rounds and chocolate pudding. All of Chloe’s favorite foods. A surefire way to earn mommy points.
Four blocks from home the cell phone rang. Brandy groaned when she read Futterman’s name on caller ID. She didn’t have to answer. It was after seven o’clock. She was a paralegal, not an indentured servant. She’d given the firm nearly eleven hours today. She was tired. Her child was hungry. She had a life outside Futterman-Ulbright.
And the salary Fenton Futterman paid her financed that life. Well, put it that way. She took the call and listened as her frantic employer explained his latest problem. He had an early pretrial conference in the morning and had somehow lost the documents she’d meticulously prepared from sketchy notes and marginalia. Her hopes for a quiet evening flew out the window. Her boss considered motherhood a disability. He wouldn’t consider chocolate pudding a good excuse.
Nor was he willing to find the file on her computer and print another copy. She’d have to return to the office. The task wouldn’t take long, but it would cut into time she wanted to spend with Chloe.
Would forfeiting mommy points earn her a few employee points? She glanced into the back seat. She was working hard to give Chloe the kind of life she deserved, but it wasn’t really fair to drag her along for the ride. On the other hand, she couldn’t afford to tell her demanding boss no.
Life was a series of trade-offs. Balance was the key.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Futterman. I’m on it.” She disconnected the call and released an exhausted sigh. The scales were tipping and Mommy was losing.
H.A.R.P. Field Report
From: Celestian, Earthbound Operative
To: Mission Control
Re: Operation True Love
Current Objective: Contact human ally and introduce matchmaking protocol. Initiate communication between male and female subjects and assess their respective relationship skills.
Progress Notes: Contact with child established. Screening tests reveal depth of subjects’ differences. Limited success with current objective. Male subject exhibits resistance to operative’s environmental manipulation techniques. Measurements indicate commitment levels below acceptable standards.
Female subject emotionally accessible and responsive to dream therapy. Exhibits interest in long-term commitment but is currently distracted by vocational duress. Internal stress and external pressure reduce suggestibility and make her less susceptible to covert tactics.
Plan: Initiate emotional retraining of subjects and increase contact between them.
Personal Assessment: Operative desperately lacks experience to complete this mission and respectfully requests to be relieved of duty.
Chapter Two
Brandy pulled into the fast-food drive-thru and ordered the usual. With the food cooling on the seat beside her, she drove downtown against rush hour traffic, an exhausted salmon swimming upstream without even the prospect of mating to motivate her.
By the time she arrived at the office, the firm was closed for the day. All the smart people had gone home. Juggling her briefcase and purse in one hand and the bag of food in the other, she unlocked the dead bolt and ushered Chloe inside. The lever jammed when she tried to relock the door. The universe was conspiring against her today. She pulled the knob and jiggled the catch to secure the door and led Chloe to her small office at the back of the building.
“Is this your work?” Chloe looked around curiously. She hadn’t visited the hallowed halls of Futterman-Ulbright before.
“Yep. Sorry you had to come down here, honey. Mommy needs to get some papers ready for her boss.”
“I know. They got losted.” Chloe peered at the computer monitor’s space-themed screen saver, then swiveled the desk chair in dizzying circles.
“Right.” She hadn’t mentioned the missing papers. “How did you—”
“Your boss should be more careful.”
“I agree.” She cleared a spot on a corner of the desk and set out a colorful cardboard box. Cinnamon. Again. Where was that coming from? Brandy found nothing unusual among the meal’s contents. She sniffed the air near Chloe where the scent was strongest. Ah, cinnamon crackers. “Here you go. You can eat while I work.”
Chloe wasn’t happy with her meal and went straight for the toy. “Oh, ratties. I already have this one.” Unwrapping the burger, she carefully removed both pickles and picked off every microscopic bit of onion before dumping French fries on the wrapper.
“Sorry, baby.” Trying not to feel too guilty about all the fast-food meals they’d eaten recently, Brandy poked a straw in the milk carton. She squirted a packet of ketchup in a neat red pile, careful not to let the condiment touch the fries. Chloe had a thing about mixing food. She preferred to dip.
“That’s all right, Mommy.” She tore the wrapping off the disappointing toy and laid it aside. “I can start a collection.”
Sipping her super-size diet cola, Brandy sat at the computer and pulled up the file containing the case documents her boss needed for the conference. She couldn’t believe someone as anal as Futterman could misplace something so important. Moving anything on his desk an eighth of an inch left or right resulted in a major freak-out. Today’s weirdness just kept piling up. And it wasn’t Friday or the thirteenth.
Deciding to make a spare this time, she set the printer control for two copies and started the process.
“So, baby, can I ask you something?”
“Sure, Mommy.”
She blotted a dot of ketchup from her daughter’s mouth with a paper napkin. “Do you think school is a kid’s job?”
“Uh-huh. Like being a pair of legals is your job.”
“Right.” She smiled. “Amy says you have a new friend. Tell me about her.”
Chloe’s dark brown eyes seemed much older in her baby face. “It’s a him. His name is Celestian.” She blended the four syllables together into two. Sles-chun.
Ah, Celestian. She’d heard the unusual name before. “Your dad’s dog?”
“No. It’s a different Celestian. He’s supposed to help me, but most of the time I don’t need any help and he gets his feelings hurted. I told him to go home today.” Chloe rolled her eyes. “It’s kindergarten, not college. He’s too sensitive.”
Brandy nodded. “Can you see Celestian?”
Chloe gave her a look she would have considered insulting had it come from anyone but a five-year-old. “’Course I can.”
“Can I?”
Chloe laughed and dipped another fry. “Nope. He’s inbisible. He says I’m the only one who can see him.”
“So you named your pretend friend after the little white dog that sleeps on your bed when you visit Daddy?”
Chloe’s
