Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108905 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 545(@200wpm)___ 436(@250wpm)___ 363(@300wpm)
“If you think that’s a good idea, I don’t see why not. But I do need to see you, to have you sign some paperwork. Would this afternoon be all right?”
Nothing is all right! I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I calmly set up a time to meet the woman. I’d just hung up when Neil emerged from the walk-in, dressed casually in a baby blue sweater and a pair of comfortable-looking, faded jeans.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” he asked, not confrontational but confused.
I looked down at my t-shirt and panties. “I just haven’t had the chance.”
“Well, get up, put something on,” he urged, and now, he was being a little confrontational.
On my way to the closet, I asked, “Where are we going? The social worker—”
“Sod the bloody social worker,” he snapped. “I’m going to get my granddaughter.”
“Okay,” I agreed easily, but my mind whirled. I grabbed a pair of jeans and pulled them on. “But how? You drove the Keurig here—”
“Koenigsegg,” he wearily corrected me.
I didn’t complain. It was the most normal part of the day so far. “You drove that here. You said it was a poor choice because of the high performance tires.”
“I’m a very cautious driver, Sophie, I learned in—”
“You learned in Iceland. Yeah. Did they teach you how to fit a car seat into a Scandinavian supercar in Iceland?” I demanded. “A car seat that we don’t even know if we have, because it could have been—”
Nope. I wasn’t going to finish that sentence if someone held a gun to my head. But Neil had heard the rest of it, whether I’d said it or not, and it seemed to knock some sense into him.
“You’re right,” he said finally. “We need to be calm and organized about this. About this above anything else.”
“Right,” I agreed cautiously.
He took a deep breath. “I want to be calm and organized with my granddaughter in my arms.”
“Fine. Then, let’s…” Decamp to Emma and Michael’s house? Painful Reminders R Us? But there wasn’t a way to get around going there if we intended to go to Olivia, right now. “I’ll get my coat.”
We took a cab to Emma’s house. On the ride, I called the social worker and informed her of our plans. I put special emphasis on the car seat.
If the thought of going to Emma and Michael’s home had made my stomach upset before, arriving made me straight up seasick. I thought about Neil vomiting in the bushes the night before and prayed I didn’t do exactly that.
Neil and I both stood on the sidewalk in front of the stoop. We were frozen, but not from the blistering cold.
“I’m getting up the courage,” Neil said with a sharp breath. “You can go ahead of me.”
“Do you want me to stay with you?”
He shook his head.
I went up the steps.
Emma and Michael had, with help from Neil, bought a lovely three-bedroom house on East 30th. In the summer, the boxes on the garden level windows had overflowed with shade-loving flowers. Someone had cleared the snow from the stoop and spread salt, and it crunched beneath my feet as I headed up to the door.
No one would take as much pride in this house as Emma and Michael had.
I rang the bell, and Laura, the au pair, answered immediately, her eyes red. Though we’d only met briefly and on one occasion, she threw her arms around me. I looked over my shoulder and ushered her inside.
“Hey, maybe don’t…hug Neil,” I said quietly as I closed the door behind me. “He’s…”
“No, no. I understand. I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just…”
She was just unemployed and soon-to-be homeless.
This was the kind of thing we would have to think about from now on. The mundane details that death left behind. There was no way Neil could deal with all those things, right now. Who would it fall to? Me? I couldn’t handle that, either, just from inexperience.
“I get it,” I assured her.
The house looked exactly the way I imagined a house would look when two tired working parents and a baby lived in it. I knew they had a housekeeper—yet another person we’d have to break the news to and unemploy—but life had happened here, evidenced by stacks of diapers on the coffee table, a basket of unfolded laundry, a plate with crumbs on it balanced on the arm of the easy chair.
This was their life, existing without them.
The door opened, and Neil entered quickly, getting the shock over with like jumping into a cold pool. “Where’s Olivia?”
“Upstairs,” Laura said. “She didn’t sleep well. Even when they go out, they’re usually there in the night to feed her. They like to do that themselves.”
Hearing her refer to Emma and Michael in the present tense was almost more painful than thinking of them in the past tense.