‘I’m going to do some work,’ she said. ‘Call me when Tyler needs a bath. His routine’s on the board in the kitchen, so you’ll know when he’s due for a feed. If he’s grizzly before then, try him with a drink. There’s some cooled boiled water in sterilised bottles in the fridge.’
Again, Dylan was surprised by Emmy’s efficiency. Maybe he’d misjudged her really badly, or he’d just seen her on bad days in the past—a lot of bad days—and taken her the wrong way.
‘Oh, and you need to wind him after a feed,’ she added. ‘Hold him upright against your shoulder, rub his back, and he’ll burp for you.’
‘Got it.’
‘Are you sure you can do this?’
No. He wasn’t sure at all. But he didn’t want Emmy to think that he was bailing out already. ‘Sure,’ he lied.
He carried Tyler downstairs and checked the routine board in the kitchen—which Emmy had somehow managed to get written up properly and laminated while he’d been at work. Apparently the baby needed a nap for about an hour; then he’d need a bath and then finally a feed.
And it was also his turn to make dinner.
He hadn’t even thought about buying food. He’d only focused on the fact that he’d needed to get everything done and leave the office ridiculously early. He opened the fridge door, and was relieved to discover that there were ingredients for a stir-fry. And there were noodles and soy sauce in the cupboard. OK. He could work with that.
Now, how did you get a baby to sleep?
He sat down, settling Tyler against his arm. Sure, he’d given his godson a brief cuddle before, but Ally had understood that he wasn’t used to babies and wasn’t much good at this, so she hadn’t given him a hard time about it. But it also meant she hadn’t talked to him about baby stuff. And Emmy had just left him to it.
‘I have no idea what to do now,’ he said to the baby.
Tyler just gave him a gummy smile.
‘Emmy seems to know what to do with you. But I don’t.’ OK, so he’d enjoyed playing with the baby, but was that all you were supposed to do?
‘She’s abandoned us,’ he said, and then grimaced. ‘And that’s not very fair of me. If she’d stayed, I would’ve assumed she didn’t trust me to do a good enough job with you and was being a control freak. So she can’t win, whatever she does.’
Maybe he needed a new approach to Emmy. And she had given up some of her work time to show him how to care for Tyler. As she’d pointed out, she could’ve left him to muddle through and fall flat on his face, then gloated when he’d made a mess of things. But she hadn’t. She’d played nice.
Maybe she was nice. Maybe he hadn’t really given her a chance, before.
‘I don’t know any nursery rhymes,’ he told the baby. Except for “Humpty Dumpty”. He made a mental note to buy a book and learn some. ‘I could tell you about computer programming.’
Another gummy smile.
‘Binary code. Fibonacci sequence. Debugging.’ He could talk for hours about that. ‘Algorhythms.’
Well, the baby wasn’t crying. That was a good thing, right? Dylan carried on talking softly to Tyler, until eventually the baby’s eyes closed.
Now what? Did he just sit here until the baby woke up again? Or did he put the baby to sleep in his cot? He wished he’d thought to ask Emmy earlier. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb her now. She needed time to get on with her work. And he could really do with checking his emails. OK. He’d put the baby down.
Gingerly, he managed to move out of the chair and placed the baby on his playmat. The mat was nice and soft, and Tyler would be safe there. Did he need a blanket? But his little hands felt warm. Maybe not, then.
While Tyler slept, Dylan caught up with some work on his laptop.
Not that it was easy to concentrate. He kept glancing over at the baby to check that everything was all right.
Eventually Tyler woke, and Dylan saved the file before closing the laptop and picking the baby up. ‘Bath time. We need to go and find Emmy.’
He carried the baby through to Pete’s study. The door was open, and soft classical music was playing. Another surprise; he’d pegged Emmy as someone who would listen to very girly pop music, the kind of stuff that was in the charts and that he loathed. Although he’d gone into the office earlier, he hadn’t really taken any notice. He’d never seen her in a professional environment before, and there was a different air about her. Total focus and concentration as she worked on something that looked very intricate.
If he interrupted her now, would it make her jump and wreck what she was doing?
He waited, jiggling the baby as he’d seen her do, until her hands moved away, and then he knocked on the open door. ‘You said to come and get you when Tyler woke up and it was bath time.’
She looked up from her workbench, smiled, and put her tools down. ‘Sure.’
He caught a glimpse of the work on her bench; it looked like delicate silver filigree. Again, it wasn’t what he’d expected from her; he’d thought that she’d make in-your-face ethnic-style jewellery, or lots of clinking bangles.
‘All righty. We need a bottle of boiled cooled water from the fridge.’ She collected it on the way up to the bathroom.
‘What’s that for?’ he asked.
‘Washing his face—it’s how Ally did it. She has what she calls a “top and tail” bowl.’
‘A what?’
‘To give him a quick wash instead of a bath. But you still use it for his face when you give him a bath.’
‘Right.’
In the bathroom, she put the baby bath into the main bath. ‘It’s easier to use this than to put him in a big bath, because he can’t sit up all on his own yet.’
‘When will he do that?’
‘When he’s about six months old.’
Dylan looked at her, not sure whether to be impressed at her knowledge or annoyed by the one-upmanship. ‘How come you know so much about babies?’ Had she wanted a child of her own? he wondered. Were all women like Nadine, and just woke up one morning desperate for a baby?
‘My bedtime reading,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ll lend you the book, if you like—you’ll probably find it useful.’
She undressed the baby, though Dylan noticed that she left Tyler’s nappy on, and wrapped him in a towel. ‘This is just to keep him warm while we’re filling the bath. It needs to be lukewarm, and you need to put the cold water in first—it’s better for it to be too cool, and for you to add a bit more warm water, than the other way round.’ She demonstrated.
‘How do you know when it’s the right temperature?’
‘You check the temperature of the water with your elbow.’ She dipped her elbow into the water. ‘If it feels too warm, it’ll be too hot for the baby.’
‘Why don’t you use that thermometer thing?’ He gestured to the gadget on the side of the bath.
She laughed. ‘That was one of Pete’s ideas. You know how he loves gadgets.’ Her smile faded. ‘Loved,’ she corrected herself softly.
Awkwardly, Dylan patted her shoulder. ‘Yeah.’
She shook herself. ‘OK—now you pour the cooled water into the bowl, dip a cotton wool pad into it and squeeze it out, so it’s damp enough not to drag his skin but not so wet that water’s