Still Recovering After Giving Birth, I Heard My Husband Saying "I Love You" to the Night Nurse I Had Hired to Care for Our Baby Through the Baby Monitor novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Say It Back

Alexis tells Ward she loves him on purpose, then calls the agency, and its owner Emmett Ridgely brings the file her husband told him to hide and reveals that the nurse came asking for the Wexler family eleven months before the baby was born.

At 6:40 the next morning, Ward was in the kitchen making coffee in his work shirt.

I had not slept again.

I stood in the doorway with my hand on the frame and watched him fill two mugs the way he had every morning for six years.

He turned around and his whole face went soft.

"There she is. How are the stitches?"

"Fine," I said. "Tender."

He crossed the kitchen and kissed my forehead, and I held still and let him.

"I love you, Lexi," he said into my hair.

It was the same voice.

I had told myself in the dark that I would hear the difference now, that some part of it would sound false.

It sounded exactly like it always had.

"I love you too," I said.

It came out smooth and warm and I did not know I could do that.

Ward smiled with his whole face, picked up his keys, and told me to text him if I needed anything, anything at all.

I listened to his car back out of the driveway.

Then I went to my studio nook, plugged in my good headphones, and played the 3:12 clip all the way through, twice.

It was four minutes long.

In the last minute, after I had walked into the nursery, Haley said something under her breath that I had missed in the dark.

I slowed it down to half speed and turned up the low end.

"After the gala," she whispered. "Then you tell her."

Tell me what?

I wrote the sentence on a sticky note and put the note in the drawer with my spare cables.

At nine o'clock I picked up the card Haley had left on the fridge the first week, a cream card with a navy border.

Ridgely Home Care, West Street, Annapolis.

I had hired them off a Google listing and Ward's one-line text: "They're the best, my mother's friend used them."

I asked for the file on Haley Merritt.

The woman at the front desk said she would have to ask Mr. Ridgely.

Four minutes later my phone rang.

"Mrs. Wexler, this is Emmett Ridgely." He had a flat, tired voice, the voice of somebody who ran a business with his own name on the door. "Our front desk says you've never seen Ms. Merritt's file."

"I never got one."

There was a long pause.

"I'm going to bring it to you myself," he said. "Is forty minutes all right?"

He arrived in thirty-five.

He was tall, with dark hair going gray at the temples and a nose that had been broken once and set crooked.

He carried a gray folder in both hands.

I walked him to the dining table at the pace my stitches allowed.

He did not offer me his arm, which I noticed and liked.

He put the folder on the table and did not open it.

"Mr. Wexler called me himself," he said. "Five weeks ago. He asked for Haley Merritt by name. He said a friend recommended her."

"Agencies don't work that way."

"Ours doesn't, usually." His jaw moved. "He paid six months up front, in cash. He asked that we not send you her paperwork. He said you'd been through enough and he'd handle the details."

"And you agreed."

"My front desk logged it as a family request." He met my eyes. "I should have called you. I didn't. That's on me, not her."

I thought about the sticky note in the drawer.

I decided to trust this man with exactly one thing.

I took my phone out of my robe pocket and played him ten seconds of the oldest clip.

"Does she suspect anything?"

"No. She thinks the agency picked you."

Emmett Ridgely did not move.

When it was done, he reached out and put one finger on the table, very precisely, next to the folder.

"The agency didn't pick her," he said.

"I know."

"I want to be clear that I'm not in the business of putting women in houses where they aren't wanted."

"I believe you," I said, and I was surprised to find I did.

He opened the folder then and turned it toward me.

Haley's license was real.

Her references were real.

"There's one more thing you should know," he said, and he didn't look at the folder. "Ms. Merritt came to my office eleven months ago. In person."

"Eleven months ago," I said.

"Before you had the baby." He looked at me. "She asked whether we placed night nurses with families who had a baby coming. She asked for the Wexler name specifically."

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend