Page 25 of Double Bucked

I can’t tell one baby from the other, but I say the thing you’re supposed to say when confronted with a squealing freshly born.

“He looks just like Hudson,” I say.

The girls exchange a fugitive look and then burst out laughing.

“What am I missing?”

Mary-Kate takes my hand and squeezes it too hard. “We have so much to catch up on.”

They deliver finger sandwiches with mayo and cucumbers. Small bowls of creamy, white mushroom soup. Pimento cheese on crackers lined up perfectly on a slim plate.

Nibbles that aren’t meant to fill you up but to pad the stomach for the bottomless mimosas that pass back and forth across the table.

My Promise Sisters have grown up. Everyone has had kids. Jake is Mary-Kate’s second. Elspeth has one. Violet has three.

“That’s amazing,” I say, meaning it.

“It’s a pain, is what it is,” Mary-Kate says as she plucks through the finger sandwiches, pushing them around the plate until she finds the one with salmon and cream cheese. “You really have to be careful about what you put inside of your body. You do all this work for them and—for what?”

“And they’re ungrateful.” Violet sighs. “All my children said Daddy first. Can you believe it? I carried them for nine months, and they have the nerve to learn his name before mine.”

“It’s infant identity transference,” James says.

He’s been quiet the whole brunch, so when he speaks up, the girls stop what they’re doing and blink at him, as though just remembering he’s there.

“Go on,” I encourage.

“I take it you’re the primary caretaker,” James says.

“Yes,” Violet agrees.

“In the beginning stages of life, psychologists theorize that infants fuse their own identities with that of their primary caretaker. In short, they don’t think to give you a name—mama—because you are the same as them. Daddy comes easier because they can differentiate between themselves and him.”

Violet tilts her head as she considers the information. “That’s…strangely comforting.”

“He’s like that,” I muse. “Strangely comforting.”

James’s eyes catch mine from behind his glasses. I smile at him.

Our attention is derailed when a tremor rushes through the room, like a flutter of birds taking off all at once. People lift up in their seats and crane their necks to look out the large, open windows.

On the racetrack outside, I see men leading their horses, one by one, across the field. Onlookers strain to watch the parade.

“What are they doing?” I ask.

“Showing off the studs,” Elsbeth says dreamily. Her eyes are fixed on the men, not the horses.

“I’m going to have a look,” James says. He stands and touches my shoulder on his way over.

What he means is I am overstimulated. I need space.

I grant it. I watch him leave. He perches like a cat on the benches by the big windows to peer down below. He fits his earbuds back in his ears. He’s settling himself.

His ass looks amazing in those pants. Tight. Asking to be gripped.

I may have also had too many mimosas.

My bones are looser. I want to sink into my puffy dress the way one sags into a beanbag.

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