by Lilian Darcy
Visits, where? Would he go back to New York? Jodie’s family always seemed to assume so. Her heart lurched and sank at the idea. It felt so wrong to think of them at such a distance from each other, all the complicated arrangements they would have to make to keep DJ in his life.
She didn’t want arrangements. She wanted him.
It was pretty simple, really.
She loved him.
She’d known last fall that he would break her heart when he left, whether they slept together or didn’t. He would break her heart when he left now, and little DJ, who knew nothing about any of this, was powerless to help, because there was no way in the world that Jodie would ever use her as leverage or a weapon.
“Look at you, sweetheart,” Jodie whispered to her. “How can I keep you happy and safe? How can I keep you from guessing how much I’m hurting? I can’t let him guess, either.”
She picked the baby up, put her in her stroller because that was the safest way to move a baby when you weren’t sure of the strength of your own arms, and wheeled her back out to the deck, hearing Dev on the phone as she approached.
“Yeah, very glad I called,” he was saying. “Sorry I had it switched off. I was trying for some space, but I’ll keep it on now in case anything else comes up. It’s going to be a mess if we don’t straighten it out…. Yes, please, make the reservation….” He was so absorbed in the conversation, he hadn’t seen her. He was staring out at the woods, not seeing them, either. “Yes, for Wednesday, if you can, so I’m there for meetings Thursday and Friday… I can fly out of Columbus to Chicago and then over the Pole, or through New York if that connects better. Just let me know the schedule when you have it…. Okay, talk soon.”
He flipped the phone into his pocket, turned and saw her with the stroller wheels resting against the threshold between the living area and the deck. “Something’s come up,” she said, so that he didn’t have to say it. “And you need to get to London before the end of the week.”
“Yes. If my assistant can get the right flights, I’ll have to leave here tomorrow and I won’t be back before Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” she echoed.
“I can’t leave you here on your own.”
She took a deep breath, let go of the instant, aching sense of loss, tried to hold on to what she had, the wonderful new sense of motherhood and love. She didn’t have Dev’s love, but she had DJ’s. “I don’t have to be on my own. We have the cabin till Friday. Mom could come out, I expect, or Lisa and the kids. Keep me company. Help pack.”
“That’s a good idea,” he said slowly. “It would be great if you and DJ could stay for the full week. The timing on this is—”
Tough.
And yet he seemed relieved, too, which she understood. He didn’t want to be here anymore, and this gave him the perfect excuse.
“What time tomorrow?” she asked, as if everything was fine.
“Depends on the flights.”
“She’ll get back to you today?”
“Within an hour, I hope. I hate not knowing what’s happening.”
He didn’t have to hate it for long. His assistant got back to him as promised, with details on confirmed flights. By eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, he would be gone.
Jodie called home and spoke to Mom, fighting her way through the usual overanxious questions about her well-being and the baby’s until she could get to the point. “Something’s come up, Mom, and Dev has to go to London.”
“London?”
“For work.”
“Well, I gathered that. For how long? When?”
“He’s leaving tomorrow.”
“So you’re coming back?” Mom sounded relieved.
“Well, I’m hoping I don’t have to. It’s been wonderful here. That’s really why I’m calling.”
“You can’t possibly stay there on your own. You’re not driving yet. There’s so much you can’t manage. You’re not saying that Dev’s taking the baby?”
“Mom, if you’d let me get a word in edgewise, I’m not saying I’d stay here on my own, I’m wondering if someone can come out and keep me company. You or Dad or—”
“Of course we can.” She sounded eager, now that she’d grasped the situation. “Yes, we absolutely can, one of us at least. You don’t have to say another word. We’ll work it out. What time do we need to be there?”
“He has to leave by eleven.”
“I’ll get right on it. We’ll work something out. Just leave your cell phone switched on.”
“Nope, not doing that.”
“Jodie…”
“Because you’ll call me every five minutes to update. Send a text, if there’s anything important.”
“Jodie, honey…”
But she stayed stubborn, gave Mom the directions to the cabin, ended the call and switched off her phone.
Again, Dev seemed relieved. “Last dinner out?” he suggested.
“Sounds great.”
Sounded so final.
Chapter Fourteen
Jodie was in the bathroom when she heard the sound of a car arriving at the cabin at ten-thirty the next morning. Dev had almost finished packing. DJ was asleep in her bassinet. She hurried out and almost tripped on one of the rugs in the living area. There was a flash of red, parked out front.
Elin.
Her heart sank. Elin was the bossy sister, the one most likely to lecture, the one bluntest when she disapproved. And Jodie was quite sure she’d find something to disapprove of today.
But they had a big hug anyhow, because they were sisters, and in the end bossiness and lectures and bluntness took second place.
“I was sure Mom would be the one to come,” Jodie said, while Elin took her overnight bag from the trunk of the car.
“She would have, if I’d let her. We had a great fight about it, her and Lisa and me. I won.”
“So I gather.”
Elin put her hands on her hips in a pose that said she wanted answers. “What’s gone wrong, honey?”
“Nothing.” Make it bright, Jodie, make it casual. “It’s just business. Dev has to be in London. Only for a week. Less, really. Six days.”
“Right.” If there was one thing Elin was good at, it was communicating that she had a lot more to say, by means of saying nothing at all.
They went inside and met Dev with his luggage, ready to go.
“So fill me in,” Elin ordered both of them.
“Well, she has a proper name,” Dev said.
“Oh, she does?”
“Dani Jane.”
“Your idea?”
“Jodie’s.”
“Really, honey?” Elin turned to her, face suddenly lit up. “I like it. I love it.”
“It feels good,” Jodie said. “Although I can’t imagine calling her anything but DJ most of the time.”
Nobody spoke. The brief moment of harmony and happiness had gone.
Dev studied his watch as if the hands and numbers had all turned back to front. “I should get going.” He snapped his mouth shut, then opened it again and growled, “I wish she wasn’t asleep.”
“She won’t wake up if you kiss her,” Jodie told him. For some reason, she needed his goodbye to DJ to be a good one.
Only a week, she kept telling herself. Only a week. Less.
But it felt so much more final than that.
Dev was treating it that way. He’d been silent and distant this morning, as if in spirit he was already on the flight, sitting in his business-class seat and opening his laptop, eager to get to work.
He’d said to her from the beginning that the three of them were a family—himself, her and DJ—but it didn’t feel that way, right now. This felt like the breakup she’d dreaded last year, the no-strings, no-regrets goodbye she would have said to him—pretended to really mean—when he went back to New York, if the accident and the baby had never happened.
“Please keep your phone switched on,” he said to her, as they stood together beside DJ’s bassinet.
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“Oh, you want Mom to bug me every five minutes?”
“No. So I can call. To see how things are going.”
“You can trust me with her, Dev.”
“Of course I can.”
It was horrible. There was nothing she could safely say. He tossed his laptop in its carrier case onto the front seat and she realized she hadn’t seen it when he unpacked on arriving here. Then, he’d had it in his suitcase, out of sight and out of mind. Now, it occupied Jodie’s passenger seat, the prime position.
Replacing her.
Making his priorities clear.
He didn’t even hug her in farewell, just let his arm trail briefly across her shoulders. “Take care.” Gruff, not looking in her direction.
He drove off, she couldn’t help watching him with helpless, miserable longing until the car disappeared behind a patch of thick green summer foliage, and then she had Elin to contend with.
“What was that about?” She was still watching down the road, where every now and then a flash of color or light from his car would reappear.
“I— What?”
“Did you have a fight? Help me, here, Jodie!” She wheeled around, stepped closer, put her hands back on her hips in what was a classic Elin-wants-answers pose. “I can’t work out if it’s killing him to leave, or if he can’t wait. Whichever, I should be mad as hell at him, right? Shoot, I am mad! I could kill him!”
“We didn’t have a fight.”
“Then what the heck is his problem? What is yours?”
“Elin, I can’t take this right now.” She closed her eyes, knowing the tears would squeeze through her lashes anyway, and Elin would see them. She waited for the onslaught of critical big-sister words, but they didn’t come.
Until finally, quietly, “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
“Only took you a year to work it out, sis.”
“A year?”
“Okay, twelve years. Since high school. Not that I’ve been pining that long, I only thought about him if I happened to see his parents, or in the holidays wondering if he was back for a visit and I might see him. I saw his brother once, and thought for a second, from the back, that it was him.”
“Yeah, you haven’t been pining at all.”
Jodie ignored this. “But last year, when he came back to town, I knew then, and it went bone-deep in a heartbeat, and—”
“And because of the accident, last year seems like yesterday,” Elin said, understanding. “And now you have a baby together, and you don’t know if that’s the best or the worst thing that could have happened. Ah, honey…”
Elin understood!
“Real clever strategy on my part, wasn’t it?” Jodie said wearily. “Get pregnant, spend eight months in a coma. Ten points for imaginative variation on the shotgun wedding.”
“You didn’t get pregnant on purpose.”
“No. Which is a plus, really. Since it clearly hasn’t worked.”
“Hasn’t worked?”
“He left. Did you notice?”
“For a week. Less.”
“Not just a week. His whole heart left. He left, in spirit, a good thirty-six hours ago. The trick with the departing car just now was only an illusion.”
“What happened, honey? What changed?”
“Dani Jane smiled at me. For the first time.” Even thinking about it, in the midst of her turmoil about Dev, brought a smile to her face. “And I suddenly discovered how to love her. Which I hadn’t known before. Did you—? You must have seen. Or suspected.”
“We were worried. We thought maybe you just needed more time with your therapy.”
“It was more than that.”
“We thought a whole lot of things. Jodie, I realize we’ve behaved like interfering witches, the whole family, but we didn’t know. If you would ever wake up. If Dev would want DJ all to himself and we’d never have that part of you, that legacy. And then when you found out about her and it seemed you weren’t bonding with her the way you should, we didn’t want to make a big deal of it, in case that made things worse.”
“Well, it turns out that was what he was waiting for. The love. The bonding. So he could pull back, get on with his real life, and know DJ was safe and happy.”
“Bull. Bull!” Elin challenged.
“What?”
“That’s not what I saw in his face!” she almost shouted. “That’s not what that weird, distant goodbye meant, just now, Jodie. He wouldn’t do it like that, if you’re right about his reasons and his feelings.”
“How do you know, Elin?”
“Because I’ve seen him, remember?” Her voice softened. “I’ve seen the way he sat by your bed while you were in the coma. I’ve seen how he bonded with DJ from the moment she was born, how he did everything he needed to do for her without question or complaint, how he fought with Mom—and, yes, with me—over who should be her primary carer and when you should be told about what had happened.”
“So…”
“I can’t tell you exactly why he went off like that. I really can’t. But I can tell you it’s not because he’s just been waiting all this time to dump the baby on you and get out. I’ve accused him of that. Lisa has. We…we had a talk after you came here, Jodie, and we both realized we’ve let our emotions and our fears dictate the pace too much. But we were wrong to say that to him, or to think it, that he wanted to dump her. He loves her. And whatever else is going on—there’s something, there’s more—I think you need to find out.”
“Find out…”
“Call him.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order. She pulled out her cell phone, made one press and his number was right there. She pushed it into Jodie’s hand and pushed the hand to the ear in time for Jodie to hear a recorded message. Switched off, or out of range.
“So we’ll go after him,” said the bossiest sister in the Palmer family.
“DJ is—”
“Asleep. So we’ll wake her up. It’s only the first baby whose sleep schedule is the most sacred thing in the family timetable, honey. Once you get to number two and three… She’ll live.”
“Wh-what exactly are we doing? Saying to him?”
The hands went back on the hips. “Well, have you told him? That you love him?”
“No.”
“So we’re telling him that.”
Easy-peasy, Elin.
Elin had a baby carrier strapped in her backseat. Jodie realized just how much the whole family had stepped in to help with DJ, because Elin’s own kids hadn’t needed special car seats for years. It was frustrating as hell to have so much family interference, and she loved Elin for it this morning with her whole heart.
Elin flirted with the speed limit out as far as the county road and for several miles beyond. There was no sign of the back of Dev’s car. He’d had too much of a head start.
Too much of a head start, but what was this dark blue vehicle coming toward them? Elin screamed to a halt on the shoulder, and the blue car halted also, on the other side.
Dev.
Elin’s window slid smoothly down. “What did you forget, Dev?” Her hands weren’t on her hips this time, but only because they were on the window and the wheel.
“Couple of things.” He opened the car door.
Elin climbed out, also. “One big thing, I hope.” She met him in the middle of the road, both of them ignoring the possibility of traffic.
“Yeah, you could say that.” He cleared his throat.
Jodie sank into the passenger seat. She wasn’t a fearful sort of person, but she was scared right now.
Scared?
Okay, a person was allowed to be scared.
Giving in to it?
No, she hated when she let herself do that.
She began the awkward process of going to join them. Maybe the white line in the middle of a county road was the right place for family treaty negotiations, after all.
Elin seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what was going on. She reached out, pulled
Jodie closer, sent her in Dev’s direction with a commanding nudge. “She’s in love with you, Dev,” she announced. “And I damn well hope you feel the same. Talk to her. Work it out. I’ll be back at the cabin with Dani Jane.”
And then she left, screeching through a turn that curved across both sides of the shoulder and made Jodie glad about the regulations on safety for infants in cars.
“Sometimes I’m glad your family is so keen on babysitting,” Dev said. He moved to the side of the road, where a line of young sycamore trees gave shade against the summer heat.
She followed him, found a tree trunk to put her hand against, because she wasn’t convinced she could stand without support for much longer. “Helps when there are things to work out,” she agreed carefully.
He had his gaze fixed on her face, as the sound of Elin’s car receded. “What your sister said…” He broke off, swore beneath his breath. He looked like a soldier ready for hand-to-hand combat and she couldn’t look away. “Shoot, it almost doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?”
“Doesn’t make a difference,” he explained, frustrated and impatient and bristling with things she couldn’t read. “To me.”
“Oh.”
“Because even if she’s wrong about what you feel, I’m stuck with this. I love you, Jodie. Love you. I’m sick at myself, it’s killing me.”
“Loving me is so…h-horrible?”
“Loving you is horrible when it makes me so scared there isn’t any room for me in the mix. When I see you and DJ together and I think my role disappeared, evaporated, the second your bond with her kicked in. I have this horrible jealousy…”
“Of me?”
“No. Of her. I’m jealous of her.” He stepped closer, close enough to touch, but then he didn’t touch her. “Of my own baby. For earning your smile, for earning that soft look on your face that says you have all the answers and everything that matters. For having your arms around her and owning your whole heart.” Finally, he touched her, ran his hands around her back, looked into her eyes with his mouth just a few inches from hers. “Jodie, I need you to look like that at me,” he whispered. “I need you to feel like that about me. That I’m your world. Not instead of DJ, but as well as her. Both of us. Your world. If Elin’s right… Is she right? Can you look like that at me?”
