But as I thought about what I would’ve done had I been in Shad’s situation, my mind immediately went to “hell no.”
I wouldn’t have let her be.
Then again, that was seeing it from an outside perspective.
“You had a wife, sons, and two girls at home telling you that you needed to leave her alone,” I pointed out.
“Yeah,” he said. “But this gut instinct inside of me told me that I was letting it go on too long.”
He almost did.
He had no clue how close he was to losing her, but that was something that I wasn’t ready to share with him.
Maybe one day Baker would tell him what she’d told me four days ago and he’d feel it rip up his chest like I felt it rip up mine, and she wasn’t even my kid.
Wasn’t my anything.
Even though every instinct inside of me screamed to pull her in close to my chest and never let her go.
Laughter from outside the office had me glancing that way to see Keely and Baker in the middle of the hallway outside my office door, talking animatedly.
A wheezing sound left Shad’s lips.
“What?”
Shad looked from his daughter to me, a look of shock on his face.
“She’s skin and bones,” he murmured.
She was.
She looked like a completely different person than the woman I saw in the hospital all those weeks ago.
She was skinny.
Way too skinny.
But she’d been eating a lot this week. I’d seen her put away more than my brothers had at Thanksgiving dinner last year for every single meal she’d eaten.
“I had Apollo look into her medical records,” I said softly so she wouldn’t hear. “She was pumping milk in the living room the second day that she was here. Her shirt was lifted, and I saw all of her ribs. Man, those clothes only make her seem skinny. But I seriously counted every rib she had on her left side. Sorry for the invasion of privacy, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking Apollo to look.”
Shad waved the apology off.
“Anyway, what I was getting at was, the antidepressants she’s on take two weeks to completely see the effects,” I explained. “She’ll need to stay on the meds for six months after she sees her symptoms reduce.”
“Fuck,” he said. “She can’t be left alone, then?”
I immediately shook my head. “Left alone? Sure. But she has to take those meds. Her hormones are super out of whack, which they say is why she had the PPD in the first place.”
“What about the baby?” he said. “Does she want anything to do with him? The way that she made it sound over the phone…”
I thought about the mom that I saw now, compared to the mother that I witnessed with her son in the very beginning.
She didn’t care if he screamed—hell, she even left the room if it got to be too much screaming.
She didn’t care if he was bathing and did something cute.
She didn’t care if he was asleep and looked so innocent and goddamn angelic.
