Carla blew out a breath and pushed a swath of her long hair over her shoulder.
“I gotta say I’m surprised that with you being single for this long, I probably get more in a month, even with an infant in the house and staging a transatlantic move, than you do,” she said.
Meg didn’t doubt that. She drained the dregs of her soda and pushed her chair back to stand. “Gotta go run errands, and I’ve got a fifty-five-page instruction manual to write copy for by Friday. I haven’t even opened the files.”
“Okay. Call me if you need anything,” Carla responded at the same time the baby monitor crackled, and her daughter whimpered.
Backing toward the living room, Meg nodded. “Yeah.” She actually could do that. She could call, and Carla really could be there to help in forty minutes or less. It would take a while to get used to having her tribe complete again—for her to have help if she needed it and was brave enough to ask for it.
She couldn’t help but to wonder, though, whether that little tribe was more on her side or Seth’s.
* * * *
Several hours later, Meg slid her sedan into her assigned spot in the basement garage of her condominium building, rolling her eyes at the empty space to the left that used to be the resting spot for Spike’s motorcycle. Now the only reminder of the beast was a single skid mark and a bit of an oil stain in the center. Yep, that was Spike. One big, greasy stain.
Before unlatching Toby from his seat, she fetched her folding grocery cart from the trunk, opened it, and piled on the canvas bags of food and dry cleaning they’d picked up before returning home. She pressed the tidy stack of paperwork she’d fetched from the preschool office under her arm and slammed the trunk shut.
She let Toby down and placed him between herself and the cart, letting him push it from down low. She didn’t need the help, but he liked having something to do, and the activity kept him from running amok in the garage. The people in the building drove like assholes, so she put the burden of safety strictly on herself. He was her charge—her responsibility, and if she had to throw herself in front of a moving vehicle to keep him safe, she’d do it.
They took the elevator up to the lobby, and she bid Toby to hold the button while she made a dash for the mailbox. With her key already poised, she made quick work of grabbing the thick pile of catalogs, circulars, and assorted envelopes. She rejoined Toby in the elevator right as the control pad made a high-pitched beeping sound, complaining about the doors being propped open so long.
She let out a breath, glad the ride came with no extra bodies, and hustled Toby out as soon as the doors opened at the top floor.
There were a lot of things she liked about their downtown condo. The ten-story brick behemoth was a part of Raleigh’s new upward, rather than outward, urban growth. They could have bought a house out in the suburbs, and that would have put them closer to the airport Spike spent so much time at, but there was a certain street cred to having an address at The Gardner. The completely modern place lacked nothing in terms of amenities. There was a fitness room and sauna on the first floor, as well as a gathering room that could be rented out for meetings and parties. The small courtyard in the back came with a sunny patio and infinity pool she’d never used.
All that was nice, but what Meg had liked about the building were the spacious balconies. She’d spent hours pacing on theirs when Toby was a colicky newborn. They’d had to go outside, because that was the only way Spike could sleep. As they were on the top floor, the ceilings in their unit were extra-high and lent an airy openness to the place that had probably kept Meg from feeling claustrophobic all those times she’d been stuck indoors, staying home on Spike’s bidding.
She turned the knob and leaned her shoulder against the door, pushing it open while Toby skirted in around her.
“Gotta pee!” he called back in explanation, taking off at a brisk clip across the sisal rug.
“I’m going to have to teach that boy some manners,” she muttered, and wrapped her fingers around the cart’s handle.
The door across the hall creaked open, and Meg murmured, “Fuck,” under her breath as one of the cart’s wheels wedged against the hallway baseboard. She dropped the preschool papers into the basket and gave the damned cart a forceful tug.
“I thought I heard the elevator closing,” Rosamund said, sticking her white-blond head out of her condo and presenting her usual glossy-lipped pout.
She thought Meg and Toby were bringing down the value of the place or something. She’d also insinuated a time or two in the past that she was hot shit because she held membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. When she’d said that at one of the homeowner’s association gatherings, all Meg could do was turn her back and make a tiny whoopdie-do gesture with her index finger.