“Jessie, I don’t know—”
“We mine! We mine!” Jade was singing from the back seat.
I took another sip of my coffee and batted my eyelashes at him. “See?” I asked in a saccharine voice. “Who says I don’t know how to have fun?”
14
Why
Jessie
My chance for fun came sooner than I thought. After Jade’s therapy, we got back to their house for lunch, and as soon as he’d finished off his triple-decker meatball sandwich, Derrick passed out on his mother’s couch. He crashed so hard that by the time I found him he was snoring hard, and a little bead of drool had formed at the corner of his mouth.
Part of me wanted to feel sorry for him. The guy was working all through the night then driving us everywhere we went. I hadn’t even been able to convince him to leave me alone with her for more than an hour. He was obviously exhausted, and I would have thought the whole thing ridiculous. Except that after hearing about Jade’s incident, whatever it had been, I could see it had shaken him to the core. His weird interrogation at our first meeting was starting to make sense.
But sympathy wasn’t going to help me much this afternoon. I’d told him I would need to leave early to take my mom to the doctor to get a blood test done, and he’d been more than happy to take Jade. Now that he was so comfortably unconscious, however, it seemed a shame to wake him. It also made me uncomfortable to leave Jade as the only conscious one in the house, particularly with their ginormous pool in the backyard, even if it did have a gate.
The fact of the matter was that Derrick needed sleep.
I needed to leave.
And he needed to see that I truly could take care of Jade all on my own for one afternoon.
“Jade.” I popped my head into the kitchen, where she was playing with her string cheese while she looked at the same picture book she’d had in the truck earlier. “Finish up and get your shoes. We’re leaving in just a few minutes.”
She looked at me but didn’t put down her cheese. “Where?”
“We’re going to have a girls’ day.” I winked. “We might even get a smoothie.”
Jade shoved the rest of the cheese in her mouth and trotted out to find her shoes. As she put them on, though, she cast an uneasy glance at her brother.
“Coming?”
I shook my head and put my finger to my lips. “Your brother is really sleepy right now, so we’re going to let him sleep while you and I go out and have some girl time.”
She nodded and finished putting on her shoes, but the little crease didn’t leave her forehead as she grabbed her book and followed me out the door.
I felt like a nefarious kidnapper as I moved her car seat to my car. This was what her parents hired me to do, I reminded myself. Derrick had decided to insert himself into the equation, but he’d never been a vital part, to begin with. For some annoying reason, I couldn’t make the guilt go away completely, but it wasn’t enough to stop or even slow me. So I settled for leaving a note on the door letting Derrick know where we were going and that we’d be back in three hours.
“All right,” I said as I buckled my own seatbelt and turned to back out, “it’s a girls’ day! We’re going to run an errand at the doctor withmymommy, then I’m going to get you a smoothie. Are you excited?”
Jade shrugged. She was looking at her book again.
“What flavor do you want? We can get strawberry, vanilla, blueberry, cherry, you name it.”
No response.
“Hey, pretty girl.” I glanced in the rearview mirror. “What’s wrong?”
She shrugged again as she looked out the window. “Nothing.”
“Then why won’t you talk to me?”
“Thinking.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t the answer I’d been anticipating. But I didn’t have time to focus on it because my phone began to buzz. “Hey, Mom,” I said, putting it on speaker. “I’m on my way.”
“Sounds good. I’ll be waiting for you.”
