Mail Order Stepbrother (4 page)

“I know, Mom. And I want you to be happy, so if there is anything I can do…”

“Thank you, baby.”

Her mother hung up a few minutes later, but not before promising to send an email with a list of things Melanie could do from a distance to help with the party. Just what she needed, more stuff to do.

Melanie tossed the phone onto the soft couch cushions and proceeded to straighten up the kitchen from her rare meal preparations the night before. She had just finished putting the last dish in the dishwasher when her computer beeped at her. She wandered over, still drying her hands with a dishtowel, and felt her heart skip a beat as she realized it was an email from Nash.

“I’m going out of town for a few days and will have limited access to a computer—all day meetings and that sort of thing. I didn’t want you to wonder why I wasn’t responding to your messages or anything.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” Melanie answered. “I’ll miss our superhero debates.”

Nash didn’t answer right away. Melanie assumed he had signed off, so she went back into the kitchen to finish up. Just as she hung the dishtowel over the oven handle, her computer beeped again.

“This might be a little forward,” Nash’s message said, “but I don’t suppose it would be possible to get your cellphone number? Maybe we could exchange a few texts or something.”

Melanie’s heart jumped into her chest. She liked the idea of having his number, of texting him whenever a thought crossed her mind. There were half a dozen times in just the past four hours when she thought of things—comebacks, mostly—she wanted to say to him in response to something they had discussed the night before. But the act of turning on her computer and composing an email or messenger comment just seemed to take the spontaneity out of the moment. But to have the quick, easy access of a text message…she would seriously have to work on her filtering skills.

“Not forward,” she wrote back. “Just the next step.”

“Are we ready for the next step?”

Melanie bit her lip, taking his words more seriously than he probably meant them. She didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how he would take her enthusiasm for the idea, didn’t even know if she should be enthusiastic for it. What if he started calling? What if she didn’t like the sound of his voice? What if he didn’t like the sound of her voice? What if she couldn’t keep herself from saying something that would frighten him off? What if he somehow used her number to find where she lived, to steal her identity? What if this had all been some sort of scam to earn her trust so he could hurt her in some, here-to-for undefined way?

There were so many what-ifs.

Before she could decide how to answer, he came back with nothing more than his ten digit cellphone number.

What was done was done.

***

Melanie spent her one, truly free, day off shopping for little plastic sailboats her mother could use as party favors for Burton’s birthday bash. She wasn’t sure why her mother couldn’t find sailboats in San Diego—or Los Angeles, since apparently, she and Burton had been spending quite a bit of time there—but she promised she would help, and this was what her mother wanted.

She was walking out of the third craft store she had visited that day, with her purchases in hand, when she stumbled into Jack. More than two weeks she’d avoided going down to radiology so that she wouldn’t have to see him, and here he was, walking into a craft store on her day off.

“Dr. Spence,” he said, clearly as surprised as she. “How are you?”

Melanie nodded, trying to think of something clever to say when a pretty blond woman, clearly not much older than twenty, came up behind Jack. She slipped her hand through his arm even as she balanced a baby against her shoulder with the other hand.

“Jack?” she asked, the lack of trust in her voice like a punch in the stomach. At least, to Melanie.

“Tess, this is Dr. Spence, the one I was telling you about.”

A sense of dread washed over Melanie at those words. But the woman’s face lit up like he’d just told her Christmas had come early.

“Dr. Spence, it’s wonderful to meet you,” the girl said, stepping around her husband and thrusting a hand at Melanie. “When Jack told me he talked to you about Eli’s condition, I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I was.”

“Eli?”

Jack’s face twisted into something like anger—or maybe annoyance—as he gestured with a nod of his head toward the baby.

Melanie, who was always drawn to babies, slid her hand up the infant’s back before cradling his little head. “How old is he?”

She was expecting to hear something like five or six weeks by the child’s size, but was surprised when Tess said, “Six months.”

Melanie glanced at Jack. He rolled back on his heels, anger flashing in his eyes. “Down Syndrome,” he mouthed above his wife’s head.

A whole list of complications ran their way through Melanie’s mind. She immediately knew why Jack had told his wife that he spoke to Melanie specifically. Babies with Down Syndrome tend to have problems with their cardiovascular system, usually some deficit in the formation of the heart that causes what is essentially a hole in the center that allows blood to flow improperly. Melanie lifted the infants hand and could see that his fingers had a blue tint to them. He was a very sick baby.

“Can I hold him?” she asked with a soft smile.

Tess’ eyes lit up. “Of course.”

Melanie took the child gingerly into her arms, her eyes moving over the purse of his little lips and the quick, rough movement of his chest. He had the telltale markings of a child with Down Syndrome—the flat nose, upturned eyes, and slightly protruding tongue—but he also had his father’s strong jawline and his mother’s pale hair. Beautiful. Melanie again ran her hand over the child’s head, wondering what kind of future he had with an overly-protective mother and an apathetic father.

It explained a lot about Jack…but didn’t excuse anything.

“Bring him to the hospital Monday morning,” Melanie told Tess as she carefully handed the infant back to his mother. “We’ll run a few tests and see where we stand.”

“Thank you,” Tess said, tears filling her eyes.

Melanie glanced at Jack. It was the least she could do.

***

“Sometimes I wonder about people,” Melanie texted to Nash a few minutes later as she sat in her car. “How a guy can cheat on his wife when she has so much on her plate.”

“Sounds like the guy is a real winner.”

Yeah.

Melanie glanced back at the store. Instead of seeing Jack, her eyes fell to his car, parked harmlessly at the front of the store. She could see a car seat in the back now, one that had definitely not been there the night she climbed back there with him. She tried again not to think about what might have happened if he hadn’t taken that call from Tess.

Oh, what she might have done.

She couldn’t believe she’d told Nash what happened between her and Jack. She hadn’t told anyone, except what little she told Tanya, because she was embarrassed. She didn’t tell him everything. Just about the make-out session, the wife, the infant with Down Syndrome. She didn’t tell him that she was going to fix the hole in the baby’s heart. She still hadn’t told him she was a doctor.

She could tell him she made out with a married man, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him she was a doctor. Was there something wrong with that?

But, again, he hadn’t told her what he did for a living, either.

“Where are you?” she suddenly asked.

She wasn’t sure he would answer. But he came back almost immediately.

“New York.”

She’d been to New York a few times herself. It was a unique place, one people either loved or hated on sight. Melanie loved to visit…wasn’t sure she would ever want to live there.

But she could picture him there.

In her mind, Nash was a tall, blond man who looked best in well-tailored suits. And that man was more comfortable in an urban setting than anywhere else—despite his deep respect for nature. She wasn’t sure why she pictured him that way, she just did. She had never asked him what he looked like—never even mentioned his lack of a photograph on the dating site. She wondered, sometimes, what he thought of her. She had posted a picture, but it was an older one from a time when her brown hair was cut short. The photo highlighted her blue eyes, which is why she chose it, but it wasn’t really representative of who she was now.

But he had never asked if it was accurate, if that was still how she looked, or if it was even her. Was he that trusting or that uninterested? No matter what she did, or what Nash said, Melanie’s doubts kept creeping in.

And then her phone beeped, alerting her to a new message.

“Have you ever been to New York?”

“A few times.”

“There’s a romantic little restaurant in Soho…I’d like to take you there someday.”

Melanie bit her lip, her heart suddenly pumping faster than it should. “Are you suggesting we meet in the real world?” she typed, her finger hesitating briefly over the send button.

“I guess I am,” came his quick response.

Melanie glanced over at Jack’s car again, remembering the feel of his lips on hers, his hands on her back. She missed physical contact. But she was enjoying the conversation, the forced communication. The what-ifs that had been plaguing her since the beginning came into play again when she thought about meeting him in real life. It all boiled down to essentially one question: What if he didn’t like her in the real world?

“It’s been weeks,” his next text said. “Meeting in the real world is inevitable, isn’t it?”

She knew that. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t still nervous about the idea.

She hadn’t told anyone about Nash, not even her mother. Not Tanya, her college roommate, Rebecca, or any of her other friends. She kind of liked keeping him to herself, keeping him her secret. If they met in the real world, she would have to tell the world about him.

Was she ready for that?

“Yes,” she reluctantly typed, afraid if she didn’t answer he would think she didn’t want to meet him. “Maybe we could have dinner sometime, but here in Dallas. Soho is a bit of a commute for me, at the moment.”

“Sounds good.”

Melanie smiled, more pleased by his response then she had expected to be.

Chapter 4

Melanie cradled Eli to her breast as she waited for the sedative she had administrated to take effect. Tess and Eli had arrived at the hospital before Melanie, and she was concerned what their prior doctors had said. However, a quick perusal of his chart made it pretty clear that there hadn’t been that many doctors before Melanie. There was a financial aspect that Melanie had seen before—parents often failed to take their children to routine doctor visits when they didn’t have insurance or the money required for the copay, assuming that a child who seemed to be developing at a normal rate couldn’t possibly have any problems, only to end up in the emergency room when a congenital defect began to take its toll. It was obvious Eli’s pediatrician hadn’t seen him often enough to fully assess his heart condition. Most of the notes in his chart came from the staff pediatrician who saw him at birth.

Melanie ran her hand gently over the baby’s arched back, listening to his slow breathing. A sleeping baby was more relaxing than petting a purring cat or watching an aquarium full of fish swim. At least to her. Melanie was the most popular babysitter on his block when she was a teen because she had a magic touch when it came to getting even the fussiest baby to sleep. It was a no-brainer that she would go into some sort of pediatric medicine. When she did her surgery rotation and met he first patient, an eighteen month old boy with a congenital defect, she knew what her calling was.

Nothing had changed in the years since.

The door to the exam room opened and she was a little surprised to see Jack come in.

“Dr. Spence,” he said, surprise in his tone. “They didn’t tell me it was you.”

“You’re working today?”

He nodded, his eyes falling to the baby in her arms. “I’ll get someone else to help you with…” He gestured over his shoulder toward the door even as he turned.

“Wait, Jack.”

He stopped moving, but he faced the door instead of her. “I never imagined we would run into you,” he said quietly.

“You told her I could fix your baby, but you had no intention of ever telling me about him?”

“I never wanted the kid…wasn’t ready to get married and settle down. And then when the kid was born like that,” he again gestured over his shoulder, clearly not interested in looking at either his son or Melanie, “it felt like a punishment.”

“You do realize that children with Down Syndrome are not always profoundly disabled, right? They are capable of a great many things—“

“But he’s not normal. That’s all I see.”

Melanie shook her head as he slammed out of the room. She’d known a lot of different kinds of parents in the course of her career. The overprotective ones, the ones who wanted to know every little detail, ones who were concerned by willing to sit back and let the medical staff take the lead, those who had little to no interest in any of it, and those who were simply absent. She could see that Tess was one of the first, concerned, but willing to allow Melanie to do whatever needed to be done without thoroughly explaining it to her first. But Jack…she was really beginning to see a side to him she didn’t like. Beauty on the outside did not necessarily translate to the inside.

***

Melanie elected to admit Eli to the hospital after viewing his x-rays and cardiac catheterization, concerned that Jack might talk Tess out of bringing him back if she allowed them to go home. The hole in Eli’s heart wasn’t as bad as it could have been and might have sustained until he was older to be repaired. But it would need to be repaired eventually, and Jack’s open apathy concerned Melanie. Once the baby was settled in a room with a nurse watching over him, Melanie pulled Tess aside and explained the surgery. She was clearly frightened by what Melanie said to her, but she listened closely and agreed with Melanie’s chosen treatment protocol.