Seventeen
There was work to be done. Work that Rose Kilpatrick needed to be doing. And she knew it, which was the worst part. If she knew that she needed to work, she had to actually do it. She needed to sleep. Needed to eat. Needed a thousand things and none of them seemed like they were going to happen any time soon. She let out a long, low breath.
She needed to coordinate talks. She needed to get press time. She needed to show her face and talk about her family and her new place in the world. She needed to make herself available to the press and to the people at home.
When she was doing that, she could just drop in a few little pieces of information about how fake the leaks were. It was a careful piece of psychological warfare. As long as she could get in front of their faces, she could make it work. Temporarily, at least. And “temporarily” was all she needed.
You drop little things in the midst of a message that everyone’s paying attention to, and come off as genuine when you do it. Like mind control. That was how the CIA did it. How the media did it. She was just using their tools, too. No reason to fight with your hands tied behind your back. It made sense, and Rose wasn’t in any position to argue.
Violet started crying somewhere in the darkness outside of her eyelids. It sent her pulse racing within the space of a single heartbeat. Her eyes snapped open. She needed to rest. Part of her wished that she could tell the baby girl to just wait a little while longer before she needed attention, just this once.
Then she forced herself to stand up, and started moving as fast as she could compel her legs to move, towards the cribs.
Sometimes, it was a mystery what the girls wanted, when they went into a panic. Sometimes they just wanted attention, and the minute that Rose gave it to them, they’d quiet down.
This time wasn’t one of the mystery times. The smell was obvious immediately.
“You’re a stinky baby,” she cooed. Violet’s apparent opinion, which was that the whole house needed to know of her discomfort, didn’t change.
Rose laid her down and started to go through the motions of changing. It seemed like there were baby wipes hidden all over the house. But right by the crib, they were piled high. She could have built a small fortress out of them. Anyone in the world would have been able to knock the walls down, but they would have to know there was someone inside first.
The whole thing was going to have to work. And it meant that she was going to have to step outside of all the defenses that she’d built for herself over the years. To say it was “scary” was the understatement of the century.
Sarah started to fuss in her crib as Rose finished up transferring the dirty diaper into the diaper bin. Violet was trying to roll herself onto her belly, and if Rose left her to it, she was going to manage it sooner rather than later.
So she scooped up Violet, and scooped up Rose, and sucked in a deep breath. They were going to drive her absolutely nuts if she wasn’t careful. And for better or worse, Rose could care less. They were hers, and she was going to do whatever it took to protect them.
She set them both on the floor, where they proceeded to start crawling towards each other to commune in their baby-language, about whatever babies talked about. As Sarah shifted to sitting on her butt, Rose reached into her pocket and checked her phone.
The babysitter was supposed to be here any minute, and then she had to make it to a taping downtown. She’d at least given herself an extra hour to navigate the parking nightmare that the city posed.
The doorbell rang. Rose sucked in a breath, picked up the girls, and walked down the stairs. How, precisely, she was supposed to be doing this was a mystery. Two hands, plus one to open the door, plus one to shake hands, plus she had to keep her eyes up and smile.
Life would be easier if she were an octopus. But she wasn’t one. She wasn’t going to be one for a long time. Probably forever.
So she reached as best she could, twisted her hips to keep her body under the baby’s butt, and opened the door. A nineteen-year-old girl smiled back at her, and Rose fought to open the door for her a little more.
She needed to be gone five minutes ago, and she needed to make sure that this girl was going to work out before she left. It was a long day, in a long string of long days that made up a long week, in the middle of a long month, at the beginning of what was going to be a long year.
But Rose Kilpatrick didn’t have much else choice but to keep doing her best. So she did.