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“I was with your brother Roger.”
The woman waited, seeming to want Travis to respond somehow to that. He jerked his head up.
“This is his kid.”
Ellen blinked. She had no idea that Roger had a child. Nor even a girlfriend for that matter. He had been troubled as a teen, but Travis had never given up on him, constantly offering him a position, asking him to help, pushing him to do something constructive with the interests that he had.
Travis had spent a lot of time talking to her about Roger over the years, his concerns for his brother, his hopes and dreams that both of his brothers would work together with him, and Ellen had thought that Roger finally came around the last few years. In fact, he had been in Brazil with Travis and had stayed down when Travis left.
But, as Ellen counted back, it had only been eight months since Roger had gone down.
She assumed Travis was doing the same calculations in his head. And came to the conclusion that the baby very well could be Roger’s.
“I didn’t know he had a child.” His voice was soft, gentle, as though he were deliberately keeping his emotions in check so as not to scare the woman in front of him who looked frightened as a church mouse.
“I can’t keep it. You need to take it.”
She held the baby tight for a moment, and then as though she needed to do it quickly, she shoved her arms out, pushing the baby at Travis’s chest.
His arms came around it, almost automatically, and she dropped away, backing up.
“Don’t tell nobody,” she said.
“Don’t leave. Tell me about...him? Her? What’s the baby’s name?”
Ellen stepped closer to Travis and put a hand on his back, just lightly pressed there to let him know she was beside him. She could feel the panic welling up inside of him, could see that he was on the verge of chasing the woman down as she turned around. She couldn’t blame him. This was quite a shock. Especially considering that he just got back into the country.
“It’s Alice. That’s the baby’s name. A girl.” She nodded at the bag she threw at Travis’s feet. Ellen had barely noticed, but when she saw it, she reached down and picked it up. “There’s a note in there along with everything else. Don’t tell nobody,” she said again.
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Ellen asked, since that didn’t seem to occur to Travis yet. She had assumed when the woman first handed the baby over that she couldn’t afford a baby and was giving it to Travis. It might not be a well-known fact that he was a multimillionaire, but it was generally accepted around town that since he rubbed shoulders with Ford Hansen, he probably had money. Or he at least had access to someone who did.
But now, she wondered if the woman wasn’t having different issues. If someone wasn’t chasing her, or if maybe she was expecting to be arrested.
“I guess you could say that. Just take good care of her, okay?” Up until that point, the woman had seemed rather stiff and unemotional about the child, but when she asked for them to take care of the baby, her eyes filled with tears, and she took a deep breath, seeming to push them away.
“Of course we will,” Ellen said immediately, feeling compassion well up inside of her. What could this woman possibly be dealing with that would make her give up her beloved baby?
“Maybe we can help you?” she added, forming it into a question, because she knew that the woman had already made up her mind to give up her baby and move on.
“No. It’s best this way. I can’t really afford her anyway, though...I love her.”
“I’ll make sure she knows that.”
Ellen stared at the woman, wondering if she’d seen her before. But the tattoo wrapped around her neck, plus the sleeve tattoos she had on both arms, the double ring in her nose, and the cartilage piercing in her ear, while they weren’t exactly unique anymore, they still made her rather distinctive, and Ellen was pretty sure that if she’d seen her before, she would remember it.
She was too young to be someone she had graduated with or even someone she had known in school. Sweet Water High was a small school, with less than a thousand students from kindergarten to twelfth grade.
Ellen couldn’t say that she knew every single kid in school, but she knew most of them. Although maybe this woman was younger than what she looked.
“Do you need money?” Travis’s words startled her.
She’d been so intent on trying to figure out the woman she’d almost forgotten he stood beside her holding the baby.
She should have thought the woman might need money.
“No. I just need my baby—Roger’s baby—to be safe.”
“She will be,” Travis said with as much sincerity as she’d ever heard him use before. In fact, if the situation didn’t feel so serious, Ellen would tease him a bit about falling in love with the baby at first sight. It was obvious he was smitten and that the baby had roused every protective instinct he owned, as he cradled her carefully, bending over just a little as though he would shield her from anything.
