A Bad Day for Sorry: A Crime Novel (32 page)

Stella was reaching for the clicker, figuring she’d see what the fuss over
The View
was about these days, when Noelle walked in the door.

Carrying a baby.

Stella’s mind did a loop-de-loop and then she recognized the familiar shock of white-blond fluffy hair and said, “Is that who I think it is?”

Noelle turned the little guy around in her arms. He was
rubbing at sleepy eyes with a fist, yawning, showing a pair of tiny white teeth.

“Mama, a lady came by the house this morning and dropped this little fella off. She said I should bring him to you.”

“Holy shit.” Stella breathed, her heart leaping.

“Mama! Not in front of a child,” Noelle scolded, covering one of Tucker’s perfect little shell ears with her hand.

While they made their way down the hall, Stella going as fast as she could while limping and dragging her IV drip, Noelle said the lady looked as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in a year but was dressed nice and driving a new Escalade, and that she said Stella would know what to do.

“Where was she going?” Stella asked.

“I didn’t ask her,” Noelle said, exasperated. “I was still trying to figure out what to do with this guy, you know?”

Stella shut her mouth, but not before noticing that Noelle seemed to be finding her way around a baby without too much trouble.

Maybe she’d make Stella a grandma someday. The notion wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

Stella pushed open the door to Chrissy’s room, and Tucker took one look at the sleeping woman and made a sound that was half burp and half exclamation and then he leaned out of Noelle’s arms like he wanted to fly through the air to his mother.

Noelle sat gingerly on the bed just as Chrissy’s eyes fluttered open and then she saw her baby and cracked a smile that couldn’t have been lovelier if she’d been the Mona Lisa herself.

Stella, watching from the foot of the bed, holding her gown shut with one hand and the IV pole with the other, beaten
and bruised and smelling of a couple hard days, got a little sniffly and figured she’d never seen anything prettier.

Good job,
she congratulated herself.

There was nothing quite as satisfying as honest hard work.