As I slipped my hands out of my gloves, I saw they were shaking. I started to pick at the tape on one end and then decided to take a leaf out of my mother’s book and tear it off in one go. Patrick laughed. The sound of it unraveled something in me, something that had been wrapped too tight for too long.
A book with a pale green cover stared back at me. BABY’S FIRST YEAR.
I opened the cover. The brightly colored pastel pages reminded me of the paint swatches Patrick and I had picked out for the nursery a lifetime ago. “Thank you,” I said. “We don’t have one of these.”
“Well, now you do.”
I turned the page. At first it looked blank, but then I noticed the scrawly, doctorly pencil marks along the right-hand side. MOMMY’S NAME IS Neva. DADDY’S NAME IS Patrick.
I glanced up. Patrick blushed. “I filled it in before she was born, obviously, but you can change it to Mark’s name if you want.”
His face was carefully neutral, his hands dug into pockets, shoulders sloped down. A strange stillness came over him. I couldn’t even see the rise and fall of his breath.
“Well … there’s a bit of space here,” I said slowly, looking back at the book. Maybe we can leave it and … just add Mark’s name?”
Patrick’s chest began to move again. “Sure. We could do that … if you want.”
Now we both smiled shyly. My insides tickled—that feeling when you’ve won a race and you’re just waiting for it to be announced to the crowd. We rocked back and forth a few times, grinning stupidly.
“So…,” I started. “Gran and Lil are coming over later. They’d love to watch Mietta for a few hours. We could … I don’t know … go for coffee or something—”
“Actually, I was hoping the three of us could go for coffee,” he said. “You, Mietta, and me?” His lips curled into a sexy half smile. How did he always know the exact thing to say?
“Nellie’s?” I said.
He nodded. “Nellie’s.” He started to push the stroller he had failed to assemble. “So what was the joke?”
“Ah yes,” I said. “Two babies were sitting in their cribs when one called over to the other: ‘Are you a little girl or a little boy?’ ‘I don’t know,’ replied the other baby. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ asked the first. ‘I mean I don’t know how to tell the difference.’ ‘Well, I do,’ said the first baby, chuckling. ‘I’ll climb into your crib and find out.’ So he carefully maneuvered himself into the other baby’s crib, then disappeared beneath the blanket. After a couple of minutes, he resurfaced with a big grin on his face. ‘You’re a little girl and I’m a little boy,’ he said proudly. ‘You’re so clever,’ cooed the baby girl. ‘But how can you tell?’ ‘It’s easy,’ replied the baby boy. ‘You’ve got pink booties and I’ve got blue ones.”
I grinned at Patrick expectantly. “Good, right?”
“No.” But he chuckled. “Terrible.”
He kept walking, and I fell into step beside him. “Come on. Like you can talk.”
With one hand on the stroller and the other slung low around my waist, Patrick maneuvered us through the snow toward Nellie’s. The sun was at our backs, and the light slid over our shoulders and onto Mietta’s face. Before I could reach for the hood, Patrick quickened his step, putting himself between her and the sun. It was an instinct, a reflex. Something a father would do.
Gran was right. When it came to family, biology was only part of it. Patrick and I, Mark and Imogen, Mom and Dad, Gran and Lil—we’d give Mietta a wonderful family.
Together, the three of us turned the corner, toward Nellie’s. Toward home.
About the Author
Sally Hepworth is a former event planner and human resources professional. A graduate of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Sally started writing novels after the birth of her first child. She is the author of Love Like the French, published by Random House Germany in February 2014. Sally has lived around the world, spending extended periods in Singapore, the U.K., and Canada, and she now writes full-time from her home in Melbourne, where she lives with her husband and two young children. Visit Sally’s Web site at www.sallyhepworthauthor.com. Or sign up for email updates here.