Totlandia: The Onesies, Book 1 (Fall) by Josie Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

ceiling, waking both the babies.
    Scott hesitated just a moment, as if fighting the instinct to reach in and pick up his daughters. Because they happened so rarely, the memories Jillian treasured most were those of him holding both of them in his arms, cooing down at them, his head rocking back and forth as he peered into each of their little faces.
    You can’t stop caring for them, she pleaded silently. Even if you don’t love me anymore, you can’t stop loving them, too.
    When he didn’t pick them up, she took them instead: one on each hip, rocking them to keep them from reaching out to him.
    Their happy squeals for their Dada were hard enough to take.
    Obviously, he couldn’t take it either, because he headed for the door. “The mail is on the table. I took mine. I’ll have the rest forwarded to the office.”
    He nodded toward the tortoiseshell bombe beneath the large ornate mirror that graced the foyer wall below the winding staircase. She’d found both pieces at an estate sale for a pittance and refinished them herself.
    Maybe I should have been working on my marriage instead, she thought.
    The door creaked when he closed it. Jillian stood there staring at it for at least five minutes. All that time she fought back the tsunami of tears that made her head want to burst. The girls’ responses to her silence were to babble back at her. To yank her ponytail. To hug her around the neck.
    To giggle and reach down, toward the floor.
    They’re right, she thought. We have to keeping moving forward, with or without Scott.
    She forced herself to do something normal. What were Scott’s last words? Oh yes, something about mail…
    That’s when she saw it, right on top of the sales flyers and the Restoration Hardware catalog and the latest issue of   Elle   Décor :
    The invitation for the Pacific Heights Moms & Tots Club.
    She and the girls had been accepted into the club.
    They’d be able to meet new people, make friends, network, get on with their lives—
    As long as the club didn’t find out about her pending divorce.
    If and when that happened, they’d be considered an inconvenience.
    “They won’t find out,” she said out loud. “We deserve to belong. I’ve worked too hard for it.”
    No matter what, the club would be her daughters’ entrée to everything she’d hoped for.
    She wanted to believe that so, so badly.

Monday, 10 September
 
    8:36 a.m.
    “You’re not seriously taking Dante to Bettina’s shindig dressed in that tuxedo, are you?” The shocked look on Matthews’s face said it all: overkill.
    Since receiving the Pacific Heights Moms & Tots Club invitation, Lorna had been floating on a cloud. For three days she had scoured the town’s baby boutiques for the perfect outfit in which he’d make his club debut. When she came across the tiny tuxedo, she had actually squealed out loud, scaring the poor shop girl out of her skin.
    Stunned by Matt’s remark, she shook her head. “But…he looks so adorable in it, and it’s Armani—”
    He was laughing so hard he choked on his coffee. “Hon, he’s not meeting the Pope! It’s just a bunch of babies drooling all over each other.”
    Matt’s belly laugh normally made Lorna feel as if everything was right with the world. Today, though, all it did was reinforce the fact that nothing was as it should be.
    But Matt’s reaction had her wondering if Bettina’s would be the same. She could just imagine her sister-in-law’s tight lips curling into a smirk.
    Yep, nix the baby tuxedo.
    She sighed. It had taken her almost fifteen minutes to knot Dante’s tiny bowtie, what with him squirming the whole time. She had learned fast that he didn’t like her touching him around his neck. With his long dark tendrils and those big blue eyes, he’d be the handsomest child there. But in life, looks only took you so far. The other mothers would be comparing him to their children, scrutinizing everything about him. His height and weight. His agility. His