His Unexpected Family

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“Very.”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“To raise this baby.” She looked over at Cora sleeping peacefully in the car seat. “I can’t have children of my own.”

“Oh, I see.” He nodded and took a bite of his burger.

Stupid, she thought to herself. It was a personal thing to blurt out, and she wished she could take the words back. What did Greg want to know about her fertility? Seriously, Emily, she chastised herself.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She took a long, creamy sip of her milk shake. “It’s just so complicated.”

“I can see that.” His blue eyes met hers, and she was relieved to see compassion in them.

“I wish I knew why Jessica chose me instead of her brother. If I knew that, I’d know if I should be fighting for this or not. I need to know what she wanted, really wanted.”

He nodded slowly and leaned back in his chair. The comfortable quiet stretched out between them as they each finished their burgers.

“Greg?”

He raised his eyebrows in response.

“Are you going to be investigating my cousin’s death?”

“I’ll be looking into it,” he said. “I don’t have any reason to suspect foul play, but I’d like to get a few questions answered to put my own mind at ease.”

“While you’re doing that, would you mind keeping an eye open for something that might explain why she chose me?” Emily asked.

“Like what?”

“I wish I knew. I just need a few answers, too, about now, and I don’t know how to get them.”

Greg was silent for a moment, his gaze moving slowly over her face. His blue eyes seemed to be filled with conflicting emotions, something he wasn’t hiding very well. Finally, he took a deep breath. “Sure.”

“Really?” Emily laughed nervously. “I didn’t think you’d agree.”

Greg smiled at that. “I think you could use a favor about now.”

“Thank you. This means a lot to me.”

Just then, Cora began to cry, a thin, hiccup-y wail coming from the car seat, and Emily rummaged through the baby bag for a bottle.

“I’m prepared.” She gave him a wink and gently picked up the wriggling Cora in her arms.

* * *

Emily tried to give Cora the bottle, but the baby scrunched her eyes shut and wailed all the louder, turning her face away from the milk. Emily patted her and shushed her, but to no avail. She peeked in the diaper and felt her little face for fever. At first, Greg’s thoughts were focused on the crying, wondering when it would stop, but then he saw Emily’s face and he felt a sudden surge of sympathy. She looked ready to cry, too.

“What’s the matter?” Greg asked.

Tears welled up in Emily’s eyes, and she shook her head. “I’m not her mother.”

Greg could hear the pain in Emily’s voice as she said it, and the thought of the tiny thing crying desperately to find her mother—the mother who had been absent for a couple of weeks now—was heartrending.

Cora wailed harder, her face turning red as she cried out her frustration or grief, Emily patting her little rump and shushing fruitlessly. The restaurant was empty except for them, and when he looked over at the teens working, he found them staring.

“Can I try?” he suddenly asked, and as the words came out of his mouth, he was already regretting them. He was more of an iron-pumping kind of guy than a baby-soothing kind of guy, but there was something about the sadness in Emily and the unwanted audience that made him want to fix it if he could.

Emily agreed mutely, and he took the squirming infant out of her arms. What was he thinking? Cora screamed, her eyes squished shut and her tiny tongue quivering with the effort of her wails. When he tried to hold her close, she writhed and wriggled. He wasn’t sure exactly how to hold her, but he decided to simply use logic. When apprehending a suspect, first you needed to stop the perpetrator and then subdue the limbs. Cora’s legs were squirming quite actively, so he simply pushed the little knees up and pulled her against his chest. Once she was there, she seemed a bit surprised by her position, so he took advantage of the pause in her cries to hum a low, soft note.

It wasn’t a song. It wasn’t anything, really, just a low sound in his throat that rumbled in his chest. Cora gave a few more squirms, then leaned her tired little head onto his chest, listening to the sound. Emily came around to his side of the table.

“Have some milk, sweetie,” Emily murmured, and she slid the bottle’s nipple into Cora’s mouth. The infant started to suck noisily.

“There.” Greg caught her eye and grinned. “Now don’t move...”

Emily gave him an impressed look. “Wow, you’re good with babies.”

“I’m normally not.”

“How did you know what to do?”

“Lucky guess?” He looked down at the top of Cora’s little head with the damp little swirls of golden-red hair. “I think I just surprised her.”

The sound of Cora’s soft slurps as she drank her milk filled the space between them, and he looked down at Emily with her dark hair swept away from her face and her long lashes brushing her cheeks with each blink. She sat close to him on the bench as she held the bottle for the baby to drink, and the soft scent of her shampoo mingled with the scent of baby. Just another couple of inches and she could rest her head on his shoulder, too. He pulled his thoughts away from dangerous ground.

“I’ll have to remember that trick.” She smiled sadly. “I can’t change the fact that I’m not her mom.”

“Steve’s wife wouldn’t be her biological mother, either.”

“Well, that’s true.” Some of the sadness left her eyes, and he felt gratified to see it. She was hard on herself, that much was obvious. And she was under a tremendous amount of pressure.

What would it be like to belong with Emily and Cora? This was a sweet moment with the baby in his arms, drinking her bottle, and Emily so close to him that if he just leaned over... No, this wasn’t productive. There was no point in imagining what it would be like to have a family—to have them.

“Maybe you should take her back,” Greg said gruffly.

“Oh, no,” Emily replied, nonplussed. “You seem fine, and she seems happy.”

With that, Cora finished the bottle and Emily moved around to her seat across the table from him. Greg looked from Emily to Cora and back to Emily again.

“Burp her, would you?” Emily said. “Here’s a cloth.”

She said it so matter-of-factly, as if asking someone to burp a baby was the most natural thing in the world, that he found himself wondering if it weren’t in fact the most natural thing in the world. He took the proffered cloth and put it over his shoulder the way he’d seen Emily do it. Granted, she was more graceful, but after a couple of tries he managed it, and he started to gently tap Cora’s back.

“You know, I used to see myself with a whole houseful of kids.” Emily turned her attention to her fries, swirling them slowly through the ketchup. “I don’t even know why I thought I’d have so many. I suppose it comes with always having a class full of five-year-olds.”

“And now?”

“Now I’m grateful for the chance to raise one child. It’s all in perspective.”

Cora let out a resounding burp, and Greg looked down at her with a grin. He’d never expected burping a baby to be so...satisfying. It was as if he’d just slam-dunked.

“Nicely done.” Emily grinned at him, popping another fry in her mouth. “What about you? Do you ever think about having kids?”

Greg felt the moment disintegrating around him, caving in on itself like the old mall when a wrecking ball connected with a load-bearing wall. He shook his head.

“Not at all?” Her brow furrowed as her eyes met his. “You don’t want kids?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

It was the truth, wasn’t it? He couldn’t lie to her, but he could see the disappointment in her eyes as he admitted what was inside of him. No matter how adorable Cora was, no matter how sweet it might feel to imagine having a family of his own, children were simply out of the question.

Chapter Six

The next day, Emily stood at the kitchen sink washing a sink load of dishes while her mother rocked Cora. The sink was loaded full of pots and pans, some muffin tins sitting to the side taunting her with the sheer amount of scrubbing they were going to require. It was a bright and sunny day, and as Emily stood there by the sink, wrist-deep in soapy water, she could see some robins poking through her lawn in the shade of an apple tree. It was peaceful.

Emily’s mother stood behind her, Cora in her arms. She looked down at the baby with the wide-eyed expression people used with babies, and Cora looked entranced. Emily chuckled softly as she rinsed another mug and put it in the dish rack.

“Uncle Hank came by this morning,” Emily said.

“Poor man.” Her mother sighed. “Did seeing Cora help him at all?”

“I don’t know.” Emily put her attention into some egg welded onto a plate. “He didn’t stay long. He cuddled her for a little while, then he said he had to go.”

“I can’t imagine how he must be feeling right now....” Her mother put Cora up onto her shoulder and leaned against the island. “To lose a daughter.” She shook her head. “It’s unthinkable.”

Emily nodded.

“He and Jessica had a complicated relationship,” her mother commented thoughtfully. “That would almost make it worse, I think.”

“What happened between them?”

“He thought that being tough on Jessica would straighten her out.” Her mother shrugged her shoulders. “Was he wrong? I guess so, considering that she left and never really came back. He thought she needed more discipline, and by the time he realized he was wrong in that call, it was too late.”

Emily pulled another plate out of the sudsy water and looked back at her mother. “I think it did him some good. He said Cora looks a lot like Jessica did as a baby.”

“She does, doesn’t she?” The older woman looked down at Cora’s little face. Her mother had been a natural redhead once upon a time, and now she dyed it back to red, but it never looked very natural anymore. The line of white at her roots didn’t help.

Emily was avoiding the topic that was on her mind, but she was afraid to bring it up. Had Uncle Hank felt uncomfortable in her home because of Steve contesting custody? Did he think she was taking something away from his family? She washed a pot, rinsing it in hot water and listening to the sound of her mother making mouth noises for Cora.

“What about the custody thing?” Emily asked finally.

“What do you mean?” her mother asked.

“Has anyone said anything?”

Her mother was silent for a long moment. Then she took a deep breath. “Uncle Hank hasn’t said anything, but he isn’t much of a talker. Your aunts didn’t think too much of Jessica, so they think that she should have left her daughter to Steven. He was her brother, after all. Grandma is just really sad. She says that Jessica did a good thing by leaving Cora to you, and she thinks Steven is being willfully difficult....”

Emily listened as her mother went on with a description of everyone’s opinions on the matter. She knew that every family member would have one, but it was another thing hearing them all. She probably shouldn’t have asked.

“...Aunt Helen thinks that Sara wants to raise Cora because she gave Jessica such a hard time when they first got married. She thought Jessica was far beneath her and didn’t make any bones about it. Aunt Helen thinks that Sara feels like she needs to prove something. My cousin, Edith, on the other hand...”