hands grabbing the T-shirt Jonah had on under his open sweater—and he finished in an even deeper, more charged voice, “Mo, this is your grandmother. Your gram-my,” he enunciated carefully.
“Oh, Jonah,” the other woman whispered, her voice pretty damn wobbly. “You could’ve been twins.”
“Hema,” Natia gasped, dropping her phone onto the surface of the counter and standing up too.
The next thing I knew, Mrs. Collins was crying, and his sister looked pretty damn close to it too. There were tears rolling down Jonah’s mom’s cheeks, and she wasn’t even trying to wipe them up. Huh. I guess she wasn’t as awful as she’d seemed. At least not toward Mo, and she was the one who mattered. She didn’t have to like me, but she did have to like her.
The older woman’s fingers came up to cover her mouth for a moment, and in the next, she was holding them in front of the center of her body, her voice just as shaky as it had been before when she sniffed and then asked, “May I hold her?”
The gold-brown eyes on the biggest head around me flicked to my direction, glassy, so damn glassy, but asking.
Hadn’t I made it clear that we let everybody hold her as long as they weren’t shitheads? And didn’t he know that she was half his too? He didn’t have to ask me for permission. I just raised my eyebrows at him like duh.
And as Jonah turned his body just enough so that our girl could get a good look at the woman who had a pretty impressive part in her existence, she still wasn’t able to tear her eyes away from the man holding her. The little fingers she had on his shirt dug in and said, “Da, ba?”
Did she know? I wondered. Did she know somehow that this was her dad?
She looked at Grandpa Gus like he was an eclipse, but she looked at Jonah like he was a once-every-five-hundred-years meteor.
She knew, some part of me recognized. She had to know. Somehow. Some way. She was easygoing but not like this.
“Baby Mo,” the most handsome man I had ever known said quietly, tenderness hugging every syllable. “This is your grandmother, your gran, look, darling. Look.”
He’d called her his darling.
And I was not going to fucking tear up in the middle of Panera over it.
Mo didn’t look anywhere else though. Her little fingers just wrapped themselves even tighter in the shirt her dad was wearing, her body leaning toward him like she was preparing for him to try and hand her off, and she wasn’t about to have it. I watched Jonah swallow hard—a gulp, it was a gulp—and smile this wonky smile before he laughed a watery laugh and hugged her to him, swallowing up this baby in those enormous arms so that the only way I knew there was someone in them was because I had seen her disappear inside the cocoon of muscle he’d created.
Jonah laughed again, the tone low and full of… something. Joy. Love. Like he didn’t expect it and it shocked the fuck out of him.
I was not going to fucking cry, damn it. But I did swallow hard and sniff once and glance at the woman who was grabbing a napkin off the table and dabbing at her eyes with it. Beside her, Natia was scrambling for her phone, trying to take pictures with shaky hands and saying, “She’s so cute, Hema. I want to hold her too. Please.”
“You can hold her later. I think she wants me now,” Jonah murmured, letting the arm he had around Mo fall away.
But she kept on leaning into him, those little hands not loosening their grip at all.
I wanted some of that baby too—that warm, soft weight against me—but I couldn’t imagine going eight months without my little monster. And for being an only child… I knew how to share. I was pretty good at it.
“I’ll go get a high chair for her,” I told the new dad and the new grandma and aunt.
“I’ll get it,” he offered, but I gave him a look before ignoring him.
By the time I came back, Jonah was sitting at the end, and his mom was on the bench across from him. I set the chair on their end and watched as Jonah stood and settled Mo into it with only a little bit of trouble, as she kicked her legs around, being difficult.