The Baby (The Boss #5)

by Abigail Barnette

  There had been times when I’d hated Valerie. I mean, really, really hated her. But I couldn’t imagine ever feeling that way toward her, ever again. Not after seeing her so wounded. Neil went to her side, and Laurence stepped back. He and I were in the same situation; we had to watch while our partner went through this loss on their own. The least we could do is let the two of them be there for each other.

  Valerie lifted her head, tears coursing down her cheeks. She seemed to pull herself together a little, then her bottom lip trembled, and she wept, “Our baby.”

  Neil went down on one knee to put his arm around her. “I know, Vee. I know.” He was surprisingly calm as he comforted her, and I realized that no matter how close Laurence was to Valerie, Neil was the only person in the room who could possibly guess at how fragile she could be. Though their romantic relationship had ended close to Emma’s birth, they’d raised their daughter together, and that bound them in their grief.

  When we left, I was surprised again at how totally together Neil was. He shook Laurence’s hand, told him to take care of Valerie. He didn’t cry, or go to Emma’s side again. He was the definition of stoicism, somehow operating through his pain.

  Until we got downstairs and through the emergency room doors. Then, he doubled over and vomited in the bushes.

  A security guard came out the automatic sliding doors. “Do you need some help?”

  “No, he’s…” What? Not fine. Literally sick from grief? “He’s fine. He’s really upset, but he’s not… He’s fine.”

  The guard didn’t look like he believed me, and when he went back inside, still eyeing us, I reached for Neil’s arm. “Hey, we have to get out of here. That guy thinks you’re drunk or something, and I don’t think we should add a trip to the police station to our night, okay?”

  Neil straightened. His face was pale and sweaty. “Under the circumstances, perhaps you should drive,” he said, reaching into his pocket for the key fob.

  Yeah, I would just drive a ridiculously expensive supercar, then. I supposed we had a better chance of surviving the trip if the person driving wasn’t catatonic with grief.

  God, I wish I hadn’t thought that.

  The roads were still super slick, so I took it very, very easy. I hated driving in New York so much that I’d only done it twice before. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the night. There was still traffic. Neil didn’t talk on the ride, except to tell me I’d left the turn indicator on, at one point. At least it was a short drive.

  He was silent in the elevator, too. When it dinged at our floor, it startled me.

  I had to say something. The silence was going to drive me even crazier than I already felt.

  “Do you want me to get you anything?” I asked him as we stepped into the foyer.

  “Hmm?” He looked like he’d just realized I was still there. “Oh, no. Thank you. I need to make some calls.”

  “I called your sister,” I told him. “And your brothers. I didn’t want them to accidentally hear about it from someone else, first.”

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

  “I didn’t mean to step on your toes. I just thought…since everyone would be waking up soon…”

  “No, of course. That was…” He trailed off.

  I waited to see if he would say anything else. I heard the clock on the mantle in the library softly chime the hour. It was three.

  “Why don’t we get some sleep?” I asked, putting my hand on his arm. “There’s going to be a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “Yes, you’re right. Of course. You’re right.” He nodded, but he didn’t move.

  I’ve been afraid before. When I found out Neil had cancer. When he’d been in isolation after his transplant. But none of that had been as scary as the moment we were in, now, and I didn’t know how to deal with anything.

  He shook himself out of the trance he’d lapsed into. “Go to bed. I just need time to myself.”

  “Are you sure?” I already felt myself backing away from him. It was like his grief was some kind of repellent. I couldn’t get any closer to him, though I ached to help him.

  He nodded.

  What was I supposed to say? “No, I don’t want to leave because I feel like I shouldn’t?” I had to respect his needs, right? Even if it made me feel hollow and gross and like I was doing the exact wrong thing?

  “Yeah. If you need me…” I didn’t finish. I turned and walked to the bedroom.

  I wasn’t even tired.

  Just being near Neil made me feel like I was intruding, having the closed door between us made me feel like I’d accomplished stepping back. But what was I going to do, when I was this keyed up? Stand in the middle of the room, paralyzed by disbelief all night?

  I should have been tired, right?

  His scream startled me, raised hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck. It was a sound born of unimaginable pain. The pressure of it had to have been overwhelming, and now that it had burst, it poured out on loud, raw bleats of agony. I clenched my hands together into one fist and pressed it hard against my stomach and the sinking dread I’d become too familiar with in the face of Neil’s emotional pain.

  When his mother had died, he’d taken too many pills, not because he’d been suicidal, but because he’d been reckless. But now…

  Panic clawed up my throat. I ran out of the bedroom, down the short hall to the foyer. I knew where he would be. The door to Emma’s old room, the one she’d used as recently as before her wedding, was closed, and light showed in the gap at the bottom. I reached for the handle.

  The door was locked.

  “Neil?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Can you open the door?”

  He didn’t respond.

  I tried again. “I just want to know that you’re okay. I’ll leave you alone, I promise, but I’m worried about you. Unlock the door, please.”

  Still no answer.

  Something in me snapped and filled my head with horrible scenarios. Neil could actually kill himself, and not through reckless pharmaceutical mixing to dull the pain. Losing Emma was like losing almost thirty years of his life. Nothing would distract him from that, and he wouldn’t be able to handle that loss of control.

  I’d just lost my stepdaughter. I couldn’t lose my husband, too.

  “Neil, please!” I shouted, slapping my palm against the door. I desperately pushed on the handle; I would break it if I had to. “Open the door! Open the goddamn door! Please!”

  Something in the handle sprung, and the door came open. I thought for sure I would see Neil with slit wrists, lying unconscious on the floor. Instead, he sat beside Emma’s bed, clutching something to his chest. It was a cardigan she’d left behind when she’d moved out. She’d always meant to come back and get the rest of her stuff from the apartment, but she’d never really gotten around to it. Now, the few articles of clothing she’d left behind were scattered across the floor, some still on the hangers. One folding closet door stood open, half-detached from its track.

  I spotted the bottle in the center of the floor. Dalmore, judging from the stag on the bottle. The top was off. There had been a glass, too, but it was in pieces, now, beneath a wet stain on the wallpaper.

  My knees gave out. The frantic adrenaline that had coursed through my veins deserted me. I dropped to the carpet and sat back on my heels.

  “Don’t lecture me!” he snapped, lashing out at me since he couldn’t do anything about what was really hurting him.

  It didn’t matter. I couldn’t lecture him, or council him, or even comfort him. There was a tightly compressed ball of pain where my heart should have been, and it sucked all my words and feelings into it like a black hole.

  And, God help me. I pushed the bottle closer to him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There’s always a second, right after you wake up, when you forget that someone you love is gone. Which was why I was so glad I woke before Neil did. When the shades rolled up—at nine, because we’d forgotten to turn off the
timer—he stirred beside me, and I held my breath. His eyes came open, and he squinted at the ceiling. Then, I saw it, the return to reality from the respite sleep had provided.

  He covered his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I forgot.”

  “I know.” I rolled to my side and put my arm over his chest. There was nothing I could do but be there beside him. I kissed his shoulder and held back my own tears. I could fall apart later, when I was alone. Neil needed every ounce of my strength, now.

  But he didn’t break down. There was no repeat of last night’s desperate screams, no tears. He was just rubbing his eyes.

  “I should call the lawyer,” he said, sitting up. He stifled a yawn behind his hand. “And Valerie. I need to see how she is.”

  His business-as-usual demeanor threw me so off guard I couldn’t get my head on right. I managed to stammer, “M-maybe you don’t want to call Valerie this early.”

  All Neil would do was try to be strong for her, and that was the last thing he needed to be doing. I had a suspicion Valerie would try to be strong for him, too, with similar negative results.

  He nodded in agreement after a little “hmm,” of consideration. Then he stood and walked to the dressing room. I stared after him long after I heard the bathroom door shut.

  What the hell was happening? Emma had just died. Sure, Neil dealt with basically everything by erecting a massive wall of denial, so I should have expected a little of this. But his daughter…

  My chest ached. I wanted to roll over and scream into my pillow, because I knew what was coming. The size of the next meltdown would be directly proportionate to the amount of denial Neil managed to exert over himself.

  I didn’t get a chance for a good, cleansing scream, though. Neil’s cell rang, and his lawyer’s number flashed on the screen. I scrambled across the bed, flailing for the phone, and somehow managed to answer before the caller hung up.

  “Mr. Elwood,” the voice on the line said. “Let me express my most sincere condolences—”

  “This is Neil’s wife,” I interrupted. I didn’t want to hear anybody’s condolences, even if they hadn’t been intended for me.

  “I’m sorry. My deepest condolences to you, as well.” He paused. “Is Mr. Elwood available?”

  “Not at the moment.” Because he had been replaced by the avatar of Okay-Neil. And when actual Neil came back, he wasn’t going to be able to take a phone call. He would be screaming and wrecking up the place, again. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Yes, this concerns you, as well…” The lawyer’s voice trailed off, as though he were reading something. “There is a social worker from the State of New York who will be contacting you within the hour regarding Olivia Van der Graf…”

  “Social worker?” My heart shuddered to a stop. Social worker meant DHS, right? Investigations of abuse or neglect? Something like that?

  Oh, god, they weren’t going to put Olivia in foster care, were they? They couldn’t do that when there were family members who could take care of her. Neil would burn down the entire city.

  “Yes, it seems that in their will, Mr. Van der Graf and Mrs. Elwood-Van der Graf appointed you and your husband as legal guardians.”

  I developed sudden tinnitus. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you and Mr. Elwood will be responsible for the child, in a legal capacity, as though you were her parents.” He paused. “Were you aware that you had been named as guardians in their will?”

  “I didn’t know they had a will.” Maybe I had known that. It seemed like I’d heard Neil badgering them both about it, at one point. “Just us? Not Valerie Stern, or Michael’s parents?”

  “Just Neil Elwood and his wife, Sophie Scaife.”

  In the bathroom, the shower started.

  “Okay. You have my cell number, right?” I asked, chewing my lip and casting nervous glances toward the bathroom as though I were smuggling drugs through an airport. The lawyer repeated the number back to me, and I said, “I need you to please call that number about any of this. Give it to the social worker, too. I’ll deal with all of this, because Neil is…”

  “I understand,” the lawyer assured me.

  We hung up, and I checked the time. He’d said the social worker would be contacting us within the hour.

  I had to talk to Neil, now.

  I grabbed a t-shirt and a pair of panties as I walked through the closet and pulled them on when I stepped through the bathroom door. Steam fogged the edges of the glass, but I could still see Neil standing under the spray, his forehead against the wall. When I said his name, he raised his head and cleared his throat, donning the mantle of Okay-Neil in an instant.

  “Now is…not a good time, Sophie. I want to be alone.”

  “I know. And, under normal circumstances, I promise, I would leave you alone, right now.” I took a breath. “The lawyer called, and…a social worker will be coming by this morning. With Olivia.”

  Neil tipped his head back, looking to the ceiling, but he said nothing.

  “We were named in the will,” I went on. “Just us. I guess we’re her guardians, now?”

  He cleared his throat. “Right. Well, that makes it much simpler, doesn’t it? No fight.”

  “The person is going to call me within the hour. I don’t know if she’ll bring the baby stuff—”

  “We’ll figure all of that out,” Neil interrupted. “If you’ll excuse me?”

  “Yeah, sure.” I backed out of the room and closed the door behind me. I waited a beat. Even over the sound of the running water, I heard his sobs.

  I leaned my forehead against the door. I hated this. We’d been on this merry-go-round before. Shut down, shut out. It was how he dealt with everything. Then, I had to somehow claw my way back in.

  How did I do that, when this pain was so immense and so private?

  I heard my phone’s generic ringtone from the other room, and I ran to it, my hands shaking. Something in me panicked, like Olivia would be taken from us if we missed that first phone call.

  “Hello?” I gasped.

  “Ms. Scaife?” the voice on the other end asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Amanda Thomas.I’m a social worker for King’s county. I’m calling regarding the placement of Olivia Van der Graf.”

  “Right, we’re, um… My husband and I—” Stop. Calm down. Get your shit together. “Obviously, this is a very difficult time for my husband. Olivia is his granddaughter.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the woman cut in. “Which is why I’d like to make sure this goes as smoothly as possible for everyone. I understand that the child is at home at present?”

  “Yes. With the au pair.” I bit my thumbnail. Should we have gone over and picked her up last night, after all? What were we thinking? “Can she just bring her?”

  “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 wa
s 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.