“Very much so. Go to sleep now, and you can tell me everything in the morning.”
When he got to the door, she said, “Matt?”
“Yes?”
“I brought one of Rodney’s children home with me. Just for a while. Is that okay?”
“It’s your house,” he said, but when she started to say something else, he smiled. “Sure, it’s okay. I think it’s time someone did something about those kids anyway. Maybe we can find them foster homes. Together. It’ll be something we can do together.”
“Yes,” she said softly, her eyes closing. “Together. The three of us.”
The idea of him and Bailey and a child made Matt smile, and as he closed her bedroom door, he thought that maybe everything was going to work out all right after all.
The next morning, Matt awoke to a nightmare. It was as though he’d been transported back to Patsy’s house. The bathroom was a pigsty. Every towel in the cabinet was wet and had been slung across every surface. The tub was rimmed with greasy gray scum. There was hair in the sink, and the mirror was speckled with what looked like shaving cream.
When he left the bathroom, he nearly tripped over a box in the hallway. Suspicious, he investigated and found out that all his storage boxes, at least fifty of them, had been removed from the spare bedroom and put into his attic office. He couldn’t get to his computer, or his drafting table.
Downstairs again, he flung open the door to the extra bedroom and saw that all his things had been cleared out so completely that all that was left was the bed and . . . well, all the furniture that Bailey had put in there originally.
Calm down, he told himself. She told you that she’d brought home one of Rodney’s kids, and you can’t expect a kid that’s been brought up like he was to keep a bathroom tidy. Poor child has probably never seen an indoor toilet.
But still, it hurt to see all his possessions removed and put elsewhere, as though he was no longer living there.
In the kitchen, Matt went to the jar that Bailey kept filled with her homemade granola, and found that it was empty. He looked in the oven. There was no scrumptious omelet waiting for him. In fact, when he looked in the refrigerator, there were no eggs. And no milk.
Bailey walked into the kitchen, and she looked better than he’d ever seen her. There was a light in her eyes that he’d never seen before.
“Good morning!” she said brightly. “You got in late last night.”
“Yeah, I—”
“I put it in the wash,” she shouted over her shoulder, cutting Matt off from what he’d been about to say. She looked back at Matt. “Oh, sorry. Alex was looking for his shirt, but I told him . . . But then, you heard what I told him. Are you okay? Do you need something?”
Matt gave her a helpless, little-boy-lost smile that had made a few women weak-kneed. “Breakfast?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, but you’re going to have to fix it yourself. Alex and I have to leave. We have to . . . uh . . . do something.”
“Oh,” Matt said, keeping the smile plastered on his face. “But I couldn’t find the cereal.”
Bailey opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Cheerios.
“From a box?” Matt said, shock in his voice.
“Sorry, but Alex ate all the granola I made. Have some eggs.”
“There aren’t any.” He was having to work hard to keep smiling.
“Oh, that’s right. I made Alex and me an omelet last night.”
“There were a dozen eggs in there yesterday.”
Bailey shrugged. “Were there? I guess so, but Alex and I were very hungry last night, so I guess we ate all of them.”
“How can a kid eat an entire dozen—” Matt began, but stopped when Alexander Yates entered the room. Matt had been expecting a child of nine or ten, but in walked a fully grown young man—and he had a look in his eye that said he knew exactly what Matt was thinking . . . and feeling.
Matt wanted to remain cool, but he didn’t. “What are you doing here?” he snapped.
“I’m her partner in crime,” Alex said, then he and Bailey laughed together. In fact, Bailey laughed so hard that she had to sit down.