“Jesus,” Jarrod growled, looking almost sick at the thought.
Newsflash, that shit happened, and those poor precious babies suffered for it.
“Yeah. The hospital rang Leo and told him he had a granddaughter and that her mom had disappeared, so he went and got her. Two months later Effie came back claiming that she wanted to be a mom, and that things were different this time. For the last year, that’s happened eight times.”
Picking me up, Jarrod carried me across the room to one of the chairs and sat down with me on his lap. “Where does she go when she disappears?”
Shrugging, I kept my focus on the windows where I could see the tops of some trees moving slightly with the breeze. “No one knows because she never calls while she’s away, but it most definitely involves drugs.”
“Who has custody of Elodie?”
“That was the one thing Effie did for her daughter that was good – she awarded custody to her dad. But that means that Leo needs a break, he can’t always find someone to look after her when he’s busy at work, and it also means he’s got dreams of his retirement and he’s looking after a baby. Neo helps out as much as he can, but his job has him living two hours away so it makes it difficult.”
“So your family helps out?”
All the stiffness I’d had that had been holding my body upright and like I was carved from stone left me. “Yeah. That little girl is the world that my family lives for, Jarrod. She’s the most beautiful baby ever made, and I’m not just saying that because she’s related to me. The first time I held her, she opened her eyes, and I felt like someone had inflated my heart. She can be teething or feeling like shit, but the second someone holds her she settles and uses the love to erase her pain. Looking after her isn’t a hardship, every second sticks with me, but what cuts me is that her own mother can’t see what she’s created and use the pure innocent beauty of Elodie Crew as an incentive to get clean and stick around. I just don’t understand it.”
His arms tightened for a second, and then he bent his neck so that his chin was on my shoulder, meaning his mouth was roughly an inch away from my ear. “Sometimes, Katy, people are so caught up in whatever their brains are telling them to do that they miss the beauty around them. I’m not that informed on drug addiction and the reasons why it happens, but it’s a disease that’s so hard to kick. Lots of people get a hold of it once they have a baby, some don’t. The thing is, that little girl is not going without love, and she’s going to grow up knowing that she has a lot of people around her who care, which will make her feel safe and precious. She’ll also know that she has an aunt who thinks she hung the moon, because I don’t doubt for one fucking’ second that you’re ever going to think or act otherwise. So, now what we do is figure out how to make this work for the time that you’ve got Elodie, which leads me to ask, what do you need help with, honey?”
Everything.
“I need to get to the store to stock up for her, I need to build the bed I bought her for her room in my house, I need to make sure her toys are put away and her books are next to her bed so I can read them to her. I also need to make sure there’s nothing around that’ll hurt her, figure out how I’m going to work with a baby every day…” I trailed off and thought about something else. “She’s also at the age where she can cogitate now, Jarrod. That means that she knows who her mom is and more than likely understands when she disappears. How do I protect her from the pain that’s causing her?”
His reply might have sounded dismissive if he hadn’t said it with the emotion that he used. It was an emotion that said he understood, he hurt for a little girl he’d never met, and that he was determined to make sure she was ok. “I don’t know the answer to the last bit, baby, but I do know how to get the first done. Do you trust me?”
I fucking hated that question when people asked me it. My ex in high school had asked me that once when I’d found out he’d cheated on me with one of the cheerleaders. On that occasion I’d replied with a no immediately. With Jarrod, I didn’t know him enough to fully trust him because having a heavy crush on someone didn’t mean you knew all of them, so I guess I trusted some of him, so that’s what I went with.