Page 11 of Just Come Over
“Go ahead.”
“Why the hell would you tell me that, when you know it isn’t an option? And when you know bloody well that if it had been me in that hotel room, that apartment, whatever it was, I’d have stepped up six years ago, and kept stepping up, for the same reason I will now, and not with four hundred dollars a month, either? Because it’s not a choice.” The dragon was loose. No holding him back. “She’s my responsibility, and you know it. Where would I have been if my Nan had felt that way, or the aunties? If they’d said, ‘Sorry, mate, got no room for you and your little brother. Good luck to him once the two of you are separated, but there’s nobody here with time or space in their life to cope with that nuisance.’ It’s not a bloodychoice.Why would you tell me it was?”
“Because,” Colin said, “it isn’t my choice. He wasn’t my brother.”
It was freezing in Chicago. Literally. When you added the biting wind to the mixture, it was worse. Rhys remembered that from the Chicago trip. It was about all hedidremember, other than the match itself, and the hockey game some of the boys had gone to see a couple nights before, during which time Dylan had been chatting up a teenaged waitress at the pizza place.
Who’d been barely nineteen, as it turned out, and just out of high school. Rhys had had to stuff down another blast of cold rage when he’d learned that. Dylan had been nearly thirty.
He hadn’t even eaten any deep-dish pizza on that trip. Not on his nutrition plan. He hadn’t eaten it last night, either, after he’d arrived at the hotel, even though there was a place down the street serving it up, and it smelled amazing. Just because your life was falling apart, though, just because you’d left your team in the care of your assistant coach days before their first Super Rugby match of the season, and you’d been flying out of Auckland when you should have been having a breakfast date with your sister-in-law, that didn’t mean you lost your discipline. Comfort eating led to no comfort at all, when you were sweating off the extra Kg’s in the gym. Life was all about consequences.
He finished paying the driver and headed across the pavement, accepting the polar blast until he got through the glass doors and into the lobby of the Children and Family Services building, a drab thing made of concrete that matched the steel-gray sky overhead, heavy with the frozen promise of snow. Up in the lift, down the corridor, giving his name to a receptionist, then sitting in the last available seat, in an arrangement of chairs like a doctor’s waiting room, only less cozy.
There was a reason it was the last seat. To his right, a woman was holding a toddler. Barely. The kid—a boy—was thrashing, crying, his eyes and nose streaming in his dark face. “Want to gohome,”he moaned. “AJ all done. All done. Want to go home.” Rhys knew how he felt.
He had to look at the kid, because to his left, a woman was nursing a baby, and he wasn’t looking over there. It wasn’t that he thought she shouldn’t be doing it. He just didn’t think he should be watching. He was also too big for this chair, he was having to hold his elbows close to his sides to keep from banging into somebody, and he was the only man in the place.
The toddler had stopped crying, at least. Instead, he was staring at Rhys, his brown eyes big as saucers.
Rhys tried a smile. “Hi,” he said.
The kid started crying again. Brilliant.
After what felt like an hour, but was probably fifteen minutes—during which time somebodyelsestarted feeding her baby, and Rhys seriously considered just closing his eyes until it was over—a woman appeared at the doorway and called out, “Rice Fletcher?” Exactly like a doctor’s office, mangled name and all.
He got up with a silent prayer of thanksgiving. “Rhys,” he said, pronouncing it the way you were meant to.Reece.“I’m here.”
“Jada Franklin,” she said, shaking his hand. “We spoke on the phone.” And yet she’d forgotten how to pronounce his name. “Come on back.”
He followed her, not into an office, but into a cubicle, where he wedged himself into another chair in not enough space.
“So,” he said.
“So,” she said. “Casey Moana Hawk. Your daughter. She’s ready to go.”
Nine words, dropping into the restrained hubbub around them like nine nails being driven into his coffin. He said, “It can’t be that simple, surely. You aren’t just going to hand her over without knowing more about me than that. I had some of it done for you, though. Background check.” He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, pulled out a sheaf of printed papers, and handed them to her together with the passport he’d picked up at the consulate that morning, which would allow the girl to travel to New Zealand with him. Colin had pulled major strings to get it this fast, but the kid had been in foster care for two weeks now, and Rhys needed to get her out. Anyway, if you had to do something, you didn’t moan about it. You just went ahead anddidit.
Jada’s brown eyes held a career’s worth of shattered illusions, and she didn’t even look at the papers, just handed them back. “You’ve acknowledged paternity, her mother’s dead, and you’re the other parent. As far as the State of Illinois is concerned, she’s yours. Let’s go get her.”
“I’m not adopting a kitten at the SPCA,” he said. “Come to think of it, you probably have to do more to adopt a kitten. I’m not... I’m not a dad. I’m single. Don’t you have some—paperwork? A bloodyinterview?A brochure? Something?”
She smiled, which was the last thing he’d have expected. “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard requestmorebureaucracy. You do realize that’s exactly the thought in every dad’s mind when the nurse hands the baby over at the hospital curb, and he tries to put her in the car seat for the first time and realizes exactly how small she is and exactly how much she’s his responsibility now. Nobody’s ready to have a child, although some people are less ready than others. You learn as you go. Your own social services offers parenting classes, I’m sure. The fact that you’re aware you need support is a good sign. You’ll be fine.”
He wouldn’t be fine. This was agirl.He knew about having a little brother. He even knew how to change a nappy. What he didn’t know was what he was going to do with a six-year-old girl. He was going to have to talk to her about boys. He was going to have to learn about clothes. He was going to have to fix her hair.
That wasn’t the real problem. He knew that, too. He was panicking, was what it was. Getting himself out of the moment, watching the scoreboard instead of the field. He took a breath and refocused.
He could have called in the whanau. Somebody would have taken her, some auntie or cousin, once he’d explained that she wasn’t his, but she was theirs. He didn’t trust half of them, though, when it came down to it. Not with a life. Not with a child. His Nan had done her best, but she’d been too old and too tired to take charge of two more rambunctious boys, as well as two of their cousins—malecousins. Which had left the kids to sort it out themselves. He wasn’t dropping Casey, determined stare or not, intoLord of the Flies.And then there’d have been telling Zora the truth about her husband, and leaving her to pick up yet more pieces. That was a no.
He put the papers back in his jacket pocket, because nobody was interested in reading about the fact that he owned his home, was gainfully employed, paid his debts, and had never been charged with a crime.
Maybe he’d hang onto them for dating purposes. That would move things along.
He was stalling again.
Jada said, “Come on. Let’s go get your daughter.”
He’d been mad to think he could do this.
