off my shirt before she really did choke me out.
I didn’t think she cared about how it had gone down, honestly, because she just kept on smiling at me… and clinging to my collar for dear life.
With another kiss and finally succeeding in extracting myself from her grip, I opened up her playpen while she sat on the floor and then set her in it. I pulled out a few toys from the cabinet beside my desk and set them in there too. Then I picked up my phone from the top of my desk and opened my messages so I could shoot one off to Luna, who was the only reasonable person I could bring this up to right then.
Me: My baby daddy was just here.
I bit my lip and sent off another message.
Me: He made it seem like he had no idea who Mo was. He tried to say that he’d stopped checking his voice mails and texts, and that he broke his phone, and that he hadn’t read an email in his account since before he “took off.” I don’t know what the hell is going on, but he just left. He seemed pretty upset.
Luna wrote me back immediately.
Luna: He’s there???!!!
Luna: Wait.
Luna: If he didn’t know about Mo, then why was he there in the first place?
Wasn’t that the million-dollar question?
I set my phone back on the desktop and stared at it.
I stared at it for a long time, not knowing how the hell to answer.
“So, what are you going to do?”
I sighed to myself as I finished washing off the pureed lentils that were all over my hands from Mo’s dinner. She didn’t mind being fed with a spoon, but she liked me putting a dab in her hand and then trying to hoover it herself even more. The girl was all about eating. Luna’s baby was a fussy eater, but Mo scarfed everything down. She got that from me. You didn’t come between us and food. The only thing she regularly tried to spit out was peas, and I couldn’t blame her. I hated peas too.
But that wasn’t at all related to the question that Peter had just shot me.
I was actually surprised that Grandpa Gus hadn’t brought anything up while I fed Mo—and tried to sneak my own bites in—as they ate dinner. Grandpa had come back into the office maybe ten minutes after Jonah had left and seen the look on my face. He’d made his own face, swallowed his comment, even though it had to have been hard, then grumbled out his and Mo’s plans for the rest of the day, settling for giving me a slanted, pissy look before they disappeared, leaving me all alone to think about my decisions in life.
It wasn’t my fault he hadn’t been in the building when Jonah had come by.
Grabbing the dishtowel from the hook on the cabinet to my left, I turned around to face the two men sitting around the kitchen island and shrugged. We all knew what Peter was asking. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” the smart-ass, Grandpa, asked before raising his eyebrows and bringing his after-dinner decaf coffee up to his mouth to take the smallest sip in history.
“No.” I shot him his own special look that said I know you, old man. “He came into the office and made it seem like he had no idea Her Majesty existed. He acted like he was….” An image of Jonah’s devastated face filled my head, tears in his eyes and all. “He looked really upset after I told him.” Why the hell I didn’t mention him tearing up was beyond me, but I kept my mouth shut. “Then he walked out of the office because he said he needed to think.”
Grandpa hmphed from behind his coffee cup, and it made me wonder what Peter had said to him to make him be so… subdued. Because he had to have said something. Nothing I suggested would sure as hell be enough to keep him from making comments. Peter was Grandpa’s voice of reason and was usually the only thing in the world that would get him to think rationally.
I was going to have to thank him later for whatever he’d said or done.
Luckily, it was Peter who kept up the questions… confirming that he had gotten my grandfather to bite his tongue on the topic of Jonah and Mo.
Jonah and Mo.
I’d never had an ulcer before, but I suddenly wondered if that weird