Cooper swung his legs over the side of the bed. “It slipped my mind,” he said. “I was busy worrying about Lucy—not David.”
“He said there must he over thirty messages on the answering machine,” Josie said hotly. “Did you forget about them, too?”
“Babe, that machine’s your territory,” Cooper said. “All I did was make sure the thing was on to catch the calls when Ben and I came home last night. The message light was flashing when I looked at it a few hours ago—I assumed you checked it, too, and got the messages.”
Perfect. Now this whole mess was
her
fault? And how could he be so blasè? How could he shrug this off as if it weren’t a major disaster?
“Cooper, we’ve got a deadline in two days for a project for Thorton that got put so far on the back burner, it was totally forgotten,” she said. “We’ve somehow got to squeeze an eighty-hour job into the next forty-eight hours or we’re not going to meet our contract.”
“You
could
call Thorton, explain what happened, tell them you’re going to be late and offer them a discounted price,” Cooper said.
“We have a reputation for being on time,” Josie said tightly.
“Things happen,” Cooper said. He stood up and crossed to her, trying to rub the tension from her shoulders. “Come on, Joze. Call David back, tell him to relax and call Thorton in the morning. Tell him to go home—Fluffy wants a can of Feline Cuisine.” He met her eyes. “And then you can come back to bed.”
Back to
bed
? He actually wanted her to come back to bed?
Now?
Josie was so angry she could have spit. Gritting her teeth, she pulled away from him. “I’ll talk to David downstairs, so I won’t bother you.”
She closed the bedroom door behind her. Cooper sat back down on the bed and rested his forehead on the palms of his hands, elbows propped on his knees, momentarily giving in to a flash of despair. Talking about being put on the back burner . . .
Down the hall, Ben woke up and began to wail.
Cooper tiredly pulled on a pair of sweat pants and headed for the baby’s room, thinking, I know how you feel, kid.
“What’s up, Luce?”
Cooper stood in the doorway of the little girl’s bedroom, Ben slung on his hip.
“Nothing.” Lucy didn’t look up from the child-sized table that was in the corner.
“You doing some drawing?” he asked, taking a step into the room.
“Yes, sir.”
“Lucy, my name’s Cooper. It makes me nervous when you call me sir,” Cooper said. “Call me Cooper or Coop, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
Cooper sighed, and came a little bit farther into the room. It was a little girl’s room, complete with pink lace and frills. The curtains were hand-made—Carla’s work, no doubt—and hand-worked shelves held a fair amount of books and toys. The room seemed made for another child—a child who laughed and smiled and played and made noise. Lucy did none of those things. She didn’t even cry.
“Mind if I look?” Cooper asked.
Lucy shrugged.
He turned the light on and sat down on an impossibly tiny chair, with Ben on his lap.
Lucy was drawing pictures of puppy dogs—using the drawing he’d made on the back of that old envelope as a model.
“Holy sh—” He stopped himself in time. “Hot dog!” he said instead. “Lucy, where’d you learn to draw like that?”
She was good. She was better than good. She was four years old, and she had a sense of perspective and depth in her little line drawings that most adults would never achieve.
She shrugged.
“Can you draw a picture of Ben?” he asked her, putting a fresh piece of paper in front of her.
She shook her head “no.”
“I’ll draw Ben first,” Cooper said, “so you can see how I do it, okay?”
She nodded.
Holding Ben on his lap with his left hand, Cooper quickly did a rough sketch of the little boy. It was cartoonish, but enough of Ben’s good-natured exuberance came through.
Lucy watched seriously, then picked up her pencil and drew a fairly accurate copy of Cooper’s picture. She didn’t draw painstakingly slowly the way most children did—instead she moved her pencil quickly, imitating the way Cooper had drawn.
“Hot damn—
dog,
” Cooper said. He looked at Lucy and pretended to squint at her suspiciously. “How old are you
really
?” he asked.
“Four.”
“Nah,” he said. “Twenty-four maybe, but not
four.
”
She didn’t respond to his teasing. She didn’t react at all. In fact, she turned away and began another drawing of a puppy dog.
Ben began to fuss and Cooper stood up. “Ben’s hungry,” he said. “How about you, Luce? Want something to eat?”
She shook her head.
“See you later, then,” he said.
She didn’t answer as he left the room.
There had to be a way to get through to that kid, he thought as he took Ben down to the kitchen.
Ben burbled happily as Cooper strapped him into the high chair. Cooper heated a jar of strained peas in the microwave and mixed up a bowl of rice cereal—using infant formula instead of cow’s milk. He could hear Josie in the dining room, still talking to David on the phone.
She’d spread the contents of her briefcase across the dining room table, along with her laptop computer. She’d been on the phone almost constantly since ten o’clock last night.
Cooper fed Ben, listening to Josie’s voice get more and more hoarse. He rinsed Ben’s bowl and handed the baby a bottle, then went to stand in the dining room doorway, where he could see Josie and still keep an eye on the baby.
Josie’s dark curls were standing straight up in the places where she’d run her hands through her hair in frustration. She was, essentially, doing the work herself, but without the right kind of computer in front of her.
Her face was pale and she’d only picked at the food Cooper had brought her throughout the day.
He cleared his throat, and when she glanced at him, he made a time-out motion with his hands.
“Hold on, David,” she said, then covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
“You’re making yourself sick,” Cooper said evenly.
“It’s got to get done,” she said.
“You don’t need to do it yourself,” he said. “You pay people to do this sort of thing for you.”
“The ball got dropped, Cooper,” Josie said. “Yeah, I pay people to do this work, but they dropped the ball. It’s my responsibility to see that the work’s done correctly and on time. I can’t take the chance that it’ll get messed up a second time.”
Cooper took a deep breath and carefully didn’t say a word. It figured this had to happen just when she was starting to relax a bit about delegating work. This fiasco was bound to make her paranoid again about entrusting other people with important work. Great. At this rate, she wouldn’t relinquish control of Taylor-Made Software until some time in the late twenty-first century—like right around the time of her death.
But he didn’t say a word.
“Did you want something?” she asked as the silence stretched on.
“You should at least eat, Josie.”
She shook her head. “My stomach’s a little upset.”
“I’ll make you some soup if you want.”
“No,” she said, then added, “thanks,” as if she realized how harsh she’d sounded. She took a deep breath. “Cooper, I’ve
really
got to get back to this.”
“Right.” Cooper pushed himself up from where he was leaning against the door frame. “Sorry, babe. Don’t want to get in the way.”
Josie saw a flash of hurt in Cooper’s eyes. But he was not the injured party here.
He
wasn’t the one who had worked through the night to meet a deadline.
He wasn’t the one who had been sucked back into some frighteningly similar version of his childhood home, forced to run a multi-million dollar business from a thousand miles away, while trying not to hyperventilate as the walls closed in around him.
This place—this house, this town, even the children—were everything her mother had ever warned her about. It was almost too much to handle.
“Give me a break, Cooper, will you?” she said sharply. “You know, if you had told me that David had called in the first place, I would have been able to catch that flight to New York. I would have been able to do this work on the proper terminal, instead of over this damned telephone. So just knock it off with the kicked-puppy looks, all right? This is partially your fault.”
Cooper’s mouth dropped open and he stared at her with a mixture of indignant amusement and disbelief on his face.
“My
fault?” he said with a laugh of disdain. “Shit, I’m not even going to give
that
comment the dignity of a response.”
“You didn’t tell me David called.”
“When was I supposed to mention it?” Cooper said. “Maybe in the car, on the way to the hospital?” He took a deep breath, making himself lower his voice, afraid the sound of angry voices would upset Ben and Lucy. God knows they’d been upset enough already without Cooper and Josie making things worse. “If you can sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that you would have walked away from Lucy when she needed you, then I’ve seriously misjudged you, lady.” He shook his head and laughed. “I’m glad I forgot to tell you about David’s call, because this way I’ll never have to find out what you actually would have done.”
Cooper walked away, into the kitchen, without looking back.
Josie buried her face in her arms, resting her head on the table.
He was right. Cooper was right. She wouldn’t have left Lucy. She
couldn’t
have, not while the child was so sick.
That scared her. And made the walls close in a little tighter.
Josie’s stomach hurt like hell.
Taylor-Made Software was five hours from the meeting with the Thorton execs when Annie received a phone call—Thorton had to cancel, something had come up, they’d reschedule some time next week.
It was a last minute reprieve, the casual wave of a kingly hand over heads that had already been neatly arranged on chopping blocks, and Josie felt the appropriate rush of relief. But even that intense relief didn’t erase the awful gnawing sensation she’d carried in her stomach for the past several days. She crawled upstairs, into bed, hoping that sleep would make the pain go away.
Cooper let her sleep for fourteen hours, then he came into the bedroom, opened the curtains and plopped Ben down on the bed.
“Your turn,” he said briefly. “I need a break. I’m going out for a while.”
Josie tried to smile at him. “Going into Nashville, I bet,” she said. “Gonna buy some ‘real’ music? Something with a salsa beat, maybe?”
He didn’t smile back. “I did that yesterday,” he said. “Ben and Lucy and I were gone for about nine hours.” He shook his head. “You didn’t even notice.”
“Cooper—”
“Catch you later, babe,” he said, his voice echoing in the hall as he walked away. “Lucy’s in her room. I’m going into town.” He added something Josie couldn’t hear—and then she realized he was speaking in Spanish.
Perfect. If he were still mad enough at her to break into Spanish . . .
Ben was staring at her from the other side of the bed, and as Josie watched, his little face crumpled as if in slow motion and he began to cry.
Okay, this wasn’t so bad. As long as she didn’t stand up straight, Josie thought, she was okay. If she carried Ben sort of doubled over, her stomach didn’t feel like someone was sticking a knife into it.
She shuffled into the bathroom, and dug her bottle of antacid tablets from the back of the medicine cabinet. Lord, she was running low on these things. Figures she would be, considering that she was eating them like candy.
Please don’t let this be an ulcer, she thought, closing her eyes and leaning against the bathroom wall until the current wave of pain let up. But it had to be an ulcer. This hellish sensation was unmistakable.
Josie went down the stairs on her rear end, one step at a time, not wanting to lose her balance or trip while she was carrying Ben. When she got to the kitchen, she put Ben in his walker and sat down at the table.
She had to eat something. Her stomach would hurt worse with nothing in it.
She was making toast when Lucy ran into the room.
“The car’s gone,” the little girl said.
Josie looked up in surprise. Lucy was out of breath and clearly upset. In all the time they’d spent with Lucy and Ben, even during the terrible episode of the allergic reaction, Lucy hadn’t raised her voice or even cried. Heck, there hadn’t once been even a wisp of emotion on that child’s face.
“Cooper drove into town,” Josie said.
She wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of Lucy’s outburst.
“No!” Lucy screamed, and launched herself at Josie. In a frenzy, she hit Josie with her fists, kicked her, all the while screaming, “No! No! Bring him back! Bring him back!”
The force of the attack pushed Josie back into the kitchen counter, and a glass was knocked over. It fell onto the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces. Across the room, in his walker, Ben watched, wide-eyed.
Josie regained her balance and grabbed Lucy, pinning down the little girl’s arms so the child couldn’t hit her. With her other hand, she grabbed Ben’s walker and pulled him away from the broken glass, out the kitchen door, down the hall and into the living room.
She got Ben’s wheels securely anchored in the high pile of the carpeting, then sat on the couch, holding Lucy on her lap.
The little girl was crying, with great huge sobs and tears that streamed down her face. She was trying to say something, but the words were incomprehensible.
Josie held her close, rocking her gently for what seemed like hours until Lucy ran out of steam. Finally, exhausted, the little girl lay against Josie’s shoulder and said very softly, “I don’t want Cooper to go away forever, too.”
“He won’t honey,” Josie said. “He’ll be back really soon.”
Wouldn’t he?
Don’t be silly, she admonished herself. Of course Cooper’d be back.
Lucy’s eyes closed, and she fell asleep.
Across the room, Ben sat slumped down in his walker, sound asleep, too.
Josie sat very still.
This little girl, her niece, Brad’s small daughter, had lost the two people in the world who had meant the most to her—her mommy and daddy. Josie closed her eyes, remembering how she had felt when her mother had died. She’d been a whole lot older, eleven years old, and the pain and grief had been terrible. What must it be like for a four-year-old?