“Got it.” Seb sat. He knew better than to disagree with a woman close to exploding.
The room fell silent again. Seb blew on his tea. Helen cracked eggs into a bowl like she wished they were someone’s head, Tom wallowed in a cloud of frustration, and Emma—oh, man—was breastfeeding her baby.
Seb’s gaze shot awkwardly to the other side of the room, a blush creeping up his neck, but Emma didn’t seem to mind at all.
“Helen tells me you’re an Olympic swimmer,” she said. “That must be very exciting.”
“It can be.” Seb sipped his tea, his gaze following Tom as he stood from the table to continue his discussion with Helen by the stovetop.
“Have you ever won gold?” Emma asked.
“Not yet.”Much to his mother’s annoyance. Seb tuned in to the hushed conversation going on behind him, but the only words he could really make out were names. Jaxon and Alexa. “So what do you do, Emma, when you’re not being a mom?”
“I’m a hairdresser. I’m on maternity leave for the next seven months but I work at a salon in the village.”
“Cool. Now I know where to come for a haircut.”
Emma beamed, seemingly ignoring the discussion behind them that was heating up faster than the pan Helen had just slammed on the burner.
“Will you help me with something please, Sebastian?” Emma discreetly adjusted her clothing.
“Sure.”
“I need to put Lucy down. Will you get the door?” Positioning the now heavily sleeping baby against her shoulder, she turned to Harry who was now playing quietly in the corner with a large push-truck toy. “Stay here with Daddy, I’ll be back in a minute.” Then out in the hall, she whispered, “They won’t f-bomb if Harry stays in the room.”
“Do they always fight?”
“No, not at all! They bicker but only when Tom is worried about her.” Emma led the way through to the living room, then asked him to open the door that Helen had shut in his face last night. “We’re leaving the kids here for an hour while Tom and I go for a walk with the dog to reclaim our sanity. I’ll put Lucy on Helen’s bed. Hopefully she’ll stay asleep for the duration.”
Seb followed Emma into the room where sunlight streamed through the wide glass-panel doors that led out to a deck under a wooden pergola. Seb had expected Helen’s bedroom to be a mess so wasn’t surprised to find that it was—an almighty one at that. Pens, papers, clothes, shoes and cables littered the floor, a few socks too. But it was the books scattered next to her unmade bed that caught his attention.
Angling his head, he read the titles,Software Development with Z, Concurrent Programming, Functional Programming with Miranda, Developing C++ Software.They were all battered, dog-eared text books, the one splayed-open facedown on her pillow titled,Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science. It lay next to a notepad filled with scribbled equations and formulas.
Holy freaking hell.
“Helen is scary clever,” Emma said. She padded the pillows into a nest around the baby on the bed. “It’s why Tom gets so frustrated with her sometimes. She’d fly through exams but I keep telling him she’s not made that way. She’s not interested.”
“She told me she designs websites.”
“And a whole lot more.” Emma chuckled, as if websites were a mere drop in the ocean. “Helen’s a hard worker, a real grafter, but she’s at her happiest when she’s left to her own devices. She’s just not cut out for a nine-to-five job. Unlike Tom. He absolutely loves his schedules and systems.” Emma smiled warmly. “He says it’s because he never had much routine growing up, not until he saw one of their foster dads leave the house each morning in a suit.”
Seb looked up. “Helen and Tom were in care?”
Emma nodded sadly. “There was no one else to look after them after their dad died.”
“How old were they?”
“Tom had just turned thirteen. Helen was fourteen.”
“What about their mom?”
“No, she walked out when Tom was just a baby and Helen not more than a year old. Can you imagine it? What kind of person does that?” Emma’s expression turned fierce. “I can't leave Harry and Lucy for more than an hour before I start missing them.”
Seb barely knew Emma but he could believe it.
“They don’t talk about their mother much,” she went on, “but Tom told me the authorities traced her when their dad passed away. They were told she’d died several years before from a drug overdose.”
“Man, that’s rough.” Above a desk crammed with notes and books, another photograph of the old lady hung crooked on the wall. Seb nodded toward it. “Is that their grandma?”
