Page 47 of The Wrong Track

Chapter 10

“Tobin? Oh my God, Tobin! I thought that was you!”

A woman walked through the crowded restaurant towards our table, smiling widely in his direction. “Tobin, oh my God!” she told him, and when he stood up, she threw herself into his arms. In doing so, she knocked against Ella’s car seat and I grabbed it, then took the baby out of it for safety.

“How have you been?” the woman cooed to him. “Oh my God, I heard about you and Lulu. I’m so sorry!”

“It was for the best,” he told her, then looked over the top of her head at me. “Devon, this is Remy,” he said, and she turned and seemed to notice us for the first time. Me and the baby.

“Oh. Hi.” She smiled again but now, very uncertainly.

Just in case she got the wrong idea, I answered, “Hi. I’m Tobin’s roommate.”

“And that’s your baby?”

“They’re both my roommates,” he announced, and stepped around to take Ella, who’d started to fuss a bit. He held under her tiny butt and patted her small back and unconsciously started to rock.

Well, that did it. If this woman, Devon, hadn’t been interested in him before, she sure was now. I thought that she might melt into a puddle on the floor. “Oh, my God, look at you! It’s like you’re a daddy!”

“No, he’s not her father,” I said quickly, but both of them ignored me. Tobin, because he was proudly showing off the baby, and this Devon woman, because she was about to start pulling off Tobin’s pants. He turned so that Ella’s face was more visible and introduced them to each other, and they talked more about babies and life and then she said that she’d definitely like to see him again. He didn’t seem too averse to that either.

“Nice move,” I told him when the woman finally left, and at first he looked confused, but then he laughed.

“I wasn’t trying to pull anything. I thought Ella was going to start yelling so I picked her up.”

She had been. Still. “That Devon seems to like you.”

“She’s one of Lulu’s friends. They’re not really friends, but they hang out together,” he clarified. “They’re actually kind of mean to each other.”

“Sounds fun.”

“When I think about it, Lulu doesn’t have a lot of girlfriends. She doesn’t like a lot of other women. She hated Haze.”

“How could anyone hate Hazel?” I asked, but actually, that did make a lot of sense. Lulu loved Tobin, Tobin loved Hazel, Lulu hated Hazel.

“I know,” Tobin agreed. “She’s such a nice girl.”

She was. She’d been extremely nice to me, despite everything I’d put her through. She and her mom hadn’t asked to live next door to a career criminal and despite the danger, she had always tried to help me. Like one night, they’d heard him pushing me around and they’d called the police, which had made him so angry that I’d been afraid for them. They probably hadn’t been aware of the potential consequences, though. If Kilian hadn’t been so interested in keeping a low profile, I didn’t doubt that he would have done something awful to Hazel and Monica.

“Remy? What are you thinking about?”

“What about that Devon?” I asked. “Do you like her?”

“I don’t have anything against her,” he said, but that wasn’t what I’d meant. She was really pretty, and she seemed pretty interested in him. Of course, Tobin holding the baby was so damn cute that it almost hurt to look at them. It did seem like he could have been her father—but she’d never have one, of course. I hadn’t either and I had ended up…that was a bad comparison. Ok, Lily had grown up without a dad and she was going to be just fine. She was going to be wonderful, in fact, and so was Ella.

He rocked a little longer then sat down gingerly, watching the baby as he did, but she didn’t start to kick up a fuss. Then he held up a French fry to me. “Go on,” he said, nodding at it.

“What are we doing?”

“Cheers,” he said. “Our first successful night out.”

I held up a fry and touched it to his, and we both ate them. And he smiled at me, and I found myself smiling back. “The night’s not over,” I reminded him. “We still have to get her home.”

He held up the chocolate shake. “I see this as half-full, not half-empty. She’s going to be a little angel.” Then he finished the drink. “Now it’s more than half-empty, though.”

And his confident statement was not really borne out by Ella’s behavior in the car, which was crying the entire way until we pulled into garage. Then she didn’t want to be put in her crib and nothing soothed her, not even six books, a recital of Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy from act two, or Tobin’s very boring football recaps. Finally, we put her down and then stood outside the door together, listening as she wailed.

“I don’t think she enjoyed the restaurant,” he whispered, and I was also thinking that we wouldn’t go out anymore. It seemed to upset Ella, I’d eaten way too much, and we ran into annoying people like that woman Devon. Who needed to go out when we had this great house, so comfortable and safe for us all?