Finding Tessa by Jaime Hendricks (best ereader for comics .TXT) 📗

Inside, music is playing in the background, softly—something you’d hear in a movie. “Hush little baby, don’t say a word, momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.” It fills me with hope, because I was raised on the likes of Alice Cooper and Tupac, depending on who my mother was screwing at the time.

Another small store, as most of the mom-and-pops on Main Street are, there are only a handful of people inside. A quick scan tells me that the left-hand side has toys for toddlers, the right-hand side has toys for small children under ten, and the back is a bliss world of soft blankets and baby lamb stuffed toys and onesies and mobiles. Tears rush to my eyes.

“Can I help you?” A tall, slim lady approaches me. “Looking for a gift or for yourself?”

“Oh. Hi.” Despite my first instinct of wanting to run up Gwen’s driveway to spill the news, Jace needs to be first. “A gift. For a coworker.”

“Oh, fantastic. How old is the little one?”

“Brand new. Less than a month,” I say, thinking about my bun in the oven.

“All of our infant stuff is back here.” She turns and makes a gesture toward the other end of the store. “Let me know if you need help narrowing anything down.”

“Will do. Thank you.”

I walk to the back of the store when a familiar scent hits me. I must look like a dog, sniffing with my nose in the air, and I realize it’s baby lotion. Between fifteen and twenty years of age, a lot of my friends kept their pregnancies, so I’ve been around babies. And Gwen still treats Caleb like an infant, so I’ve seen her slathering lotion on his butt before.

I finger through the soft blankets and the kits to make molds of baby handprints and footprints. There’s so much to look forward to! Then I see the most perfect present. It’s not even for the baby.

It’s just a mug. But it says World’s Greatest Dad.

I snatch it off the shelf and practically run to the front of the store. The same slim lady wraps it in five sheets of blue tissue paper and closes the top with blue ribbon, then places it gently in a small, sturdy brown bag.

Happy with today’s bounty, I pass Romano’s and decide to stop in and see if the new tablecloths came in yet. To my surprise, Evan is ordering at the counter.

“Hey!” I say excitedly.

He turns and smiles. “Tessa. What are you up to?”

My smile is probably goofy. Should I tell him? I have to tell someone! No, I could never do that to Jace. He has to be first. “Just passing through. Had to grab a few things.” My fingers tighten against the brown bag and I turn it inward, so he doesn’t see the logo. I don’t want him to know that it’s from the baby store.

“I’m just getting a quick slice, I’m in the middle of a nutty case. Hey, let’s grab a picture, I’ll send it to Jace. He’d get a kick out of this.”

Evan’s arm wraps around my shoulder, and I smile—wide. Because I know a secret. I have the new-mother glow.

He takes his pizza to go, and I tell him to come for dinner this weekend and he agrees before he leaves.

After checking on the design progress, I head home in the warm weather, and only then do I realize that I definitely have to tell Jace about my past. We’ll need to get a lawyer—I should call Evan, because I’ll need to do it right. I’ll need to dissolve my marriage to Drew, and I need to make the one with Jace legal, with my real information. I’m mad at myself as I think about how I’ve deceived him. He’s my child’s father. And I need this all done correctly, and soon, because I’ll need to get a driver’s license. I certainly can’t plan to tote a baby around on foot all the time. There will be doctor’s appointments. And what if, God forbid, there’s an emergency?

I’ll be waiting up for Jace when he gets home from his client shindig tonight, and I’m going to tell him everything.

I welcome the night alone to practice. It used to bother me being left alone, knowing what Drew was doing behind my back. But what was my recourse? Bitching about it and getting a black eye? Or worse, like the time Drew broke one of my ribs when I questioned his whereabouts. While I was on the floor, screaming in searing pain, he told me not to move and he’d be right back, like I could even go anywhere. He’d taken my cell phone and zip-tied my wrists around a load bearing pole in the living room and stormed out. Came back twenty minutes later, and I heard the car still running in the garage.

“Get up,” he said, and cut the zip tie. Yanked me by my hair and dragged me to the garage, where his car was smashed on the passenger side. He opened the door and threw me in, not caring that the pain was worse each time I moved. “We’re going to the hospital. We were just in an accident. On Northwest Vine Street. The car came out of nowhere, hit us, and took off. It was a white SUV. Do you understand?”

The ache in my midsection blinded me, but I nodded yes, happy to at least be taken somewhere that would pump me full of painkillers and make sure, through an X-ray, that the broken bone didn’t pierce any organs, which if I was being honest, I thought might’ve happened. I wanted to be fixed, and Drew was taking me to be fixed.

At the time, that’s all I cared about.

Drew knew everyone, everywhere, and I was sure his hedge fund was laundering money for corporate bigwigs and politicians—he spent entirely too much time in DC. He’d be able to make the trip in less than ninety minutes from where we lived