But maybe she wasn’t doing a terrible job, after all.
Maya went to bed that night bracing herself for another day of interrogation.
Instead, she was woken ten minutes later by a screaming toddler.
Tomás was enraged. By what, she didn’t know. He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t sore. He didn’t need a fresh diaper or his binky or a book or a song. Even laying out his treasures didn’t soothe him for more than a minute. He would relax in her arms until she could almost convince herself he was asleep, then jerk back into total wakefulness with a roar of outrage.
Desperate, she found herself sneakily googlingsleep regression.It was pointless. There was a sleep regression for every week of a baby’s life up to age eighteen when presumablyyou booted them out to college and it became someone else’s problem. And none of the sites had any advice about dragon babies.
“Pone!” Tomás wailed, clutching at her mobile. “Pone! Pone!”
Did giving him her phone make her a bad mom? Did it mean her phone would be part of his hoard and she would never get it back? Would that be a bad thing? Her phone used to be her life, but these days it was mostly a way for her to read guilt-inducing parenting advice. And call the only other humans in town. Her shifter neighbors were lovely, but they were still coming around to the fact that some people couldn’t magically telephone people using telepathy, and—
Oh. Tomás had the phone now anyway, so—
CRASH!
“Waaaaah!”
And now the floor had her phone.
Yayyyy.
She bundled Tomás onto one hip and clumsily kneeled to pick up the phone as he wailed into her shoulder. The screen was cracked, and she really wasn’t in a mood to discover that it wouldn’t turn on, so she didn’t even try.
“Come on, baby. Let’s go try another snack, okay?”
Her brain flailed at ideas as she made her way to the kitchen. She used to calm him down by bouncing on an exercise ball. Where was it now? Had it come with her to Hideaway Cove? Or was it in the boxes of stuff her mom had arranged to be shipped to her after she moved here? All those boxes she was going to unpack next weekend. One day, next weekend would come, and then maybe she would find her favorite pair of jeans again, too. Except they probably wouldn’t fit.
Better to never unpack anything. Yes. That sounded like a better idea.
“Awawa,” Tomás grumbled. “Hoo! Hoo!”
He puffed his cheeks out like a chipmunk and blew a raspberry at the fridge, then yelled at it.
“What are youdoing?” Maya asked, exhausted.
“Hoo!”
“Do you want to be an owl? Is that it?” She scrabbled a bottle of milk out of the fridge. Tomás growled at it. She put it back in. Tomás started hooting again.
Okay. This was her life now.
That was fine.
She hooted back at him, and he stared at her like she’d just transformed into a dragon.I bet that would make some things easier,she thought with a familiar pang. But Tomás wasn’t screaming, which meant she had approximately oh-point-six seconds to think of something, anything to keep distracting him with so he would forget he was grumpy long enough to fall asleep…
Too late.
Time passed. Or maybe not. Maybe she was trapped in a timeless void, fated to be hooted and cried at by an angry toddler until the sun exploded.
She was half-asleep on the rocker in Tomás’s room—Tomás still switching between chewing on his hands and hooting—when someone knocked on the door.
Oh god.
Tension ratcheted up her spine. Shifters were psychic. What if Tomás had been screaming telepathically this whole time? What if he’d woken up the whole street? What if—
She opened the front door. Sunlight streamed inside.It’s morning already?she thought, dazed, and looked up into Corin Blackburn’s chilly face.
