Greg asked.
Tears welled up in Emily’s eyes, and she shook her head. “I’m not her mother.”
Greg could hear the pain in Emily’s voice as she said it, and the thought of the tiny thing crying desperately to find her mother—the mother who had been absent for a couple of weeks now—was heartrending.
Cora wailed harder, her face turning red as she cried out her frustration or grief, Emily patting her little rump and shushing fruitlessly. The restaurant was empty except for them, and when he looked over at the teens working, he found them staring.
“Can I try?” he suddenly asked, and as the words came out of his mouth, he was already regretting them. He was more of an iron-pumping kind of guy than a baby-soothing kind of guy, but there was something about the sadness in Emily and the unwanted audience that made him want to fix it if he could.
Emily agreed mutely, and he took the squirming infant out of her arms. What was he thinking? Cora screamed, her eyes squished shut and her tiny tongue quivering with the effort of her wails. When he tried to hold her close, she writhed and wriggled. He wasn’t sure exactly how to hold her, but he decided to simply use logic. When apprehending a suspect, first you needed to stop the perpetrator and then subdue the limbs. Cora’s legs were squirming quite actively, so he simply pushed the little knees up and pulled her against his chest. Once she was there, she seemed a bit surprised by her position, so he took advantage of the pause in her cries to hum a low, soft note.
It wasn’t a song. It wasn’t anything, really, just a low sound in his throat that rumbled in his chest. Cora gave a few more squirms, then leaned her tired little head onto his chest, listening to the sound. Emily came around to his side of the table.
“Have some milk, sweetie,” Emily murmured, and she slid the bottle’s nipple into Cora’s mouth. The infant started to suck noisily.
“There.” Greg caught her eye and grinned. “Now don’t move...”
Emily gave him an impressed look. “Wow, you’re good with babies.”
“I’m normally not.”
“How did you know what to do?”
“Lucky guess?” He looked down at the top of Cora’s little head with the damp little swirls of golden-red hair. “I think I just surprised her.”
The sound of Cora’s soft slurps as she drank her milk filled the space between them, and he looked down at Emily with her dark hair swept away from her face and her long lashes brushing her cheeks with each blink. She sat close to him on the bench as she held the bottle for the baby to drink, and the soft scent of her shampoo mingled with the scent of baby. Just another couple of inches and she could rest her head on his shoulder, too. He pulled his thoughts away from dangerous ground.
“I’ll have to remember that trick.” She smiled sadly. “I can’t change the fact that I’m not her mom.”
“Steve’s wife wouldn’t be her biological mother, either.”
“Well, that’s true.” Some of the sadness left her eyes, and he felt gratified to see it. She was hard on herself, that much was obvious. And she was under a tremendous amount of pressure.
What would it be like to belong with Emily and Cora? This was a sweet moment with the baby in his arms, drinking her bottle, and Emily so close to him that if he just leaned over... No, this wasn’t productive. There was no point in imagining what it would be like to have a family—to have them.
“Maybe you should take her back,” Greg said gruffly.
“Oh, no,” Emily replied, nonplussed. “You seem fine, and she seems happy.”
With that, Cora finished the bottle and Emily moved around to her seat across the table from him. Greg looked from Emily to Cora and back to Emily again.
“Burp her, would you?” Emily said. “Here’s a cloth.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, as if asking someone to burp a baby was the most natural thing in the world, that he found himself wondering if it weren’t in fact the most natural thing in the world. He took the proffered cloth and put it over his shoulder the way he’d seen Emily do it. Granted, she was more graceful, but after a couple of tries he managed it, and he started to gently tap Cora’s back.
“You know, I used to see myself with a whole houseful of kids.” Emily turned her attention to her fries, swirling them slowly through the ketchup. “I don’t even know why I thought I’d have so many. I suppose it comes with always having a class full of five-year-olds.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m grateful for the chance to raise one child. It’s all in perspective.”
Cora let out a resounding burp, and Greg looked down at her with a grin. He’d never expected burping a baby to be so...satisfying. It was as if he’d just slam-dunked.
“Nicely done.” Emily grinned at him, popping another fry in her mouth. “What about you? Do you ever think about having kids?”
Greg felt the moment disintegrating around him, caving in on itself like the old mall when a wrecking ball connected with a load-bearing wall. He shook his head.
“Not at all?” Her brow furrowed as her eyes met his. “You don’t want kids?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
It was the truth, wasn’t it? He couldn’t lie to her, but he could see the disappointment in her eyes as he admitted what was inside of him. No matter how adorable Cora was, no matter how sweet it might feel to imagine having a family of his own, children were simply out of the question.
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