CHAPTER FIVE
Bex!” Cilla called to me across the living room. “Nick is hogging the baby!”
“I am not,” Nick whisper-yelled from the sofa, where a dark-haired infant was sleeping on his chest. “But he cries if anyone else tries to hold him. It’s not my fault that I’m his favorite.”
Next to him on the sofa, Lacey yawned expansively as Cilla began handing out teacups: to me, to Bea, to Olly, and to Lacey, who wrinkled her nose but accepted it.
“I wish this was wine. But my tolerance is terrible now,” she said, scooching up into a seated position and blowing on the wafting Darjeeling. “Nick, feel free to keep him all week if you want. I can practice getting my drink on, and he can keep you company in the middle of the night. He’s very perky at three a.m.”
“Of course he is. The middle of the night is interesting,” Nick cooed to the baby. “I understand you, Danny. No one understands you like Uncle Nick.”
On his chest, the baby wiggled his teeny fingers in his sleep. I felt it in my gut. Watching Nick be adorable with my sister’s accidental blessing was carving me up in a way that I could not control. I turned away and busied myself looking for coasters.
“I wish evolution had created babies with respect for the mother’s sleep cycle,” Lacey said, yawning again and falling against Olly.
“At least it invented a nine-month gestational period,” said Olly. “Elephants go for almost twenty-two.”
Daniel Earl Porter-Omundi had been born three weeks ago, after thirty-six hours of what Lacey called “an excruciating hellscape” of labor. It had started while Nick and I were in Hampstead revealing a plaque marking the refurbishment of John Keats’s house, and the baby arrived the next day while we were giving out shamrocks to the First Battalion Irish Guards on Saint Patrick’s Day. (In the photos, if you look closely, you can guess how late I was up fielding texts that said things like, “I hope Olly gets a kidney stone the size of Montana.”) Our little Danny Boy was perfect, from the top of his sweet-smelling head to the bottom of the wrinkly feet that fit in my hand. Nick and I had met him at the hospital, but this was his first official outing—and one of Lacey’s as well. The toll of being alert was evident on her face, even as she seemed delighted to have adult company. She’d come over in her maternity overalls and a topknot and immediately instructed Bea not to say a word. Bea had simply steered her to the couch, pushed her down gently, and put a pillow on the coffee table for her feet.
“He doesn’t do much, does he?” Bea peered down at Danny. “When do they become fun?”
“Some still haven’t,” I said. Lacey snickered.
“Don’t lean over him, you’ll spill your tea,” Cilla said crossly, swatting at Bea’s legs with a napkin.
“I have no intention of leaning,” Bea said. “I am not sufficiently interested in babies, and I am even less interested in leaning.”
“Hello? Could someone please come help me carry something?” came Freddie’s voice from the foyer.
“I don’t understand where your staff are,” Bea grumbled.
“It’s a Saturday. They don’t work weekends unless we’re hosting a thing, which has never happened,” I said, getting off the sofa.
She made a face. “You are hosting a thing. This is a thing.”
I frowned at her. “A thing is when the prime minister of the Bahamas comes over. This is family.”
Bea pulled off the trick of furrowing her brow with irritation but also looking vaguely pleased. Gemma and I exchanged grins before I headed out and found Freddie in the foyer, a giant stuffed elephant wearing a blue bow tie sitting at his feet.
“Hi,” he said. “Can you help me? I did all right up the steps but my arm still hurts a bit, and God forbid I go back into a cast because I went overboard at Hamleys.”
Together, we hoisted the elephant and carried it into the living room, where Olly’s face lit up like a Christmas tree.
“I love it!” he said. “I mean, Danny will love it.”
Freddie laughed, giving Olly a hearty handshake and pecking Lacey on the top of her head. “I really bought it for you two. How are Mum and Dad?”
“Thrilled to be out of the house,” Lacey said, stabbing at a piece of salami on the charcuterie board that Nick had put together. “Also excited to eat deli meat again.”
“I hope that goes double for unpasteurized cheeses,” sang Gaz, bustling in with an equally pretty board of selections from the Food Hall at Harrods. Cilla stole a piece of Brie as he passed, and then, when he stopped in mock annoyance, fed him half.
“Ah, brilliant, Freddie’s here!” he said, dropping the tray with a clang on the table.
“A phrase hardly ever uttered in polite society,” Freddie said.
“Fortunately, that doesn’t apply here,” Nick said. “Other than Danny.”
Lacey snorted. “Please. That kid blew out a diaper ten seconds after I changed it. He has no manners.”
“Cheese, Knickers?” Freddie said casually as he carved off a piece and plonked it onto a cracker. “Since you’re trapped under something heavy? The Stilton is nice and smelly, just the way you like it.”
“I’d love a piece, and maybe a slab of that truffly Camembert while you’re at it,” Nick said, gesturing with his elbow.
“Coming right up.”
Their manner was easy, but I knew they were aware of how much everyone in the room was rooting for this reconciliation to be real. Cilla and Lacey and I launched into aggressively casual-not-casual chatter about nursing bras, a subject about which two of us knew nothing, just to try to defuse their sense that they were being observed—even though of course
