I have serious doubts about my ability to parent in any sort of hands-on practical way.
Rose gives me a look. “You. Herfather. That’s who.”
“We don’t know I’m her father,” I protest weakly. “We don’t have the DNA results back.”
Since the minute Lacey’s sister dropped Evelyn off at my office like a damn DoorDash lunch delivery, my focus has been on logistics. Securing baby gear, making a pediatrician’s appointment, filing for emergency custody, ordering a DNA test, finding a rental in my hometown of Honeysuckle Harbor, South Carolina and moving here.
I’ve barely had time to breathe between all of that and watching endless YouTube videos on what the hell I’m actually supposed to do with a seven-month-old baby. I haven’t processed how I actuallyfeelabout it.
It doesn’t matter now either, because I have yet another pressing logistical problem. Rose is leaving me alone with this baby and it will be a miracle if somehow we survive.
Rose scoffs. “Have you looked at this child? She looks exactly like you. Same eyes, same nose, same chin.”
“How can you tell? She just looks like any other baby to me.” I’m not just saying that. I can’t tell if she looks like me or not. I’ve ruthlessly scoured her features multiple times, and she just looks like a baby. A perfect, beautiful, adorable as fuck little baby. I lift Evelyn up so I can check her out again, waiting for some moment of genetic recognition. My heart does a weird flip in my chest like it does every time I just pause and take a breath and look at her.
As far as babies go, I haven’t studied them much as a whole or individually. I was never interested in the whole create-your-own-mini-me trend. At thirty-three, I’ve yet to feel any sort of tug to start a family. I haven’t even felt any real urge to get married. That doesn’t mean I don’t get the appeal of having kids—I just never saw it as part of my future.
I like my life. I work hard. I play hard. I’m busy, but I also have reached the point in my career where if I want to take a spontaneous trip to Vegas with friends I can. If I want to romance a hot supermodel and jet her off to Paris for a weekend of sex and good food, I do. I have a killer apartment in TriBeCa, a closet filled with designer suits, and arrangements with the finest restaurants in New York to always have a table available to me.
It’s tidy, it’s fulfilling, it’s very controlled.
Or it was.
Nothing has been in my control since little Miss Hates Sleep showed up in my life.
Evelyn frowns at me. I frown back. She wrinkles her nose. I wrinkle mine back. “What?” I ask her, gruffly.
She lets out another shriek that sounds angry.
Maybe she doesn’t like being dangled mid-air and scrutinized. I probably wouldn’t either. I lower her against my chest again.
Rose eyes us in amusement. “That right there…same furrow between her brows and same skeptical little frown. She’s a dead ringer for you, Grayson. I haven’t seen a baby this naturally cynical since, oh, let me think,youwere a baby.”
I feel a grudging sense of kinship toward Evelyn. “Not cynical. Intelligent. Highly intelligent.”
“Or just crabby, one of the two.” But Rose pats my cheek to let me know she’s teasing.
“That’s why I was your favorite.” Rose was a nanny for my sister and me for a decade. She was a second mother to both of us and is still a huge part of our family. After we were too old to need her care, she moved on to our neighbors, the Andersons, who had a son and triplet girls. She then went on to one other family with an only child before she retired ten years ago.
This isn’t fair to her. I recognize that. “How do I get a nanny? I don’t want just some random person. No one will be as good as you, anyway.”
“Don’t try to butter me up. I’m not staying. I’m exhausted from these last two weeks. A good agency can find you some wonderful candidates to interview in the next week or so. I’ll send you the name of the best agency around. They service the upper echelon in Charleston.”
“An upper echelon nanny sounds good to me. Let’s Mary Poppins this shit. But what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“You’ll figure it out.” Rose gives me a smile.
Panic starts to set in. “Oh, come on. You can’t just roll out of here. I don’t know what I’m doing!”
“You know exactly what you’re doing. Just feed her, change her, keep her from putting anything in her mouth.”
“You say that like it’s easy.” To prove my point, I stride into my living room where there is a playmat on the floor for Evelyn. I set her down on it. She looks stunned, tries to reach for me, falls over, and starts crying. “She won’t let me put her down. My kitchen is filled with dirty dishes and bottles. My trash is overfilled with shit-filled diapers that I can’t even take to the trash chute in the hallway because she won’t let me put her down and I’m afraid I’ll accidentally drop her down the chute.”
Rose laughs.
I don’t. “I’m fucking serious. I had a nightmare last night that I did that. I woke up in a cold sweat.”
“Don’t swear in front of Evelyn.”
