Page 32 of Hale Yes (Highway to Hale #1)

From her tightened up demeanor, I gather we’re getting into personal territory. “Because the mother is ill or incapacitated?”

“Yes, there’s that. Or they’re on drugs and aren’t allowed,” she adds, gripping her glass with so much force I can see the pallor of her knuckles.

Knowing we’re getting to the root of the issue, I pick around the edges of it. “When did you start doing this baby cuddling program?”

She tilts her head and looks at me, though her eyes are unfocused, like my image is not the one being projected from her retina to her brain. “I was in college.”

I stay silent and let the story unfold at her pace.

“I noticed when I came home for Christmas my freshman year that Angelica had lost a lot of weight. I was concerned and asked her about it, but she told me it was none of my damn business.” Her smile holds no humor.

“You’ve met her, so no big surprise, right? ”

“Not at all,” I reply softly.

“Angelica was in her senior year of high school. I’m two years younger, but I had leap-frogged her because I graduated early.

” Nicolette looks down into the pale-brown of her coffee and gives it a stir with the fat straw.

“When I came home for the summer, she looked even worse than she had at Christmas. She’s always been thin and willowy, that type of body men love, but she was beyond that. She was a stick.”

I disagreed about the body type statement, but this wasn’t the time to correct her, so I buttoned my lip and let her talk.

“She had started hanging out with our cousin, Zoey, who was one of those out-of-control teens. Her parents had pretty much given up on even trying to discipline her by the time she was thirteen.”

“Did you say anything to your parents?” I ask.

Nicolette’s teeth indent her lower lip, and I can see the pain flicker in the green of her eyes.

“I did. I sat them down one night and told them I thought Angelica and Zoey were doing drugs. It wasn’t just the weight loss,” she rushes to say.

“Zoey had these sores all over her face, and Angelica had developed a kind of facial tic.” She twitches her left eye a few times to demonstrate before she continues.

“Ma, of course, was completely offended that I would dare to insinuate something like that about her precious baby girl. Pop…” She sighs and stares into her drink again.

“Pop has always been kind of like an ostrich. If he keeps his head buried in the sand, nothing bad can happen. If he doesn’t want it to be true, then it must be a lie. ”

“He didn’t believe you either.” My words are a statement rather than a question because I can see it in the dip of her head and the slump of her shoulders.

“It was the only time my father has ever yelled at me.” Her voice is so low, I can barely hear it.

When she lifts her eyes to mine, I see the fierceness I normally only see when she’s working on a difficult problem in the lab.

“I knew what was happening, but no one would listen to me. We got into a big fight, and I left early to go back to school.”

“Where did you stay?” I ask.

“I’d made friends with the resident adviser in my dorm. I had tutored her in biology, so she let me sleep on her futon until I was able to move back into my room. It was only about a month until the fall semester started.”

“Did your parents contact you?”

Nicolette shrugs and takes a long sip of her drink. “Pop did the next day. He apologized for yelling but told me I couldn’t just go around saying things like that.”

“Jesus, it’s not like you posted it on Facebook for the whole world to see. You just had a private conversation with your parents about your concerns for two family members.”

She blows out a sigh. “Exactly. Anyway, I told him not to worry. I’d never bring it up again.”

“Not your circus, not your monkeys,” I say, and Nicolette laughs. I love seeing her laugh.

“I say that in my head all the time.” Hooking her straw through the hole in a piece of ice, she lifts it to her mouth and slips it inside before crunching it.

“My mother’s always been like she is, but that whole blow up changed how I thought about my father.

I was still hurt months later, so I chose to go home with a friend for Christmas break my sophomore year and didn’t even go back to Jersey. Same with Spring Break.”

“Did you ever go back?”

She shakes her head. “I thought I was going to have to for the next summer, but I was offered a paid internship at Aquarius. There was a host family that I stayed with in New York.”

I’m truly amazed by her. She was still a teenager then and yet more independent than most thirty-year-olds I know. “So how does that relate to the baby cuddling program?”

“Ah,” she tells me with a lift of one brow. “I almost forgot what we were talking about.”

“Because you’re so much older than me,” I tease. “They say memory is the first thing to go.”

Nicolette holds up her index finger and pretends to glare at me. “One year, whippersnapper. I’m one year older than you.”

A chuckle rumbles my chest. “Okay, fine.” Then I mutter so she can hear, “Some people get so testy in their old age.”

She gasps and playfully kicks my shin beneath the table. “I’m going to need to speak with your mother, Dr. Hale, because I know she raised you better than to make fun of a lady’s age.”

I think of that text from my mother asking to meet my “new girlfriend” and laugh again. “You two would probably get along really well.” My coffee is cooling, so I drain the rest of it and set down the yellow mug. “Go ahead and finish your story. I’m sorry I interrupted with my abhorrent rudeness.”

With a sniff, she says, “Thank you for acknowledging your mistake.” She stirs her straw around the almost empty glass.

“Do you want another coffee? Something to eat?”

Nicolette’s mouth twists in thought. “It might be a little late for more coffee. Just water will be fine.” Her hand goes to her stomach, as if she’s testing to see if she’s hungry. “And maybe something light to eat?”

“They have a huge club sandwich here. We could split it.”

When she nods, I flag down a server and place our order. She returns shortly with our waters, and Nicolette takes a long drink.

“Okay, the baby thing,” she says, setting her glass down before inhaling and exhaling slowly. “So I told you I was in New York for the summer.”

“I remember.”

“Well, I heard through the grapevine that Zoey was pregnant. I’d unfollowed her on all social media accounts because she was always posting wild pics of her and Angelica.

It made me sick to see them like that.” Her voice turns soft with thoughtfulness.

“Zoey was a year older than me, so between me and my sister. She was always nice to me growing up, and it was hard seeing her throw her life away.”

Nicolette nibbles on her bottom lip and runs an absent finger up and down the sweat forming on the side of her water glass. “Anyway, that summer I got a call from Pop that Zoey went into early labor, and the baby wasn’t doing well.”

I’m starting to see where this is headed, and my guts clench.

“They moved the baby to a hospital in New York. Since I lived there, I went to check on things, expecting to see Zoey.”

“She wasn’t there?” I ask.

Anger takes shape on Nicolette’s pretty face, narrowing her eyes and hollowing her cheeks. “No, the baby was born addicted to meth, so they took him away from Zoey. My aunt was there though, wailing that she had no idea how this happened.”

I roll my eyes. “Of course she didn’t. She’d only been enabling her daughter for years.”

The server drops off our sandwich, which she’d separated onto two crystal yellow plates. Nicolette’s eyes widen at the thick triangles. “Wow, that is big.”

“That’s what she said,” I blurt out before I can stop myself, and my dinner companion snickers while I whack my forehead with my palm. “Sorry, I’ve been around Phoenix for too long.”

“It’s okay.” She smiles before taking a healthy bite, and I do the same. “Anyway, my aunt seemed more worried about Zoey than the baby, so she left to go back to New Jersey.”

“The baby was a boy?”

She nods. “Noah. I explained the situation to the nurses, and since no one knew who the father was and the baby was kind of an orphan at that point, she let me come up there after work and hold him. She got me signed up with the cuddling program to make me all official and cover her ass.”

We’re both silent, me in my thoughts and Nicolette in her memories.

“Noah was small, about four pounds. The low birth weight only compounded all the other health problems that come with a baby addicted to drugs.” She shakes her head and asks, “Have you ever been around a baby with neonatal abstinence syndrome?”

I shake my head and answer with a soft no.

Her face pinches into a grimace. “It’s not pretty. The tremors, the irritability, the trouble feeding. It pisses me off and makes me sad at the same time.”

“Same,” I grunt, though I mostly feel rage. “Those babies shouldn’t have to suffer because of their mother’s decisions. And it is a decision. I know drug abuse is a disease, but at any point, she could have sought help. Did she even try?”

“She didn’t,” Nicolette answers. “She and Angelica kept partying like it was 1999 throughout her pregnancy.”

“Fucking ridiculous,” I mutter, the anger heating my face on behalf of a baby I’d never met.

“Noah was a fighter though. He held on for two weeks, and then…” She sucks in a breath, and I reach over the table to clench my fingers around Nicolette’s. She raises her chin a notch and says, “He had a seizure. They tried, but there was nothing they could do.”

“I am so sorry, Nicolette. You sound like you’d grown close to Noah.”