Page 1 of Tulips and Lost Time

PROLOGUE

LUC

“It’s time to go,” Jess murmurs. My younger sister. One of two—identical twin girls—both hovering in the NICU and peering over my shoulders as I stare down at a sweet, five-pound, teeny tiny, blonde-haired baby.

Billy.

My daughter.

She’s too small, too thin, and way too fucking fragile for me to take home on my own. But our bags are packed. The crib has been built. The car seat is ready, and there are approximately seven hundred pink, and pastel green outfits hung in the closet, in the room we dubbed Billy’s, inside the house I bought for my wife.

We did all the things… Dated. Married. Purchased our own real estate. And then styled a nursery.

We followed the steps and obeyed the rules.

Sort of.

But it was all for naught, it seems.

Because if the universe wants to fuck a guy up, it’ll do it, whether we stick to the rules or not.

Jess sets her hand on my arm, her glossy, painted fingernails tapping my muscle and drawing my attention. She’s the more outspoken of my sisters. The louder one. Though Laine has been known to destroy a man when it was necessary. “They’ve discharged her, Luc. We’ve gotta take her home.”

“But Kari?—”

“She would want this.” Laine leans around me and picks up the baby—her niece—and presses a gentle, adoring kiss to her brow before turning away and nestling the bundle in her car seat. “She doesn’t want you guys hanging around here longer than necessary, Luc. You know that.”

“Because she’s always the fucking martyr.” I turn now that the hospital crib is empty but for rolled blankets and a lost sock.

One tiny sock for one tiny foot.

“This isn’t what we planned.” I hate that my eyes itch. That my stomach rolls with nerves and the world seems to tip on its axis. “We were gonna take her home together.”

“Sometimes plans change.” Jess bends to grab Billy’s unused diaper bag, overflowing with all the things an expectant mother packs as her ninth month approaches. Bibs. Blankets. Pacifiers. A cute little brush, though fuck knows, we were never gonna use it at the hospital. “You’re a dad now, Luc.” She hefts the heavy bag up and slips the straps over her forearm. “Your priority is Billy. Everything else needs to be dropped down a peg on your totem pole.”

“Not Kari.” I look down at my daughter and swallow the painful lump at the base of my throat. “I never agreed to push my wife down a step.”

The NICU doors slide open, a humming hallway filled to the brim with nurses and medical staff marching to their own beat as they go about their work. But in the doorway, my best friend in the whole world waits, his sparkling green eyes shimmering. Because he didn’t agree to this either. He never accepted a world where Kari wouldn’t be number one.

Because Jess and Laine are my sisters.

But Kari is his. She was his to protect first. His sister to raise after their parents died, even though he was still a kid himself.

“Marc…?”

He sets his hands on his hips, his six-foot frame slumping under the pressure of life and loss. To love and grieve and live, when others aren’t so lucky. He swallows, so the movement of his Adam’s apple is obvious, then he shakes his head and sighs.

Speechless.

Broken.

“It’s time to go.” Jess picks up the baby car seat in one arm, a woman who clearly knows how to do this stuff, considering she has two of her own. Then she wraps her free arm around mine and forces me to move. “Insurance isn’t gonna cover another night, Luc, and sticking around any longer would be like burning money. You can put those funds in Billy’s college account instead.”

“I don’t know how…” I search the bland white walls and the humidicribs that span the room. Other parents exist within a world that terrifies them. Some babies cling to life, half the size of my daughter. Some, even smaller. Machines breathe for some, while others get to graduate to their mother’s embrace instead of an uncaring plastic container.

The NICU is a world unlike any other. Where a baby is torn into existence, sooner than they’d intended, and placed inside a contraption like it could somehow simulate the comfort of a womb.

“I’ll probably need bottles,” I mumble, my mind spinning off in a thousand directions. “Formula, right?”

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