Page 78 of Knocked Up in Alaska

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ford heard the drumbeat of fast footsteps on the stairs leading to his front door and looked at his watch, then at Shayla, splayed out on her back in front of him on the living room floor, all dimpled fat rolls displayed in a light green summer onesie, parked under her colorful new jungle-pals playmat. “What’s your mom doing back already?”

Shayla gurgled and stretched an arm in the direction of a dangling monkey, looking for all the world as if she was saying, I don’t know.

“I don’t know, either,” he admitted and got up to open the door.

Lilah stood there, pale and teary, in stark contrast to her pretty pink V-neck and sweetly sexy white shorts. Not just pale. A sickly gray. Even her lips lacked color. And not just teary. Her eyes couldn’t seem to focus. They reeled.

“Hey.” He took one ice-cold hand and pulled her inside, into him, and felt the shakes rattling her. “Baby.” He shoved the door shut, pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and wrapped his arms around her. “What’s wrong?”

“N-n-nothing.”

“Something,” he insisted and guided her to the sofa, sat her down, then knelt in front of her and rubbed her freezing hands between his own.

From the depths of the house, a phone chimed. His, in its charging holster on his nightstand. For one moment, they both went still, then he sighed. “Mia’s at the movies with some friends. I better make sure it’s not her calling—”

“Of course.” Lilah nodded and swiped her hands over her cheeks. “I’m okay now. Really,” she added, pulled the corners of her mouth up in a very tenuous smile, and made a move to go to Shayla.

“Okay.” He stood. “I’ll be right back.”

He rushed to make it to his phone before voicemail picked up and experienced an increasingly familiar trickle of relief to see it wasn’t Mia calling, or the sheriff, or the medical clinic. Just one of those newly discovered joys of parenting—low-grade worry when the subject of said patenting wasn’t right under his nose. In the wake of his receding worry came a wave of…unease. Trace was calling.

He picked up. “Hey.”

“Hey.” The single syllable contained audible worry, of the not-so-low-grade variety. “Is Lilah there?”

“Yeah. She just arrived.”

On the other end of the line, Trace exhaled a long breath and said to someone on his side, “She’s there.” Then, into the phone, “Good. She left here very upset. Too upset to drive in my opinion, but she’s fast when she wants to be. Left half her tires on our driveway. Then she didn’t pick up her phone. We worried.”

“She’s still very upset, but she’s in one piece. What the hell happened?”

The question provoked another long, slightly frustrated breath. “We honestly don’t know. What’d she tell you?”

“Nothing. Yet. She literally just got here. But this is not about baby blankets.”

“No. We were talking about Shay and some of the decisions we’d come to regarding his estate and how to best provide for her and Shayla, and…she freaked out,” he admitted. “Maybe it was too soon. To us it seemed like well past the point to have the conversation, because she deserves to have some security and a little fucking breathing room so she can make a real plan for herself and Shayla, but it took some time, legally, to unscramble the egg of Shay’s financial affairs. I didn’t…we didn’t…appreciate how the discussion might make the loss fresh for her. She hasn’t really had a chance to sit with her grief the way the rest of us have. Right after Shay died, she suddenly had a pregnancy to deal with. In retrospect, it’s totally understandable that she had to put those emotions on a back burner. And then, tonight, she walks in and we’re all sitting down, ready to talk about wills and trusts and…boom. It’s right there in her face again, in a very formal way. He’s dead. He’s gone. He’s not coming back.”

Trace sighed. “We messed up. We saw a need that we could help address on Shay’s behalf, and we were, frankly, happy to do it. We were happy,” he repeated, in a kick-his-own-ass kind of voice. “We didn’t consider how this would blindside Lilah. We just wanted her to have the same financial security Shay would have offered if he’d been here to do it. Give her options beyond what’s she’s got right now.”

Options beyond waitressing for a living, squeezing in one stingy online class a quarter, and wondering who would watch Shayla once school started. Options that could—and should—take her wherever was best for her to go. Like to college in Anchorage, as Rose had promised for so long, with sufficient funds to pay for daycare for Shayla. Ford dropped to the edge of his bed. “You guys can’t beat yourselves up over tonight. You’ve done the right thing. Sounds like you did it ethically and legally. Most importantly, you did it out of love—for her, and the baby, and Shay. Once she settles down, she’ll see that.”

Wouldn’t she? He thought of her and those still waters running deep. Months and months, she’d kept a lonely, heavy secret. He thought of her calling out to Shay in her dream, that same night his relationship with her had started to skid out of the friend zone he’d promised her. He remembered how she’d dreamed of Shay again during labor, thinking he’d spoken to her.

A shiver slid down his spine. Did she have unresolved issues with Shay?

“…hope you’re right,” Trace said from the other end of the call, and Ford forced himself to dial back into the conversation. “Anyway, tell her we love her, and we can re-visit everything when she’s ready.” One of the women spoke, Trace responded, and a short, impatient round of back-and-forth ensued, which suggested the woman was Bridget rather than Izzy. Then Trace sighed heavily before adding, “And, that said, Bridget’s going to call her tomorrow, so maybe give her fair warning.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he assured the man before signing off.

He glanced at the time. Almost nine. Mindful of Shayla’s impending bedtime and aiming not to have two distressed females on his hands, he walked quietly back to the living room. Lilah stopped her bouncy walk-Shayla-to-sleep midstride when she spotted him. She’d kicked off her white sandals, so now her feet were as bare as his, and equally soundless. He came closer and peered at the baby laying over her shoulder. “She’s out,” he said.

Lilah nodded. “I saw you’d given her half the bottle I packed, so I just topped her off, burped her. That pretty much did the trick.”

He lifted the baby from her arms and deposited her in the carrier. Even though Shayla had displayed considerable skill at sleeping in broad daylight and through loud bar-room conversations, he clicked off the table lamp closest to her carrier, which pitched the room into muted light from the kitchen.

He walked that way. “Something to drink?”

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