“Okay,” I said again. “I’ve got you.”
Mrs. Fenwick became very still.
“You mean until morning?”
I looked at the three car seats.
“No.”
“Reid.”
“I can’t let strangers take them tonight.”
“Tonight is how it starts.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she picked up the diaper bag.
“Fine. I’ll make bottles while you carry them inside.”
I brought the girls into my apartment one at a time.
Somewhere between the second trip and the third, I stopped thinking of them as Callan’s children.
I was still Uncle Reid.
But I had already begun becoming something else.
Mrs. Fenwick taught me how to warm a bottle.
She taught me to test the milk against my wrist and to support a baby’s head.
She changed the first diaper while I watched with the concentration of a man defusing an explosive.
The girls were named Liora, Carys, and Maisie.
Liora was the oldest by eleven minutes.
