Insolent (Crimson Elite 4)

I sit in the seat and watch. The nurse snaps a photo of all of us and hands it to me from her Polaroid camera. It’s deceiving, we appear a happy family.

We are just the opposite—we’re a confused-as-fuck family.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.” The nurse steps out, and I sit here and wait. How many questions I’ve wanted to ask Cleo over the past days, and now she’s finally awake I don’t know what to ask first as confusion reigns heavily in my mind.

“I hope he has your confidence,” she says breaking through my thoughts.

I look up at her holding our son.

“Do you still want to do a test to see if he’s yours?”

I shake my head. “He’s mine.”

She smiles. “He is. I may have tricked you about other things, but this I did not.”

“What shall we call him?”

She gazes over at me. “You haven’t named him?”

I shake my head. “No… figured you’d want to.”

“Thank you.” She brushes a tear away from her eye. “I’ve had a shit life, a terrible existence growing up. But I had one saving grace, an old man who lived not far from me whose name was Charles. He would feed me when my family wouldn’t. He would buy me shoes when he saw my toes hanging out of mine. I’d like to name him Charles in the hopes he will become a good man.” She strokes his face again. “Can you take him?” she asks me with a shaky voice.

I do so, taking him firmly in my grasp, and the minute my hands are on him her eyes roll back in her head, and she starts shaking violently. I press the call button for assistance as the baby is taken from me. Echo grabs hold of him and walks out as hands are pushed on Cleo’s now non-reactive chest.

They push, pump, and then they shock.

“Her heart…” is all I hear above the ringing in my ears, my selective hearing turned on.

“Non-responsive.”

“Keep going.”

“Don’t stop. Bring her back.”

“Her heart…”

This goes on for what feels like hours when in reality it’s only minutes, and then I hear the doctor say, “Time of death…” And now I know they’ve tried to revive her for longer than thirty minutes, and they’re calling it.3Darby“You got this,” I tell myself out loud as I push up from my very comfortable bed at two in the morning. It’s the same mantra I say to myself every two hours of every day when Charles—my baby—decides to wake up. My eyes are sore, my brain doesn’t function, but somehow I seem to be on autopilot. I have been for two months now, that’s how long it’s been since I walked out of that hospital room as they covered Cleo for the last time.

I never realized I could feel so much pain for someone I barely knew, but she was someone who also gave me the greatest gift on earth, so I guess in a way I was thankful and mourning what could have been at the same time.

The big kicker, though, the surprise, was that she had it all planned down to every last detail. The day I took Charles home, a delivery man was standing in wait.

All that money I gave her, she used it for our baby. Every last cent. She bought everything I will ever need for him. Then she had it arranged to be delivered to me. I was angry at first, mad she’d given up before the fight ever truly began. I’ll never actually understand why she did it, and I’m guessing that the letter sitting in Charles’s drawer may reveal the answers I seek. There’s one addressed to me as well as him—I haven’t touched either envelope. I’m not ready.

My hands reach for my screaming son. Charles instantly goes quiet when I touch him. His little hands reach out to my face as I lay him on the change table.

“We really need to break this cycle, little man. Times are a changing, and I can’t keep doing this.” He offers me a smile, and my heart instantly melts. How is that possible, to be so dog tired and the minute he smiles I feel anything but? “Okay, okay, you can have a bottle, then let’s go to bed.”

The nurse told me not to co-sleep. I tried that, but he seems to sleep better when he’s next to me, and to be honest, I sleep more easily when he’s next to me. I pick him up and open one of his drawers, and the scrawled writing catches my eye every single time.

What did she write?

Did she explain it all in great detail?

Or will it simply be another one of her tricks that I’m not ready to deal with?

I grab his bottle from the warmer, while he tries to reach out but can’t quite manage it yet. Walking back to my bed, my phone lights up, and I see Falcon’s name flash on the screen.