sleep.”

      “Your brain is still healing.”

      “So I’ve been told.”

      “I’m making brain food. A beef-and-vegetable stir-fry, full of iron and vitamins.”

      “It smells great.”

      “Ready in a couple of minutes. Sit down.” He nodded at the wooden kitchen table, then moved to pull out a chair for her.

      “No, don’t,” she said quickly, taking one hand off the frame to reach for the chair herself. “I’m fine. I hate—” my family hovering over me “—too much help.”

      “Duly noted.” He turned back to the stove, tossed in slivers of onion and red bell pepper, sticks of carrot and celery, lengths of green bean. The pan hissed and made a cloud of aromatic steam, filling the silence made by their lack of conversation.

      He seemed to understand instinctively that she didn’t want to talk yet—or not about anything important, anyway—and to her surprise the interlude of silence between them felt easy and right. She didn’t have that uncomfortable itch to break the quiet with a rush of words that people often experience in the company of someone new.

      Not that Dev was new.

      But this felt new.

      Untested.

      Three of us. We’re a family, he’d said.

      Anything but the usual kind.

      She watched him. Just couldn’t help it. The way his neat, jeans-clad butt moved as he tossed the contents of the pan. The way his elbow stuck out and his shoulder lifted. He added the cooked meat and leaned back a little as another cloud of hissing steam came up. There was rice in a steamer on the countertop, and a jug of orange juice clinking with a thick layer of cubed ice.

      Nine months ago, he hadn’t wanted a serious relationship, but now it was as if she’d simply blinked and woken up to find herself here, in his kitchen, and the mother of his child.

      Connected.

      Yet not.

       Are we dating?

      She felt they needed to talk about it—for hours surely—but had no idea what to say, what to suggest. He was the one who’d had time to think. The surge of chemistry she’d felt earlier at the family barbecue couldn’t compete with her shock and disorientation. It hummed in the background of her awareness, but she didn’t know what to do with it, just wished it would go away.

      “Is there a schedule?” she blurted out.

      “A schedule?”

      “Of who takes care of—of DJ.”

      DJ. That’s my baby’s name. Well, it’s not her name. It’s what we’re calling her in the interim.

      A crazy litany of baby names began to scroll in her head, the ones she’d vaguely thought, over the years, that she liked. Caroline, Amanda, Genevieve, Laura, Jessica, Megan, Anna … The idea that it might be up to her to make a decision, replace temporary DJ with something different and permanent that would belong to the baby her whole life, was daunting. A huge, confusing responsibility that she didn’t feel equipped to handle.

      “Your family has her when I’m at work,” Devlin answered. “Mainly your mom. She’s set up Elin’s room for a nursery.”

      “That’s why Lucy had to sleep in my room today.” An image flashed in her head of her sister’s old room with the door firmly closed. Even if she had seen inside, she would have assumed it had been set up for Maddy’s baby girl.

      “But Elin and Lisa have her sometimes, too. And then I pick her up on my way home.”

      “The night shift.”

      “That’s right. I expect she’ll spend more nights at your parents’ place now.” Now that you’re home, he meant.

      “That’s why you look tired.” A rush of tenderness and guilt ran through her. Those creases around his eyes, and she hadn’t been here to help. Crazy to feel that it was her fault, and yet at some level she did. What kind of a mother slept through her whole pregnancy and didn’t even waken to give birth? What kind of a mother had an eleven-week-old baby that she’d never touched and held?

      He made a wry face. “Yeah, she’s not exactly sleeping

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