The receptionist at Global Connect, Inc. smiles up at me from behind her desk. “Good morning, Mr. Nash. It’s finally starting to warm up out there, don’t you think?”

I scan my access card through the reader next to her desk. An access card. Through the reader. It’s a far cry from walking in past the foreman at Killion, who would stand there with his arms crossed, looking at everybody like we were late for a prison shift, even if we were ten minutes early.

Christine’s right. “It could be a little warmer. It’s almost April.”

She laughs as if this is the funniest thing anyone has ever said and waves me in.

I play it cool, like working in an office is a normal thing for me to do.

It should be normal, after almost a month on the job, but it still seems fucking crazy to me that I’m here at all. GC, even with the most ridiculously generic name I’ve ever heard for a company, isn’t the kind of place I ever dreamed I’d work at. It’s boring as hell to explain to another person, but basically, we’re a go-between for charities and nonprofits and the places they serve. Somebody has to arrange for shipping massive amounts of lifesaving crap all over the world. That’s us. It takes so much planning, it makes mission development look like target practice—too easy.

The hero’s welcome isn’t my favorite thing, but other than that—

“Good morning, Dayton.” Susan stands up from her desk to greet me. “How are you?” She’s in her sixties, silver-haired and poised, and she looks at me every morning like I’ve just shipped home from the front lines with a shiny medal pinned to my chest.

“I’m all right. How are you, Susan?”

“Very well. Very well, thank you.” She nods to herself—a job well done—and sits back down in her seat.

“Liar.” Simon. Good old Simon. He’s the only one in this place who doesn’t worship me so much that he’s afraid to joke. Conveniently, he has the cubicle across the way from mine, so he has plenty of opportunities.

I hang my coat up on the hook by my chair and swivel to face him. “Who says?”

“Your face says.” He waggles his eyebrows. “Rough night?”

I rub my hands over my face. Yes, there’s grit in my eyes and a heaviness at the corner that only coffee will dispel—hopefully—but as far as rough nights go, I’ve had worse. “No.”

“Shut up. You’re totally hungover.”

I wish. “I’m not.”

“You can admit it to your old buddy Simon.” He stands up, his own mug of coffee still steaming, and leans against the doorway of my cubicle. “Come on. Your girlfriend’s gorgeous. It’s okay to say you were up all night pleasing her, and—”

“If by pleasing her you mean holding her hair back from her face when she throws up. She’s pregnant and sick as hell.”

The expression on his face changes from teasing to serious and fatherly, even though we’re the same age. “Shit, dude. Yeah. My wife was sick all nine months.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know why they call it morning sickness when it lasts all day.”

“Yeah.”

Simon perks up. “It’s the most incredible thing, though, when you see that baby for the first time. All your feelings change in an instant, and—”

I want him to go away. I want to go into the break room and make an inappropriate amount of coffee, then come back to my desk in silence, get the weight off my prosthetic. It’ll be easier to be excited about holding the baby when Summer isn’t so obscenely sick all the time.

Simon goes on and on about the miracle of holding your child, the words nothing more than a faint buzzing sound in my ears. Her face was pale this morning when I left—she called sick into work. She can’t sit in a chair in the office all day, feeling like that, but I know she hates to take time off. Sunny wants to be there.

So do something about it.

“—and when they laugh…God, it’s—” Simon looks rapturous.

I clear my throat. It’s not that I want to ask him these things, but if he knows something that’ll help Summer, I’ll admit defeat. “What’d you do to help her? Your wife?”

His eyes light up at the chance to share more insight. “Those Club crackers? I always kept a box by her bed. She’d eat a few of those before she got up in the morning—I mean, literally, before she even sat up, and that would help. Plus, they make these suckers out of herbs or some magic shit. Should have bought stock in those. Ginger ale, too. She carried around a tumbler with a straw in it for months. I got so sick of washing that thing.”

I’d wash a tumbler every five minutes if it would help her feel better.

Simon raises his coffee mug in a salute. “Good luck, man. Try some of that stuff out.”

“I will. Thanks.” This is the part where, at Killion, the other guy would give me endless shit about getting a girl knocked up, where he’d bring some other people into it, where it would become an all-day shitfest, until somebody threatened a fight. Simon only goes back to his cubicle and sits down in his chair.

It feels like cheating, working in a place like this.

“Hey, Nash?” He sticks his head out from behind the wall of his cube.

“Yeah?”

“Congratulations.”

Pride loops its way through my chest. “Thanks.”

I write down his list of recommendations on my notepad.

It’s nothing but meetings and phone calls and shuffling paper until after lunch, until that three o’clock lull that doesn’t exist at factories like Killion. You work until the bell rings at the end of your shift. You don’t fuck around at three in the afternoon, recovering from an afternoon slump.

Not that I’m fucking around.

I go on Amazon and search out everything that Simon was talking about, except the ginger ale and crackers—I’ll get that at the bodega on the way home. The lollipops look weird, but I don’t care. I find a tumbler shaped like a Starbucks cup, only with a straw, a delicate snowflake pattern on the edge. Perfect. I add a misting spray meant to help with morning sickness and a relaxing candle to the order. I’ll draw a bath for Sunny, if that’s what she wants.

Everything’s loaded up. I pick the fastest shipping method and dig my wallet out of my pocket. I have a credit card for the first time in my life. It’s a small miracle. Summer has no idea how good it feels to pay for these things for her. I guess she’s been doing it on her own all along.

The phone on my desk rings before I can punch in the credit card numbers and I answer it without looking at the caller ID. “Dayton Nash.”

“It’s so sexy when you say your name like that.”

Summer.

“Like I’m answering the phone at an office building?”

“Like a workin’ man who’s wearing a button-down shirt…” Her voice trails off at the end of the sentence, almost wistfully. “That I could unbutton…”

“You are a sucker for business casual.”

“I can’t help that you wear it so well.” She’s teasing, but I know she’s half-serious. Summer loves taking my shirt off at the end of the day. She loves doing more than that.

I press the big yellow order button on the screen and watch the browser load the confirmation screen. “How are you feeling?”

Summer sighs, a little sound that could be relief or frustration—it’s different, day to day. “Better.”

“Are you sure?”

She groans. “Now it’s the opposite. I could eat for days. I’m so hungry, Day. I’m starving. And work keeps forwarding messages from my desk phone. The last one was just some guy who said my name and then breathed through his mouth. It was disgusting. And still, I’m so hungry, I could die.” The last bit is so dramatic, I can picture her swooning onto a fainting couch.

“I’ll make dinner tonight.”

“Okay, but how much dinner?”

“All the dinner the two of you can eat.” She laughs. “And if that’s not enough, I’ll go out for more. How does a second dessert sound?”

“Almost as good as unbuttoning that shirt.”

Simon glances over at me from his cubicle and gives me a thumbs up. Yeah. Time to end this call. I twist toward the inner corner of my own cubicle and lower my voice. “You can unbutton it all you want in two hours.”

“Come straight home,” Summer says. “This apartment is too empty without you.”

Who could resist that kind of invitation?