“Not mine,” Webber grumbled. “A friend’s.”
“And whose baby are you holding, Copper?”
I jerked my head toward the balcony and said, “A friend’s grandkid. His daughter is having issues right now with postpartum depression, and she’s crashing here until he can get home.”
“That’s sweet of you,” she whispered as she walked first to the kid in my arms, then the one in Webber’s. “Please tell me that I can hold these babies.”
I gave her Holt without thought, trusting her implicitly.
“Ohh, you’re just precious.”
“You wouldn’t have thought that ten minutes ago when he was screaming bloody murder,” Webber mumbled.
Since I was child free I said, “Y’all give me a few minutes. I want to go check on her.”
Silver agreed excitedly, and I heard Webber grumble something underneath his breath while I was moving out onto the balcony with the door already closing behind me.
The sobs were the first thing I heard over the howling wind—being this high there was always wind.
Even now, all these months after moving in, the look down was still disorienting.
“Baker,” I murmured loud enough to be heard over the wind and her cries, but not too loud to be overwhelming.
She didn’t move the sheet from over her head, but she did pause in her crying.
Which was both a relief and a gut punch.
She didn’t want anyone to hear her cry.
Fuck.
“So I have this neighbor…”
I expected her to be outraged that I’d just let her kid go to some random woman I only knew through my sister. There was none. Only, “Is he done crying?”
“He’s finished crying for now,” I said as I explained what the chiropractor told me. “And then she said that I could bring Holt back any time.”
“You should definitely take him over there whenever you feel like it,” she mumbled.
Her ambivalence to what I did to her kid both concerned and relieved me.
She had to have some maternal care deep inside or her kid wouldn’t be prospering as he was, despite his crying. So that meant on some level, she trusted me with her kid.
Me, an ex-con who murdered someone.
Not to mention, there was no way in hell her father hadn’t shared about me.
She wouldn’t have been comfortable coming over here if she hadn’t known at least something about me.
And “oh, I shared a prison cell with him. We both served fifteen years for murder,” wouldn’t have been something that he left out of a conversation.
Especially not since Shad had gone down for the same reason I had—beating a man to death with his bare hands.
Though, Shad had beaten his man to death with his bare hands because he’d shot his dog and not caught his father doing inconceivable things to his sister.
“There’s food inside,” I said. “Would you like me to bring you some?”
There was a watery, red eye that popped out from underneath the white sheet, and then a resounding, “No.”
