A Last Kiss for Mummy by Casey Watson Read Free Book Online

‘Oh, it’s fine, love. Just for today, at any rate. Emma’s still busy putting her thousand and one possessions away upstairs, and she’s got to get the bedding on the cot too, don’t forget. Better I do it this once than have her break off when she’s busy moving in properly. Don’t worry – I won’t be making a habit of butting in. I’ll make sure she does it from tomorrow on.’
    Mike put my coffee down on the table behind me. ‘I wasn’t just thinking of that, love. I was thinking of Emma. Don’t you think she might have issues with someone else doing these things for her? You know what my sister was like – wouldn’t so much as let anyone breathe near little Natalie. How d’you know Emma won’t feel the –’
    He stopped then, and I turned to see why. Emma’s ears must have been burning, because she was now standing in the living-room doorway.
    ‘Hello, love,’ Mike began. ‘Did you find everything you needed upstairs okay?’
    ‘I hope you don’t mind, sweetheart,’ I added, as I quickly finished changing and re-dressing Roman. ‘Only he needed changing and I thought it best to let you get on.’
    I made to hold him out to her, but she glanced at Mike and then back at me, making no move to take him. Instead she nodded. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘I only came down to get a glass of water. If you want to play with him for a bit more, I don’t mind. I can finish our room off then, can’t I? You know, if you like.’
    ‘Oh, of course,’ I said, snuggling the baby back against my shoulder automatically. ‘He’s such a good little boy; no trouble at all. You get yourself a drink and get finished. Mike and I will mind him.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Emma said, disappearing into the kitchen to get her water. ‘Oh, and by the way,’ she called back through, ‘have you got one of those adaptor thingies?’
    ‘Adaptors?’ Mike asked. ‘What kind of adaptor?’
    Emma came back in, holding a glass of water. ‘You know,’ she said. ‘So you can plug a few things in one socket at the same time. Only I need to charge my phone because I’m, um, expecting a call later, and there’s already the bedside lamp plugged in there. Well, the CD player right now, obviously, but I just wondered for, like, later. Unless there’s another plug somewhere? I didn’t see one.’
    ‘There’s another socket behind the bed,’ I said. ‘You can plug the bedside lamp in there if you like. I’m sure it’ll reach.’
    ‘Sweet,’ she said. ‘Great. Okay.’ She glanced at Roman. ‘Okay, I’ll be down in a bit then.’
    I knew what was coming as soon as Emma had gone back upstairs. I’d answered automatically, but not without it flipping a mental switch with me. There were protocols for dealing with such things. As Mike well knew too.
    ‘A phone?’ he said, frowning. ‘In her bedroom and unsupervised? And a call from who exactly? She seemed cagey about that, didn’t you think?’ He sighed. ‘I can see this becoming complicated, can’t you?’
    I knew what he meant, but didn’t share his anxiety. She hadn’t seemed cagey to me. If she’d wanted to be cagey she would have just plugged her phone in anyway, and made do with not having a bedside light, surely? Teenagers were notoriously obsessive about their privacy, but there was nothing in Emma’s tone that made me anxious about letting her have her phone, even if we did need to be clear on what the protocol was.
    And there was always a protocol. There were protocols for everything in our line of work. Mike was right – with a young teenager like this we’d normally prohibit the use of a mobile up in their bedroom – and for obvious reasons. The children we looked after weren’t in any way the average; they often had dark and difficult pasts, and all the dark and difficult associations that kind of background tended to throw up. In some cases there might be family members wanting to snatch them back, even, which was why communication with families