“What?”
She looks at me with big eyes. “Who’ll be the godfather?”
I groan and collapse facedown onto the table.
Fin pats my back reassuringly. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. You’re probably going to be fine. In all likelihood, this is just a false alarm.”
Max says brightly, “At least we know where to get diapers if we end up needing them.”
I groan again, more pathetically.
They put me to bed and tuck me in, cooing and clucking over me like a couple of mother hens. Like I’m a sick child. Like I’m some kind of basket case, a totally lost cause.
Which I suppose I am.
When I wake up in the morning, there’s a brief, lovely moment where I don’t remember where I am or where I’ve been or what’s happening.
Then I spot the stuffed unicorn pony staring accusingly at me from my dresser across the room, and it all comes flooding back.
I pull the covers over my head and stay in bed for the rest of the day.
Like a funeral, Monday arrives.
I go to work. Hank takes one look at my face and laughs. “You look exactly like my sister at about five o’clock every afternoon.”
“Your sister with the half-dozen evil Viking banshee children who’s forty-two but looks one hundred and two?”
“She’s the one.”
“Thank you for that.”
He leans his forearms over the top of my cubicle and sends me a sympathetic look. “Guess the vacation didn’t take, huh?”
I chuckle darkly. “Oh, it took all right. It planted itself right in and took root.”
Now Hank looks perturbed. “Not sure how to respond to that, kiddo.”
I wave him off. “Forget about it. I’ve traumatized you enough with my personal life. Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
He shrugs. “George broke the copy machine again. Sandy and Donna got into a screaming match about The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. At the weekly staff meeting, Rudy launched into an epic rant about Tom Brady leaving the Patriots and joining that obscure Florida team. Whatever their name is.”
“The Buccaneers.”
“That’s the one. Orange jerseys that make ’em look like Creamsicles. Rudy’s beside himself. Thinks the whole thing was set up by some anarchist shadow group to sow discontent among the masses and overthrow the government. Oh, and there’s a new FedEx delivery guy all the girls are salivating over. If I hear the term ‘sex on a stick’ one more time, I’m quitting in protest.”
“So it was business as usual.”
“Yup.” He studies me for a moment. “You need to talk?”
“I need a time machine so I can go back to before I was a dumbass.”
He gazes at me, laughter shining in his eyes. “So many jokes.”
“I know. You’re showing amazing restraint. Now please go away so I can try to work.”
“‘Try’ being the operative word.” He raps his knuckles on the top of the cubicle. “I’m here if you need me.”
I swallow around the lump forming in my throat. “Thanks, Hank.”
“Anytime, kiddo.”
He turns and walks into his office, leaving me with a searing mental image of Killian’s face when I thanked him for saving my life. He said the same thing Hank just did. “Anytime.”
I know it’s first thing Monday morning, but I could really use a drink.
It hits me that if I actually am pregnant, I’m not going to be able to have a drink for nine months. I almost burst into tears again, but manage to control myself.
Barely.
A week goes by. I don’t hear from Killian. I don’t call him, either. The big black SUVs are still parked in front of the apartment, changing every few hours in shifts, but he isn’t one of the men who arrives to sit and watch over us.
I buy six pregnancy tests and take three, knowing it’s too early but unable to stop myself.
They’re all negative. That does nothing for my peace of mind.
I go to the bank, take out the safety deposit box, and stare at the diamond necklace. I run my fingers over the coldly glittering stones, wondering if they used to belong to someone my maybe-baby daddy killed.
I develop a nasty case of insomnia.
Then, the following Tuesday, something crosses my desk that stops me cold.
It’s an article in the digital edition of the newspaper. A small article, three pages deep, about an elderly man living in obscurity in a small town in Arizona who went to the grocery store one morning and wound up in jail a few days later, charged with multiple crimes committed many years ago.
According to the prosecutor, the man was a former mafia member who’d vanished without a trace thirty years prior. His family and associates thought him dead, the victim of a contract killing. But he’d been living out West all these years under an assumed name, quietly going about his business.
It wasn’t so much the man himself that got my attention, but the way he was caught.
An informant identified him.
Another former mafia member, now on the police payroll and working undercover, happened to be in that particular grocery store on that particular morning, buying cigarettes. He was on a driving trip from New York to California to visit his only grandchild, his crippling fear of flying keeping him off a plane.
Former mafioso number two saw former mafioso number one at the checkout, and the rest, as they say, was history.
I stare at the article with my heart racing like mad in my chest, reading it over and over. One word keeps jumping out at me.
Informant.
I grab a yellow legal pad from the top drawer of my desk and hastily scribble a list.
Secrets
Mafia
Different name
Access to FBI database
Access to air force satellite
Scary good background checks
No personal artifacts in residence
Geo-location device in business cards
Arrested on multiple felony charges but quickly let go
“He’s doing important work.”
“There are too many lives at stake to take that risk.”
I add Shakespeare buff and annoyingly arrogant, but cross them out because they don’t matter.
Then I sit back in my chair, stunned.
It blows over me like nuclear fallout. An atomic mushroom cloud, raining toxic ash.
Killian Black is working with the federal government.
He made a deal with the FBI to keep himself out of prison. He’s an informant on the mafia.
My maybe-baby daddy is a snitch.
“Holy shit,” I say aloud, causing a girl walking past my cubicle to look at me strangely.
I don’t care. I’m in the middle of something too big to give a damn what anyone thinks about me right now.
And I have to admit, my idea makes total sense.
He was arrested on multiple felony charges but let go the same day. He says cryptic things about how he’s helping people, and that there are too many lives at stake to trust me first. He has access to all kinds of technology that regular people don’t—I mean, who puts a biometric fingerprint scanner on their friggin’ computer?
Someone who’s working for the government, that’s who.