“Daddy sad.”
“Daddy’s not sad, Sweetheart,” I tell Molly as I open the door to the coffee place and carry her inside.
She studies me as we join the line, her little face serious as she pouts.
“How can I be sad when my best friend is a lion?” I ask.
“Roar!” she shrieks, loud enough to draw amused glances from two women in line. Their eyes take in her rosy round cheeks in her fluffy lion onesie, before moving to me in my suit. They both smile as one of them not-so-subtly checks my left hand for a wedding ring.
I tighten my hold on Molly, my lips flattening. My father would chuckle if he were here. Tell me I’ll have to loosen the reins as she gets older. I know he’s right. He had three kids, and saw us all through scraped knees, fevers, and a broken arm when my brother tried to build a makeshift zipline in our apartment with an old rope and a coat hanger. And at age fifty, he’s about to do it all again with Halliday.
But Molly’s my world.
She’s the one thing keeping me sane. The one thing that makes me get up in the morning after losing him. I loved my mother. And that’s a loss I feel every day. But with him it was different… he was my brother. The other half of me.
The day he died it felt like a part of me went with him. I didn’t know how I’d survive without him. I didn’t think I could. Until the moment I opened my door to a crying baby and a handwritten note that set my life on a new course.
“Babyccino and a Latte. Double shot,” I say to the woman behind the counter.
“Latte, double shot, for Sullivan,” she repeats, remembering me from the previous two days, and writing my name on the cup in thick black ink. “And a babyccino…” She winks at Molly, “…for the lion.”
Molly dazzles her with one of her smiles she gives out toofreely to strangers, and I ignore the bite of protectiveness that comes along with seeing it.
We move to the end of the counter to wait. My phone rings in my pocket and I keep a firm hold of Molly as I pull it out and answer.
“I’ll call you back,” I bark at one of the senior operations team before he can speak. I’ll be in my office in ten minutes and able to talk about whatever it is he needs to in private.
I put my phone away and grab a lid for my coffee as it’s placed down, taking in the plain white foam on top of it.
“Where’s my?—?”
“Your what?”
I glance up at the barista, but it’s the same woman who took my order, not the usual redhead with the tight uniform.
She looks at me expectantly.
“Never mind,” I grumble, shoving the lid on.
“I’m so sorry!”
The out of breath remark makes me look up. There she is. Red hair. Same unmistakable uniform that looks even smaller than it did yesterday, if that’s possible. Her heaving breaths make her breasts appear in real danger of bursting through the buttons.
“What happened?” The other woman turns her back on me, giving the redhead her full attention as she scrabbles to tie an apron around her waist.
“Shaving cut,” she mumbles in a low whisper.
“Everything okay?”
The extra layer of concern in the other woman’s voice makes me frown. Since when did a shaving cut provide an acceptable reason for being late?
“Yeah,” the redhead replies, seeming a little shaken. “I got the bleeding to stop, it’s all good.”
“All right. As long as you’re okay?” The other woman squeezes her arm in a show of understanding, making myfrown deepen. I’d put one of my staff on a final warning if they tried to sell that shit to me.
I look more closely at the redhead as she picks up a milk jug and sets it underneath a frother. Her too-tight skirt falls to just above her knees. Her lower legs are bare, no sign of a Band-Aid. Exactly which part of herself was she shaving?
I run my tongue over my lower lip as she pours the milk into a miniature takeaway cup and then holds a stencil over the top of it and shakes on some cocoa.
