The Baby (The Boss #5)

by Abigail Barnette

  “I’m looking forward to it.” I was, even if it sounded a little unorthodox for someone’s psychiatrist to visit a small European country with them. But whatever. Stranger things happened in rich people world, and I was going to have Neil back.

  “I love you…so much.” He laughed quietly. “And I’ve missed you.”

  “You know what I’ve missed the most?” I asked.

  He snorted. “I’m sure I do.”

  “No, perv!” My laugh was like a recording of an extinct bird’s call. That’s how long it had been since I’d felt so happy. “I’ve missed sitting in bed watching T.V. with you.”

  “And we can catch up on all of that,” he promised. “I need to go get some sleep, we’re filling out all of the discharge papers early in the morning, then we’ll be flying out of Montreal tomorrow evening.”

  “Okay. Sleep well, baby. I love you.”

  “I love you. I will tell you how much the first chance I get.”

  When we hung up, my heart pounded. There was so much I was going to have to do. I breathed a sigh of relief that Olivia already had a passport from her trip to London with Valerie, because that would have been a nightmare. But getting a nursery set up there, dragging all our stuff…

  They have babies in Iceland, you idiot, you can get the stuff you need there.

  Damn it! I wanted something to plan or panic about. Neil was coming back to me.

  I had to make it perfect.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I came down the jetway steps with extreme caution, my heart in my throat until Olivia and I stood on solid ground. I’d trained my eyes on my feet, terrified to miss a step and fall while I was carrying her, so I didn’t see the car door open. When I looked up, there he was.

  Neil stood beside the sleek black SUV, hands in his pockets. He wore a navy button down, untucked with the sleeves rolled up, olive green cargo shorts, and sunglasses. Only someone who grew up in a cold climate could understand that outfit when it was like sixty degrees out. He smiled wide and met us as we walked toward him.

  “There are my girls!” he called. As he got closer, I saw the stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved in days, but he didn’t look haggard. When I hugged him, though, I could feel how much mass he’d lost during his hospitalization. It made him seem weirdly fragile.

  It didn’t matter. I didn’t want to let him go. Between us, Olivia shrieked with delight. Any fear that she wouldn’t remember her afi had clearly been unfounded. She grabbed for his glasses, and he pushed them up on his head.

  “Afi is so sorry,” he murmured to her, kissing her forehead and the tip of her nose. “I’m going to try not to leave you like that, again.”

  “She’s fine, Neil. We’re all fine.” I blinked back tears. “Thank you.”

  “What for?” he asked, kissing my cheek as he squeezed both of us closer.

  “For doing so much hard work. For choosing to stay with us.”

  Tears rose in his eyes, and he gave me his half-smile, the one I had fallen in love with so many years ago. “Come on. I’ve got supper waiting for us.”

  He’d already installed a brand new car seat in the back of the SUV, and I stepped past him to buckle her in like a pro.

  “You’ve gotten quite good at that,” he said with genuine surprise.

  “You’ll be shocked at some of the stuff I’m good at, now,” I informed him, backing carefully out of the range of the doorframe before I stood. “Like bringing a second outfit in the diaper bag, every single time.”

  “Oh dear,” he replied, and I knew I didn’t have to elaborate. I didn’t want to mar this joyful occasion with a recounting of catastrophic diaper explosions.

  The streets of Reykjavik looked so much different on this visit than they had the first time I’d been in the city. We’d been here for New Year’s Eve once. It had been bitterly cold, bathed in ice, and covered in snow. Exactly like the winters where I grew up. In the summer, though, people strolled the streets with their dogs—which, Neil informed me, required loads of paperwork to own—and relaxed in outdoor cafés. There was a shocking amount of green in the city, on trees I hadn’t noticed in their winter nakedness. When we pulled up to the house, I was delighted to see huge flowering shrubs lining the poured cement walkway.

  Since Neil had driven us, we were responsible for getting our own luggage—and Olivia’s—into the house. I’d grown spoiled and soft not dealing with that sort of thing.

  “Oh no,” I gasped, slumping over my suitcase. “No, something bad has happened.”

  “You stopped working out because I wasn’t there to suggest you keep up your routine, and now, you have no upper body strength?” he teased. “Leave them a moment.”

  I almost objected until I remembered that we weren’t in New York, but a city with a crime rate that was negligible by comparison. Nobody would steal my brutally heavy suitcase while Neil took Olivia inside.

  The house in Reykjavik could not have been further, design wise, from any of the other residences we owned. Its ultra-modern style clashed a bit with the exuberant theme of the city, which boasted brightly colored roofs, but the house fit in well enough with the modern office and apartment buildings around it. The facade was gray concrete, with plate windows in random patterns that made no sense from the outside but looked perfect from within. Inside, the first floor was open to the third, towering above us. To the right, a floating staircase with a hip-height glass panel and brushed steel railing led up to the second floor. That level housed the living room, as well as a half-enclosed section with some guest rooms. One of those, Neil had informed me, was now a nursery, but as I looked around the sleek polished concreted floors and open backed stairs, I realized the shelf-life of this house was short once Olivia started walking. Crawling would be bad enough; I mentally calculated the gap between the floors and the glass half walls on the upper levels.

  Neil handed Olivia off to me, and I carried her upstairs. The bottoms of my feet tingled with every step as I imagined the worst falling scenarios possible. Sure, I’d gotten way more comfortable caring for Olivia, but I always had this constant loop of horrible things that could happen running through my mind. Like an old movie newsreel, but in a theatre built of my worst nightmares.

  Parenting fucked you up.

  Though the master bedroom on the third floor was a bridge-style loft open on both sides—which would be a problem when Olivia was old enough to be traumatized hearing her grandfather and I having sex, for sure—you could walk right up to the two-story windows in the living room. The house gave me vertigo like nothing else I’d ever experienced, but it had an amazing view of the bay and the mountains.

  “Look, Olivia,” I murmured to her, pointing to the crystalline blue sky outside. “This is your home, too.”

  Though Neil had been born in England, he’d spent a lot of his childhood here in Iceland, where his father had been born and raised. Neil had brought Emma here as often as he could. She’d been able to speak the language and had thought of the country as her third home. The Elwoods were pretty lucky to be able to consider the entire world their backyard.

  The fact that we could give that to Olivia choked me up a little. We couldn’t bring Emma and Michael back, no matter how much we wanted to. What we could do was raise their daughter to be just as amazing and her mother had been. Neil had been a wonderful father; he could do it again, now that he was getting better. As it so happened, I wasn’t too bad at the mom-ish thing, either.

  Neil brought our stuff in, and he actually whistled as he did it. The simple, normal domesticity put some kind of life into him.

  At least, I hoped that was what it was. I wasn’t stupid enough that I wouldn’t check for drugs stashed around the place later.

  That was an upsetting thought. A rush of anger filled my stomach with hot acid. I was probably getting an ulcer from the whiplash emotions I’d been subjected to for weeks.

  When he came up to the living room, I took a deep breath to banish my anger. Put it in
a bubble and blow it away, Scaife. We were here to heal and become a family, again. There was no sense exploding, now.

  I stood behind Olivia as she navigated up and down the length of the burnt orange couch, her tiny feet lost in the thick, wooly area rug.

  “Look at her!” Neil exclaimed, covering his mouth with both hands. His eyes went all watery with pride.

  “Yup, she’s cruising, now. And look.” I reached for one of her chubby little hands and lifted it from the safety of the cushion. Then, I let go, and she peered up at me, her little red nose wrinkling as she snorted with delight at balancing one-handed.

  She sat down, hard.

  “We need to keep her confined to this general area,” I lamented, gesturing to all the concrete. “I’m afraid she’s going to split her melon on this.”

  “Mmm.” He frowned. “Perhaps, it would have been better to stay in London.”

  “Right, the town house with the hundred bajillion staircases,” I vetoed him.

  “Langhurst Court, then?” He sounded like he was already making plans to pack us up again, but like hell I’d be going to that mausoleum-slash-Downton-Abbey monstrosity any time soon. Neil loved the place, but it gave me the severe creeps.

  “How about no? I don’t think Skeletonham Palace is an appropriate place for a baby.” I paused. “Or anything that isn’t a murder-mystery weekend where someone actually dies.”

  “You can’t avoid it forever,” he warned, adding an overblown evil laugh.

  Olivia squealed and held her hands out.

  “Oh, is Afi funny?” he asked, reaching down to scoop her into his arms. He lifted her above his head and looked up to kiss her, and I tried to picture him doing the same thing with Emma as a much younger man.

  I wanted Emma to be here for this. I wanted to see Michael lifting Olivia up the same way.

  “I love you.”

  The words had come out without even thinking. I didn’t have to. Being there with Neil and seeing how much he cherished Olivia—who had, over the course of a few months, become the most important human being in my life—gave me hope that he really could be the man I married again. Or, a version of that man, who was a little dinged up but still functional.

  “I love you, too,” he said, his throat moving as he swallowed. “I can’t believe I almost missed this.”

  “Missed what?”

  “Having another day with the two of you.” He pressed his face to the top of Olivia’s head, closing his eyes. She snuggled her face into his neck and yawned. God, I loved baby yawns.

  “She looks like she needs a nap,” I said, though I was reluctant to part the two of them. “Or maybe just to go to bed. What time is it?”

  “It’s seven p.m.,” Neil said, and I groaned.

  “Arctic Circle?” I asked despondently, and he nodded grimly in reply. I pressed the heels of my hands to my forehead. “I’m never going to sleep! The sun is up like it’s noon!”

  “We’re not actually in the Arctic Circle. It will get dimmer around midnight,” he said, then added, quieter, “for about three hours.”

  “Fantastic.” I got up and went to him, intending to take Olivia from his arms.

  His hold on her tightened, just a little, and he gave me an embarrassed look. “I’m sorry. It’s just been so long—”

  “I completely understand. When she went to England with Valerie, I almost went out of my mind. How about I get her bottle and her jammies, and you can put her down?”

  He nodded gratefully, and I traipsed off to get Olivia’s things. When I passed my suitcase at the bottom of the stairs, I groaned. Unlike the townhouse in London, there was no elevator to help me here.

  Olivia’s mini-suitcase was much easier to handle. I opened it and rummaged around for a sleeper—despite the fact that it was June, the house was still kind of chilly—then fished a bottle and some formula from the diaper bag. It was so much easier and quicker than thawing donor breast milk, especially once Mom assured me that mixing the powder with hot tap water was just as safe as using bottled, filtered stuff. She’d also had to convince me that I wasn’t actively abusing Olivia by letting her drink formula, despite what the parenting message boards said.

  I practically skipped up the stairs. Sure, we had Mariposa back home, but I’d still felt a lot of weird pressure being the only parent in the house. Now that Neil was with us again, I panicked less and was more sure of myself. My Pokémon evolution from Child Free to Stand-In Mother hadn’t quite reached its final stage yet, no matter how much smarter I’d gotten with regards to baby care.

  Neil had chosen Emma’s former bedroom as Olivia’s nursery. The burnt orange walls matched the color scheme of the entire house, and the crib was sturdy, black, and modern.

  “Wow, this is very…coordinated,” I said as I stepped inside. Neil sat in the black enameled rocking chair by the window, Olivia fussing in his arms. To my relief, I noted that soft white wall-to-wall carpeted the floor. I handed him the bottle. “She’s on a bunch of solids now, but she really wants this when she’s sleepy.”

  He tucked her into the crook of his arm, and she reached up, grabbing the bottle and his hand and pulling them both toward her mouth.

  “She’s gotten so strong,” he mused, his expression as full of wonder as it had been on the day she’d been born. “I can’t believe I’ve missed so much.”

  “You’ve got the chance to make it up, now,” I said, as though it were that easy to brush off his sadness at the loss of that time. “Like, while we’re here, for example. You can get up in the night with her.”

  He never tore his eyes from her face. “I would love to.”

  They needed some alone time to get reacquainted. “I’m going to go get unpacked.”

  Rather than try to carry the whole suitcase upstairs, I unzipped it in the foyer and lifted out a stack of clothes; I’d just make several trips until I’d put everything away. I had no idea how long we were staying, and I really didn’t want to live out of my luggage. But I also wasn’t used to climbing long flights of stairs, so I was only half done with the job when I collapsed, fully winded, on the couch in the living room.

  Neil came back from the nursery, his hands in the pockets of his jeans as he walked toward me. “I’ve missed that. Holding her while she falls asleep.”

  “She missed you, too.” I stretched, every muscle in my body protesting. Even in a private plane with plenty of room to sprawl out, flying destroyed my body. I groaned with relief.

  “I suppose now is the time when we talk,” he said, sitting on the couch beside me, not quite touching me. “And I do copious amounts of apologizing.”

  Though my first instinct was to tell him not to worry about it, I realized how silly that would be. I couldn’t hold Neil solely responsible for his actions; he was mentally ill, after all, and we both had to accept that if we were going to have any kind of life from this point out. But I also couldn’t give him blanket forgiveness when his actions really had hurt me.

  So, I didn’t say anything and waited for him to go on.

  He leaned his elbows on his knees and slouched forward, rubbing his face with his hands. They muffled his voice. “Oh, I don’t even know where I would start.”

  “How about we start with the coke and the pills and the booze hidden all over the house,” I suggested. “That’s an easy apology. I had to call Valerie for help ferreting all that stuff out.”

  He dropped his hands. “Valerie?”

  “She’s the only one who really knows your history with this kind of thing. It was easier than trying to explain it fresh to someone else.” I shrugged. “We had to tear the house apart. How long have you been stockpiling all that stuff?”

  He couldn’t or wouldn’t look me in the eye. “The alcohol is new. The pills…some of those are new. The cocaine…I’ve been doing that since my mother died. Not daily. Only now and then.”

  Over a year ago? My heart plummeted. “But you did so much work with the addiction thing. You were making progress
and everything.”

  “Not as much as you and Doctor Harris believed, I’m afraid.” Neil sounded embarrassed, and I guess I would have been, too, if he’d caught me in a lie.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Or him? Or anyone? We could have helped you,” I reminded him.

  “Because everyone kept telling me how proud they were of me, how well I was doing… I felt as though I would be letting all of you down.” He shook his head. “I’m not suggesting that makes it all right. I know it doesn’t.”

  I tentatively reached over and put my hand on his back. It was so difficult to know what kind of contact he would welcome or reject, having been apart for so long. “That’s a lot of pressure. I get that. And I’m sorry if I contributed to it. I was just so excited to see you turning things around. I guess I turned a blind eye a little bit.”

  “You didn’t turn a blind eye. I blinded you.” He sighed. “I have done my level best to keep secrets from you, to hide things. And it isn’t because I don’t want you to share my life with me. Please don’t ever think that. Even now, after all this time apart, you’re the person in my life to whom I’m closest.”

  “Well, to be honest, Neil…” I felt bad for even saying it, but it had to be said. “I’m not sure how you can feel that way. If you were lying to me all the time, how could you have felt close to me?”

  “Because I was only lying about the…addiction.” The word sounded hard for him to say. “I am deeply ashamed of myself. For so many things.”

  “How much of you, the you that you were showing me, was really you?” I asked. “Give me a percentage.”

  “Oh, Sophie…” His face crumpled, his eyes filling with tears.

  I leaned my head on his shoulder. “If you said five percent, I would still be here with you. Because I would still love that five percent enough to stay.”

  He put his arms around me, and I held him, too.

  * * * *

  My first few days in Reykjavik were eye opening. It was far different living in the country than it had been just visiting it. With the baby at home, Neil and I couldn’t go out to run simple errands as a pair without a lot of hassle. My total non-grasp of the language was reason enough for me to stay home with Olivia while Neil did all the running around, but staying inside constantly would drive me up a wall. I was not a creature who could tolerate isolation, especially after experiencing it for so long. There were many opportunities to humiliate myself in public, even when I was speaking English to people. I felt like I had “stupid American” emblazoned across my forehead.