The days marched on at the same speed—they always did, no matter if you wanted time to go faster or slower. I remembered waiting for my birthday as a kid and wishing that we could just skip ahead a little, and I also remembered the approach of the Bar exam when I had prayed that I would wake up to an extra week so that I’d have more hours to study. Now, I wasn’t sure what I wanted. I was interested in feeling happier about my new life, and I was hoping to get along better with Lyra. I believed that the passage of time would help with both those things.
But there was a problem with how it went slipping past, too. Ever since I’d started to think about being someone’s mother, events in my life all seemed to revolve around having children. There was the movie I’d just watched on my laptop, when the couple had received the perfect Christmas gift of a baby at the end. I’d gotten the idea that my boss and his wife, Juliet, were either pregnant or working at that (he was much too private and proper to talk about it, but she had dropped a few hints). Therewas also Rashelle, who was definitely going to be a mom. I had discovered it by mistake when I’d found her in the bathroom looking pale and trying to rinse out her mouth. She hadn’t met my eyes as she’d explained that she ate something bad…and then I saw her in there the next day, too, in exactly the same condition.
“I’m pregnant,” she’d admitted, and she seemed equally excited and nervous, as well as nauseated. “We’re not going to tell anyone until after the wedding because we weren’t planning this. I don’t want to puke on my big day but I’m also really excited. Please don’t—”
At that point, Octavia had slammed her way into the bathroom. “What are you two doing in here?” she’d asked suspiciously. “Is there something going on in our office?” She squinted as she looked into my eyes and then she also turned her gaze onto our paralegal. “What are you hiding?”
I remembered how Munir had insisted that she was a member of an alien-hunting society. “I needed to borrow a tampon,” Rashelle said, and I chimed in that the dispenser was broken again.
“I always think that women should be responsible for their own feminine products,” Octavia had started to lecture us, but I’d ushered my other coworker into the hallway and then to the stairwell, which was a much nicer place if you had to sit somewhere and feel terrible. The marble steps were cool and the Art Deco beauty of the rest of the building had carried into that area, too. I discretely put a garbage can just inside the door, in case anyone needed to puke.
And Beckett and Rashelle weren’t the only ones with baby news, either. Iker, our office manager, had announced that his wife was expecting, and even the nice doorman at the building had told me that he was going to be a first-time grandfather. He was over the moon and I knew that my parents would have loved a grandchild, too. They mostly wanted to see me happy, though, and time would help with that. It would. And someday, I would feel like I wanted to meet someone, and maybe I’d fall in love with him. We could have a baby of our own. I thought of the name list I’d created when I’d been with Dax, which I’d tried to share with him but then had realized that it scared him. He had covered that by acting mad and annoyed with me.
I was rousted out of that unhappy memory when Lyra bounced into the kitchen, but she stopped when she saw me. “Are you watching my brother?” she asked accusingly.
I had been standing at the widow and yes, Silas was working in the back yard, but my eyes really hadn’t been on him. Granted, it was excusable if they had been, since he had stripped off his shirt as he mowed the grass and that displayed a physique that was more than impressive. I hadn’t gone with him and his sister when they’d visited the community pool, so I hadn’t been aware of the massive musculature of his back, the square cuts of his abs, the…
“No,” I told her. “I’m not watching your brother.”
“Your phone was ringing.”
“It was?” I glanced at the laptop and files that I’d set up on the kitchen table. “Where is it?”
“It’s in your purse.” Her eyes shifted to the side.
“Could you please bring it to me?” I requested, and she trotted out. When she returned with my bag, I saw that my mom had called. Before I talked to her, though, I started taking out some other items, like lipstick, my keys, my keycard for work, a hair tie, and a little compact mirror. There was a whole mess of other junk at the bottom, but I ignored that as I usually did until I got mad enough to dump everything out and organize.
“What’s this?” Lyra asked. She pointed at the round gold case with raised flowers. “Does it do something? I didn’t know how to make it work.”
“If you want to play with something of mine, you should ask first,” I said gently. I’d had a feeling about how she’d noticed the vibration of my phone, and it was that she’d already been looking in here. “This is a mirror.” I pushed the tiny button that made the compact pop open. “It belonged to my grandmother.”
She looked at herself briefly and patted her hair, which made me smile. “What is this for?” she questioned next, and pointed to my keycard. “Can I see it?”
She’d listened to my lesson about asking permission. “Sure!” I answered, smiling, and she examined the piece of plastic as I explained how I used it to open doors at my office building. Lyra mentioned that it was kind of cool that I worked in a big place where I needed a card like that and I nodded, even more excited. “You could come see, if you wanted. Someday.”
She now seemed less than interested. “Yeah,” she commented listlessly. “Can I put on your lipstick?”
“Sure,” I said again. “Watch how I do it.” I held up the mirror and swept the color over my lips. “Don’t push too hard,” I warned, but she didn’t pay much attention to that advice. Her pretty little mouth was suddenly a dark cranberry streak.
“Wow,” she said, and studied herself in the mirror. “I don’t like this.”
“It’s a lot of color,” I agreed, and showed her how to blot. As we worked on remediation, Silas came back in. He had put his T-shirt back on.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to his sister’s mouth.
“Lipstick,” she informed him, and made a face like a guppy. “Camille gave it to me.”
He turned in my direction and it was clear he wasn’t happy. “She asked me to show her how to use it,” I explained. “I probably did the same thing at her age, but I wasn’t really allowed to wear makeup until I was older.”
“You’re not either,” Silas told his sister, and now her brightly colored mouth fell totally open in surprise. I felt the same way, because it was the first time I’d heard him issue an order like that.
It didn’t work. “I am so!” she answered, and before things got worse, I had an idea.
“It’s such a pretty day,” I mentioned. “The dew point is a lot lower and it’s a great time to get outside.”
“I know,” he said, and pointed to the freshly chopped yard.
“We should go to the park for some BP. Batting practice,” I explained, when they both stared at me in confusion.
