Kevin looked at her profile, incredulous. “And you think I don’t?”
“Sorry,” she said again, tears in her voice. Brother. Was he batting a thousand today or what?
“Yeah,” he breathed out. “Me, too. For yellin’ at ya. Especially considering if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t even know about her.” A pause. “Have you been taking care of her all along?”
Julianne reached into the crib, stroking the baby’s cheek. “Yes,” she whispered at Pippa’s bright smile in response. “From the moment she was born.” She angled her head at him, her lips slightly curved. “You can pick her up, if you like.” When Kevin hesitated, she added, “Just make sure to support her head—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He sucked in a breath, then slipped his hands underneath Pippa’s back and head, scooping the surprisingly solid little girl out of the crib to nestle against his chest. A whole mess of emotions slammed through him as she skootched around, her peach-fuzz head tickling his chin. But definitely topping the list was a gut-wrenching sensation of connection, that she was his, and he was hers, and nothing could alter that simple fact.
“You’ve done this before,” Julianne said.
“I’m the youngest of six. Lots of nieces and nephews.” Kevin shifted Pippa so her diapered tush rested in the crook of his arm. She started to fuss. Nothing major, just a few little eh-eh-ehs. Kevin gently jiggled her in his arms and she stopped.
“Is your family close?”
There it was, that same wistfulness he’d hear in Robyn’s voice in those rare, unguarded moments when she slipped on her rebellious streak. “Closer than some of us might like,” Kevin said, his lips twitching. “My three oldest brothers and their families all live within a cuppla blocks of my parents.”
“And where is that?”
“Springfield, Mass.”
“Ah. That accounts for the accent, I suppose.”
“What accent?” he said, and she almost smiled.
“And your other siblings?”
She was avoiding the issue. The “what comes next?” part of the conversation. And thank God for that.
“My sister Mia’s about to marry one of those hedge-fund dudes in Connecticut, over the July Fourth weekend. And my next oldest brother, Rudy, and his wife, Violet, just started runnin’ an inn in New Hampshire.”
Then there’s me, he thought. The caboose running his ass off to catch up.
“Are they all happy?” Julianne asked.
“Sure, I guess. In an Everybody Loves Raymond kinda way. We yell, we fight, we screw up. Obviously,” he said, with a self-deprecating half shrug. “Some of us’ve put our folks through the ringer more’n others. And my dad was a cop. It musta killed him sometimes, watching us learn things the hard way. But we’re there for each other. Can’t ask for more than that, I s’pose.”
She watched him for a moment, expressionless, before walking over to dump out a laundry basket, full of tiny-footed sleepers and those one-piece undershirt things that snapped at the crotch, on top of the changing table.
“So what about you?” he asked, feeling the baby slump against his collarbone, drifting back to sleep. When Julianne glanced over at him, her brow pinched, he added, “What’s your story?”
“My…story?”
“Yeah. You’ve been here for, what? A year, at least. But you’re wearing a wedding ring. Does your husband live here, too?”
She pulled out a sleeper, quickly folded it. “Robyn never talked about me, then?”
“Not much, no.”
“I’m a widow,” she said quietly, not looking at him as she continued folding. Embarrassment cringed in the pit of Kevin’s stomach.
“Oh. Hello. I’m sorry.” Shrugging, Julianne opened the drawer to a plastic bin on the changing table’s second shelf, sticking in clothes as she folded them. “Was he sick? Unless you don’t wanna talk about it—”
“My husband was killed by a drunk driver, Kevin,” she said, the words oddly stripped of emotion. Kevin closed his eyes, bile surging in his throat.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, lamely.
“Yeah. Me, too.” Now bitterness trickled in to fill the void. “Gil and I had gone out to dinner. To celebrate my getting pregnant. It was pouring rain. Per usual for Seattle in the fall. We never even saw the oncoming car.” Finally she looked at him, dry eyes screaming with unhealed grief. “So, actually, I know exactly what it’s like to have my life turned upside down.”
A silent, but potent, four-letter word exploded in his brain. “I can’t believe Robyn didn’t tell me.”
“Clearly the two of you didn’t have that kind of relationship,” Julianne said, shoving more folded clothes into a second drawer. “And anyway, she and I weren’t close. She…she wouldn’t let anybody get close.”
“You got that right,” Kevin muttered, even as he caught the frustration, the disappointment in her voice. “But you didn’t come out here right after, then?”
“Dad wanted me to. Well, after I got out of the hospital. There was a month of hell,” she said dryly. “But I was determined to pick up the pieces of my life where I’d last seen them. It wasn’t working, but I was being too stubborn to admit it. Then Dad discovered Robyn was pregnant, and it was obvious he’d never manage with her by himself, and I thought, okay, a diversion. Something to take my mind off…things.”
Inside Kevin’s brain, two and two slammed together hard enough to make his ears ring. “Even though…”
“Yes, even though I’d just lost my own baby a few months before. But Dad needed me. Robyn needed me. And God knows, later on, Pippa needed me. What can I tell you? It felt good.” She paused. “It still does.”
Pippa was down for the count. Kevin turned to lay her back in the crib, for the first time noticing the pale lavender walls, the border of carousel horses prancing underneath the ceiling. As if reading his mind, Julianne said, “Robyn decorated the room all by herself.”
“So she—”
“Wanted the baby? I’m not sure she knew what she wanted, to tell you the truth. She liked the idea of having a little girl to dress up. Being a mother, though…not so much.” Julianne hesitated. “Dad and I have no idea where she got the stuff. In Mexico, I mean. Or when. But—” her lips flattened “—but there’s a reason why Dad didn’t want to tell you about Pippa.”
“He can’t possibly blame me for Robyn’s habit.”
“No, but you didn’t exactly help things, did you?”
“I tried, Julianne,” he said, hating, even as he weirdly understood, how he’d ended up the logical target for Julianne’s and Victor’s frustration and grief. “Believe me, I tried. But you gotta understand, every time I suggested maybe she go into rehab or get counseling or something, she went ballistic on me. Like you said, she wouldn’t let anybody get close. Including me. And I finally realized I was having enough trouble keeping my own head above water at that point. So I ran. Except…” He streaked a hand through his hair. “The longer I was straight, the more I kept feeling like…I don’t know. That I gave up on her too easily or something. Like maybe I shoulda pushed harder for her to get help.”
“Even though you didn’t love her?”
“Just because I wasn’t in love with your sister didn’t mean I didn’t care about her, for cryin’ out loud.