“No, it’s okay.” She thought for a long minute. “All right. I really do need to sleep a little bit.”
He took a seat next to her and she carefully handed off the baby who settled into the crook of his arm without a fuss. His soft milk smell and soft round heft sparked a hundred memories of doing the same thing for his mom while she tried to get dinner on the table or take a shower.
Instead of getting up, Tessa sat there watching him with the same expression she used to wear when puzzling through a thorny technical problem.
“Why are you doing this?” she finally asked.
“Because you came over to my house after a long day of work and put furniture together for hours. Go take a nap.”
After another hesitation, she nodded, mumbled a tired, “Thanks,” and climbed the stairs.
Calvin finished his bottle shortly, and Ethan hunted around for a burp cloth, finally rummaging through a kitchen drawer for a clean dishtowel. He hadn’t done a ton of burping, but he knew the basics, so he gave Calvin’s back some rhythmic pats until a little belch escaped him a couple of minutes later. He settled back on the sofa with the baby on his shoulder and within a minute, the baby’s limbs loosened and grew heavy with sleep. Ethan glanced at the ceiling and hoped that Tessa had found sleep as easily. He hadn’t heard any stirring for a few minutes.
When Tessa woke up, he’d fetch his laptop so they could work, but for now, he did an awkward one-handed login to his new work account from his phone and settled in to read, wishing he could take notes but not enough to risk disturbing Calvin.
Almost an hour had passed when someone knocked on the door, three sharp raps. He tensed, waiting to see if it had woken Calvin, but he didn’t move at all. He wanted to ignore the knock, but what if they rang next and woke both the sleepers in the house? Also, what if it was the delinquent sister? Tessa might want her back, but he wasn’t at all sure a mom who dumped her kid should be able to waltz back in.
He rose as quickly and carefully as he could and touched the knob just as whoever it was knocked again, this time even louder. He yanked the door open on the third knock, prepared to hush whoever it was.
“Please keep it dow—” but the words died on his lips.
Mary Beale stood on Tessa’s doorstep, and she looked mad as hell.
Chapter Five
The world always took a minute to make sense to Tessa after a nap, like it was a puzzle reassembling itself as her brain came back online.
She sat up and blinked. She’d been so tired when Ethan sent her upstairs that she had collapsed on top of her covers and crashed.
Ethan. She blinked again, the last puzzle piece locking into place. Oh, boy. She needed to rescue him. She checked her phone for any messages from Rachel. She did it several times an hour, terrified she’d miss her sister’s call. Nothing. But the time display told her she’d been asleep for two hours.
Nice.
She pushed off the bed and went downstairs to find Ethan. Instead, she found her boss sitting on her sofa.
“Mary?”
Mary glanced over her shoulder to where Tessa stood at the foot of the stairs. “Good. You’re here.”
“Um, yes? I live here. What are you doing here?” Then as she realized how quiet it was, a more pressing question occurred to her. “Where’s the baby?” She hurried forward.
“He’s right here,” Mary said just as Tessa spotted him in his baby carrier, sitting at her boss’s feet. “Ethan went to grab some drinkable coffee, and I’ve been terrified it would wake up.”
“I’ll leave him there until he fusses. But you still haven’t said why you’re here. Not that I’m not delighted to see you.” Or totally weirded out. None of her co-workers had been inside her home before this morning and now half of them had.
“When my lead engineer disappears and then takes my new engineer with her when we have no time or people to spare, I need to investigate. Although I wasn’t supposed to look up your home address. You can report it to HR. I dare them to fire me.” Mary sniffed, and Tessa doubted even the HR department in the mighty BBMJ machine would have the guts to take on the older woman.
“Sorry. I guess we got sucked into a . . .”
“Vortex?” Mary asked, eyeing the carrier.
“Baby.”
The door opened and Ethan stepped in with a drink carrier. He smiled when he saw her. “Feel better?”
“Better?” No. Definitely as stressed as ever. “I feel more rested.”
“It’s a start. I got coffee.”
“I have a coffee maker.”
“I told him how bad your coffee is. You’re welcome,” Mary said to Ethan. “Now what are we going to do about this project?”
Tessa sank down at the other end of the sofa and accepted the drink Ethan gave her, opening a creamer.
“It has cream in it already,” Ethan said.
“Not enough,” she answered, not bothering to take a sip before dumping more in and stirring. “I don’t know what to do about Helios because I don’t know what to do about the baby,” she told Mary. “My sister left him with me yesterday morning and I can’t get hold of her and now I have 128 giant diapers I don’t need.”
“Ethan got me up to speed. Obviously, either you give him up or you find him a babysitter.”
“I’m not giving him up.” Rachel could come to her senses any day now. Tessa had seen enough headlines to know that postpartum depression was a thing. What if Rachel had it? When her sister got back to normal, the last thing she would need was a fight with the system to get her kid back.
Mary shrugged. “Then you’ll need to find a babysitter.”
Tessa blinked at Mary’s matter-of-fact tone. Mary didn’t have any kids, so it irked Tessa that the woman gave the order like it was a simple matter of making a phone call. “I’m open to suggestions.”
“We live in a gig economy. I’m sure there’s an app for that. Do some research while I get Ethan filled in on the rest of this documentation. We can’t lose any more time.”
“You want me to hire a total stranger?”
“I don’t know,” Mary said, her voice flat and dry. “You were a stranger to this kid until yesterday, apparently. Is a trained professional babysitter going to do better or worse than you?”
“Point taken,” Tessa mumbled. She cradled her coffee against her chest and went to retrieve her laptop from upstairs. Sorry, Ethan mumbled when he caught her eye on her way to the stairs. She shrugged. Unless he’d called Mary in, this wasn’t his fault.
A few minutes later the first ray of hope and clarity penetrated her fog since finding Rachel’s note. Two agencies that provided childcare to Palm Valley, both with excellent reviews and ratings. Better yet, she couldn’t find a single bad news headline or whisper of problems after thoroughly googling. Maybe this would work out after all.
She called the first one and almost wept when they assured her that they accepted infants as young as four months, then almost wept again when they told her they had no available nannies at the moment.
“Palm Valley is growing so fast that we’re having a hard time keeping up with demand,” the woman at the agency explained. “Sorry about that. But I can put you on a waiting list.”
“I guess so,” Tessa said. She hoped Rachel would be back long before she heard from the agency again.
“Great. I’ll start a profile for you. Your name?”
“Tessa Fuller.”
“Child’s name and age?”
“Calvin, four months.”
“Same last name?”
She had no idea what last name Rachel had given him. “I’m not sure,” she confessed.
There was a long pause on the other end. “Pardon me?”
“I’m his aunt, and I’m still filling in some blanks.”
“I see.” There was another long pause before the woman spoke again. Her tone was kind, but her words tied a new knot in Tessa’s stomach. “We can only contract for care with a parent or legal guardian.”
“Of course,” Tessa said. “I understand. Please keep me on the waiting list. I’ll have this straightened out by the time I hear from you.”
“Sure,” the woman said. But Tessa suspected she’d be deleted from their system the second they hung up.
The call with the second agency went the same. She hung up and stared into space for another minute or two, trying to figure out what to even google next. She tapped out, “what to do when your sister abandons her kid,” but it mostly turned up sad blog posts from people who’d been abandoned by parents as children plus a few articles by therapists discussing the long-term harmful effects of abandonment.
None of it made her feel any better, and they definitely didn’t give her any ideas for what to do right that moment. She had to work. But she also had to take care of the little guy downstairs.
As though he sensed her thinking of him, a loud wail rose from the living room and her heart rate picked up. Figuring out what to do about his crying had been a guessing game each time, and she still never knew exactly where to start. She’d googled “baby cries” in the wee hours of the morning when he’d had one particularly fussy spell, and while every article assured her all moms developed the skill of discerning which cries meant what, none of the links had explained to her how to figure out what that cry had meant.
Tessa hurried to take care of it, but the baby’s cry was already subsiding by the time her foot hit the bottom stair. Ethan had retrieved Calvin from the carrier and was softly bouncing him in the kitchen while reading the directions on the formula can.
“I’ll do it.” Tessa took the can from him and set it down, filling the bottle with water to precisely the six-ounce mark then leveling the scoop and stirring in the powder. She gave it a vigorous shake, and Ethan shifted the baby so he was better positioned to drink. Tessa pointed the bottle in the general direction of Calvin’s snout.
He stopped fretting for a minute to gum the bottle’s nipple but then his face scrunched up and he jerked his head away with a medium-sized howl of frustration. Ethan tried a few more times with the same result.
“He must not be hungry, so that means diaper.” She and Ethan managed a clumsy hand-off, and she marched to the living room to the sound of escalating cries and laid him on the sofa, which caused Mary to scoot to the far end of it. Tessa wiggled a blanket beneath him and laid one hand on his chest to keep him in place while she reached for the diaper stuff.
A new line appeared on Mary’s forehead with each of his angry cries.
“Don’t worry,” Tessa said over the noise. “This usually works if the bottle doesn’t.” But when she peeled open his diaper, it was dry. “Uh…”
What now? It was so hard to think over the crying. The only thing that had worked the day before was letting him cry until he exhausted himself, and then when she’d tried a bottle again, he’d taken it and fallen asleep while eating.
“Heat the formula,” Mary said, looking down at her phone.
“I don’t want to accidentally burn him.”
Mary shrugged. “It says here that heating it will make the baby want to drink it more.”
“I’ll try,” Ethan said, walking back into the kitchen.
“Put it in a bowl of hot water for a few minutes, shake it, test it against your wrist, and when it feels body temperature, it’s ready,” Mary instructed.
Tessa resealed the baby’s diaper and patted his stomach hesitantly. It didn’t help, but it didn’t seem to be making the crying any worse, and she didn’t know what else to do. Ethan returned a couple of minutes later with the bottle, and this time when he nudged the bottle at the baby’s lips, it was accepted.
The crying stopped, and Mary breathed a sigh of relief. “That was awful.”
Tessa couldn’t disagree. “Thanks for coming to help, you guys, but you both should head back to the lab. Better to be down by one of us, not three of us.”
“We can’t afford to be down by any,” Mary said. “You have to come in.”
It was too much on top of her sleepless night and the stress of tiny human care. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” Tessa didn’t even care that her tone was much sharper than any she’d ever used with her boss before. “I literally can do nothing about this situation at this moment. Neither of the childcare agencies in town has spare sitters, I have no idea when my sister is going to come back, I’m not about to take this to the authorities until I have a better idea of what’s going on, and now I’m going to have to start exploring my friend networks to see if anyone has the faintest idea of what I can do. And I don’t know if I know anyone with babies.”
Mary wasn’t even looking at her, and it broke the last thread of her patience. “No matter what, this is isn’t getting solved today, so again, why don’t you two go back, and I’ll get there as soon as I get everything here handled.” The baby squawked and she realized she’d been tightening her grip on him as she spoke. She jiggled the bottle a little bit, and his eyes fell back into the half-mast position he wore whenever he ate.
Mary stood. “Are you done?”
Since Tessa wasn’t at all sure she could meet her boss’s eye without snapping again, she kept her gaze on the drowsy baby and limited herself to, “Yes.”
“You have to come back to work. That baby will come with you. I checked and BBMJ has onsite childcare for employees. Let’s start there before you panic. I found a list of what you need to bring with you when you leave the house with a baby, and I’ll stop by the store to pick it all up and meet you back at the lab. We’ll figure it out there, but you working in fits and starts there is better than you not being able to do anything at all here.”
Tessa blinked at her, her recently extinguished hope stirring to life again. An onsite daycare?
“Do you have a car seat?” Ethan asked.
Tessa blinked at him too.
“Did your sister leave you anything besides this carrier?” He crouched to examine it.
“No, just that.”
He turned it over. “This is pretty clever, actually.” He pointed to notches in the bottom. “I think it’s supposed to connect to something inside the car. It must be a base since no car would come with a standard child seat setup. I think . . .” He turned it this way and that, then messed with his phone a bit. “Yeah, see these notches here?” He pointed to a spot on either side of the carrier handle. “You can feed a seatbelt through these to secure it, although the manufacturer recommends using it with the base. But it would be enough for driving around today.”
Tessa could only stare. Maybe she had forgotten how to use words. She tried to find some. “Are you guys insane? I can’t bring a baby to work. We need to see if there’s room at the daycare.”
“We will. But we all need to be in that lab no matter what,” Mary said. “Ethan, you help her figure out how to get that thing in her car. This list says you need one diaper for every three hours you plan to be out, baby wipes, formula and bottle, a comfortable pad to change the baby on, three changes of clothes, a burp cloth, and toys the baby likes.” She glanced between the baby and her phone, frowning. “All that for one baby?”
Tessa looked down at the baby who was ignoring them, still half-asleep and sucking lazily at the bottle now. “He needs . . . a lot.” It was the greatest understatement of her life.
“Do you have any of that?”
Tessa shook her head. “She left enough formula for five days, about six pajama things, a blanket, and now I’m almost out of diapers. The right size diapers, anyway.” She glanced toward the large box of useless diapers in her corner.
“Well, I’ll text you this list for stuff you need right now so you can pull it all together, I’ll stop at the store and get the rest of this stuff, and I’ll meet you at the lab in two hours.”
She headed out the door without verifying that Tessa would comply.
“Wow,” Ethan said.
“She’s a good boss,” Tessa said, feeling the need to defend Mary even though she wasn’t thrill
ed with her at the moment. “She just doesn’t like to get behind on things.”
“Oh, that was admiration you heard. She’s . . . wow.”
Tessa patted the baby’s belly a couple more times, so softly she wasn’t even sure what the point was. As with everything she’d done since Rachel had appeared with him, she just tried stuff and hoped it worked. “I’m terrified to leave the house with him.” She said it softly, embarrassed to even be speaking the words aloud, but Ethan heard her.
“I get it.” Ethan set the baby carrier on the coffee table and crouched beside it so he was closer to eye level with her. “Mary might be right, though. With your deadline so tight, maybe it’s best to bring Calvin to the lab and get some work done instead of not being able to do anything at all here.”
“He cries a lot.” She eyed the baby, disconcerted that once again he looked utterly content after raising a huge fuss only minutes before. “He’s unpredictable. Sanjay won’t like it. Darius might not like it either even though he usually doesn’t have opinions about things. What if they can’t get their work done because of the crying?”
“It’s still going to be more efficient for each of us to get ten percent less work done than it is for you to get one hundred percent less done. It’s not a perfect solution, but I don’t know if there’s a choice right now.”
She sighed.
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“It’s not that,” she said, hating that she had to make yet another admission. “I’m terrified of even putting this thing in the car and driving over there. Suddenly the road seems like a dangerous place where people are waiting to crash into me, probably on the side with the baby, and probably at the point where the force and torque will create the best chance for this car seat to fail.”
“Oh.” He thought about that for a minute. She couldn’t blame him for coming up short on a solution. Engineers fixed real problems, not irrational fears. Fears that she hadn’t even had until thirty-six hours ago.
Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8) Page 4