I'll hold her for a few minutes. Until I'm sure she's settled.
I don't put her down.
I make another bottle at some point in the night. My hands are steadier now. The motions have a shape to them. She wakes up making hungry sounds instead of screaming, which feels like communication rather than a crisis.Progress.
By early morning, we're both wrecked. I'm sitting in the armchair by the window with her heavy against my chest, watching the gray dawn come through the curtains, and I think about nothing for a while. Just her weight. Her breathing. The faint click of the heating turning on somewhere in the walls.
She's breathing. She's fed. She's safe.
I did that. Soon Emma will be here, and I won't have to do it completely alone anymore. I close my eyes and let myself believe, just briefly, that I might be capable of this.
3
NORA
The overdue notice on my counter is printed in red ink, which feels like an editorial choice by the utility company.
I've been staring at it for ten minutes. Not because I'm surprised by what it says; I know exactly what it says. I'm staring at it because it's easier than looking at the job listings open on my laptop, all of which are wrong in various ways, or the bills beside it, arranged in a small, neat stack, because organizing things is what I do when everything else is unmanageable.
The Morrisons moved to Vancouver in February. Twin girls, eighteen months old, and the kind of placement you spend years building toward. I gave them four years. I watched Lily take her first steps and Rose say her first word, and I told myself, carefully, for months, that watching someone else's children grow was not the same as having a family. It wasn't the same. It was enough.
Then they packed up and left, taking the one thing that had been keeping me functional with them, and I have been trying to reconstruct it ever since.
My phone rings. Local number, unfamiliar.
"This is Nora."
"Nora, it's Margaret." She sounds frazzled, which is unusual;Margaret is always composed. "Emergency placement. Are you available?"
I look around my apartment. The overdue notice. The cold coffee. The stacks of bills. The walls that have nothing on them because I've been here for six months and never committed to staying long enough to put anything up.
"Yes. What's the situation?"
"Professional athlete, male, late twenties. The infant arrived unexpectedly yesterday morning. Two months old." Papers shuffling. "Live-in position. Triple your usual rate."
I do the math without meaning to. Enough to cover the bills, sublet this place, and stop bleeding money on an apartment I've never once felt at home in. Enough to save something. I haven't saved anything since before the accident.
"How unexpectedly are we talking?" I ask.
"Baby showed up on his doorstep. Mother left a note." A pause, and then Margaret's voice drops into the register she uses when something is genuinely bad. "He's desperate, Nora. And from what I understand, the baby is too."
A baby who needsme—not convenience or optics—me.
"I can interview today."
She gives me the details. Tyler West, right winger for the Ridgeport Falcons, and first-time father as of thirty-six hours ago, his family arriving today. She hangs up before I can ask anything else, and I open a browser tab.
Hockey statistics I don't understand. Points, assists, numbers. He's twenty-eight, six feet two, and a right wing. Two hundred and five pounds, and two years older than me. The profile photo shows a man with sandy-blond hair that's slightly too long, as if he keeps meaning to cut it. Blue eyes that are tired even when he's supposed to be confident.
Something about his face catches my attention before I can stop it.
He's attractive in the way that athletes sometimes are, obvious about it, with a strong jaw, good bone structure, but it's his eyes Ikeep coming back to. There's something underneath them that's been there long enough to settle in. It shows up in the candid shots, especially where he's not looking at the camera. He's standing apart from his teammates at team events, his jaw tight, shoulders braced.
He looks like someone who's been surviving rather than living. I recognize it because I've been doing it for two years.
More articles.
He was traded from the Pinewood Bears last season. There's gossip I skim past. One article mentions tension with the team captain, someone called ‘Reaper,’ and speculation that Tyler is struggling to fit in in the locker room. The recent photos show him progressively more isolated: the empty seat at team dinners, the way he's always at the edge of group shots.