good?” he asked her as she passed back through the living room.
“Yeah. I think I might have overdone it at the gym. I’m a little sore. Tired, too.”
“Need me to do anything?”
“No. Maybe in the morning help me out with some light exercise again?”
“Happy to help, ma’am,” he said with a smile over his laptop screen.
She was smiling, too, when she went to bed. Her life felt complete and she had a sore cramping in her legs, the feeling of her muscles starting to learn what they had once been used for. She drifted off within a minute, freshly exhausted.
She had no idea that she’d have the dream of the huge cornfield again, of her mother holding her baby.
And, likewise, she had no idea just how badly it would affect her this time.
When the nightmare stirred her awake this time, the scream did come out of her mouth. When she sat up in bed, she did so with so much force than she nearly fell off the mattress. Beside her, Ellington also sat up, a gasp rising in his throat.
“Mackenzie…what is it? Are you okay?”
“Just a nightmare. That’s all.”
“Sounds like it was terrible. Is it anything you want to talk about?”
With her heart still hammering in her chest, she lay back down. For a moment, she was sure she could taste the dirt from the nightmare in her mouth. “Not in depth. It’s just…I think I need to see my mother. I need to let her know about Kevin.”
“That’s fair,” Ellington said, clearly still baffled by the nightmare and its effect on her. “That makes sense, I guess.”
“We can talk about it later,” she said, already feeling the lure of sleep. The images of the nightmare were still there with her, but she knew if she didn’t get back to sleep soon, it was going to be a long night indeed.
She woke up several hours later to the sound of Kevin crying. Ellington was already starting to get out of bed, but she reached out and placed her hand on his chest. “I got him,” she said.
Ellington didn’t put up much of a fight. They were slowly starting to get back on a relatively normal sleep schedule, and neither of them were keen to start testing it. Besides, he had a meeting in the morning, something about a new case where he was going to be the lead with a surveillance team. He’d told her all about it over dinner but she had been too lost in her own thoughts. Lately, her attention had been all over the place and it was hard to focus—particularly whenever Ellington talked about work. She missed it and was envious of him but could not quite dream of leaving Kevin just yet, no matter how good the daycare was.
Mackenzie went into the nursery and gently took him out of the crib. Kevin had gotten to the point where he would put a stop to his crying (mostly) the moment one of his parents came to him. He knew he was going to get what he needed and had already learned to trust his own little instincts. Mackenzie changed his diaper and then set herself down in the rocking chair and nursed him.
Her mind drifted to her parents. She could obviously not remember feeding as a baby. But the mere idea that her mother had once breastfed her was too much to even imagine. Still, she now knew that motherhood brought with it a whole new filter through which to see the world. Perhaps her own mother’s filter had been skewed—and perhaps even totally destroyed when her husband had been murdered.
Have I been too hard on her all this time? she wondered.
Mackenzie finished feeding Kevin, thinking long and hard about her future—not just for the coming weeks, when her maternity leave would come to an end, but to the months and years ahead and how she might best spend them.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mackenzie’s clothes were finally starting to fit again, and a few repeat trips to the gym had her feeling as if regaining her physique from a year or so ago might not be as hard as she thought. She was nearly fully healed from the surgery and she was beginning to remember what her life had been like before she had loaned out her body to the growth and development of her son.
As Mackenzie’s maternity leave drew closer and closer to its end, she started to understand that it was going to be harder to go back to work than she had thought. But even before that, there was the issue of her mother to contend with. It had come up here and there in conversations with Ellington ever since she had last had the nightmare but she had made sure not to commit. After all, it was not normal for her to have a strong desire to see her mother. She usually avoided any interaction with her or even conversations about her at all costs.
But now, with only eight days remaining in her maternity leave, she had to make the decision. She had been using Kevin as the primary excuse not to make the trip, but he had been in daycare for a week now and seemed to be doing quite well with the adjustment.
Besides, in her heart, she had already made her decision. She was sitting at the bar between the kitchen and the living room, already certain that she was going to go. But actually pulling the trigger on the trip was much different than accepting the idea of it.
“Can I ask you what might sound like a dumb question?” Ellington asked.
“Always.”
“What’s the worst that could happen? You go, it’s awkward and nothing is accomplished. You come back here to your happy baby and drop-dead sexy husband and life resumes as normal.”
“Maybe I’m afraid that it will go well,” Mackenzie offered.
“Now that, I’m not too sure about.”
“What if it goes well and she wants to be a part of my life? Of our lives.”
Kevin was sitting in the bouncer seat, staring at the little aquatic creatures mobile attached to the front of it. Mackenzie looked at him with the last comment, doing everything she could not to think of that image of her mother from the nightmares, sitting in that damned rocking chair.
“You’d be okay here with Kevin, by yourself?” she asked.
“I think I can handle him. We can have some dude-time.”
Mackenzie smiled. She tried to picture Ellington the way she had originally met him nearly two and a half years ago, but it was hard to do. He had matured beyond measure, but at the same time, had also managed to become more vulnerable with her. There was no way he would have showed such a nurturing or goofball side of himself when they had first met.
“Then I’m going to do it. Two days, that’s it—and that’s just so I won’t be constantly traveling.”
“Yeah. Get a motel room. A good one, with a hot tub in the room. Sleep in. After six months of learning to be a mom and constantly adjusting sleep schedules, I think you’ve earned it.”
His encouragement was genuine and though he had not said as much, she was pretty sure she knew why. He had essentially given up on any sort of normal grandparent scene on his side of the family. Perhaps if he could mend some fences with her mother, Kevin might have some kind of normal grandparent. She wanted to ask him about this but decided not to. Maybe after she got back and knew whether the trip had been a bust or not.
She
