Page 54 of His Holy Chaos

He laughs. "Just like you with eggplant. I told you you're a baby."

"Funny, Daddy," I complain, but he's right. I'm a lot like Angel. Noisy, sleepy, I cry all the time, I like to destroy stuff.

Angel reaches for him immediately, and he scoops her up, pressing his face into her neck, breathing her in.

"And you?" he asks, still half-buried in his daughter, sitting down beside me on the carpet. "How were you?"

"Destroyed. Humbled. Covered in various substances."

He laughs. "Good," Ford says. Just that. Just good.

"I'm very happy, though. Weirdly fulfilled. Like I did a good job."

"I'm glad, sweetheart. You made me very proud," he says, and I beam.

We spend the next hour playing and talking. Angel babbles something that sounds suspiciously like a word. Ford lifts her up and blows a raspberry on her belly, and she laughs, and I sit there on the floor of this man's house, wearing his daughter's lunch, and think: oh. Oh, I'm in trouble.

Chapter 25. Ford

"What are you doing?" I ask. He has Angel in his arms. Every time she starts to wake up, he's there, singing to her. It calms her down immediately for her naps, and I couldn't be more grateful. I used to spend forty minutes to an hour trying to get her down, and now all it takes is Jude singing to her. She doesn't enjoy her crib very much, just like any other baby, but his voice is the one thing that settles her. So when I find him dancing and singing for her, it's not a surprise. However, he always chooses the most random songs. I asked him about it once and he said, "My generation doesn't know any lullabies, and that's probably your generation's fault."

"I have nothing to do with that," I tell him.

He usually sings Disney songs. "Out There" is one of his favorites, and he hits all the notes perfectly without any effort. That little bastard. I spent my whole life singing, and I have twenty more years of experience, and still, he sounds better than I do. It's unfair, but I always give him a hard time about it, and I love the face he makes when I do. He also sings "Once Upon a Dream" from Sleeping Beauty, and dozens of others I can't keep track of. It's been a while since I've watched any Disney. Now I do because of Angel, and it seems Jude never grew out of it. That little baby boy. Right now he's singing "Yo Ho, Yo Ho, A Pirate's Life for Me."

Angel is not even pretending to sleep. She giggles and dances with him and watching how tenderly he holds her face toward his does something to me every time.

"Are you singing about thieves and beggars and people who like to set things on fire to my nine-month-old?" I ask him, and he laughs.

"See how much she loves it. Don't worry about it, Angel. Your daddy is very square, but you have Uncle Jude to help you."

I roll my eyes and scoop her up. I nod to the armchair. "Nap time. Sit down and let her sleep on you."

"I love how much babies trap you in place all the time. Good thing I like being trapped."

He settles into the armchair with Angel draped across his chest, her cheek pressed against his collarbone, and within three minutes she's out. Gone. The kind of deep, boneless sleep that only babies can achieve. Jude doesn't move. He barely breathes. His hand rests on her back, rising and falling with her tiny exhales, and he stares at the ceiling. I watch them for longer than I should. Then I go make coffee, because watching Jude hold my daughter while she sleeps is doing things to my cardiovascular system.

His PTO runs out on Thursday. I know this because I know everything about his schedule.

Thursday evening, the shift begins. He told me about it over Martha's casserole the night before. Casual, like he wasn't testing whether I'd ask him to call in sick.

"Night shift starts tomorrow. Eight to four. It's remote, though. Just need my laptop and decent Wi-Fi."

"You have both of those here," I say, and he looks at me with those honey eyes. I'm not ready for him to leave. I don't say that part. I don't need to. He hears it anyway.

So now it's seven forty-five on a Thursday night, and Angel has been down since six thirty, and Jude is transforming my dining room table into his personal command center. His laptop, a mechanical keyboard that sounds like a hailstorm, a mouse with too many buttons, and a headset with a microphone that makes him look like an air traffic controller. There are cables everywhere. My pristine mahogany table is buried under a tangle of USB-C cords and adapters and something he calls a "dock" that I'm fairly certain is just an expensive power strip.

He doesn't look up. His fingers move across the keyboard with a focus I've never seen from him in any other context. Jude, who can't fold a towel without turning it into a modern art installation, who leaves his shoes in the middle of hallways, who treats every domestic task like a personal affront. this Jude is locked in, precise, efficient.

I settle into the armchair across the room and open a book I have no intention of reading. What I intend to do is watch him.

At eight, he logs in. I hear the chime of whatever system they use, a series of rapid clicks, and then his posture changes. He looks like someone who knows exactly what he's doing. It's disorienting. It's really attractive.

"Alright," he mutters, scanning something on his screen. "Let's see what these idiots broke while I was gone."

He works in silence for twenty minutes, and I learn more about him in those twenty minutes than I have in some entire evenings together. He reads fast. He mutters to himself, a running monologue. Motherfucker, who pushed this to prod without testing. Jesus Christ, this API call is a war crime. Oh, beautiful, someone hardcoded the credentials, that's great, that's really great.

At nine twenty-three, his headset lights up. He glances at the incoming call notification, and his whole face changes. The focus cracks open into something warm and bright and boyish.