I shake my head. “Thanks, though.”
He nods and taps the ash of his cigarette into the dirt of an otherwise empty planter beside him.
I have a lot of questions rolling around in my head. What did we get ourselves into? What do we do about it? But what comes out first is, “Why’d you call me Ted?”
He shrugs, eyes on his cigarette. “You look like a Ted.”
“No one’s ever called me that.”
“I have,” he says.
I smile faintly. “Besides you.”
“Theodora is your full name, I’m guessing?”
I nod.
“Theodora,” he says. “Thea. Ted. Just seemed right. Like… a good reduction.”
“A what?”
He peers my way again. “Like a sauce.” At my blank look, he adds, “In cooking?”
“I don’t cook,” I explain.
“At all?” he asks.
I shake my head.
He looks concerned. “And you eat… how?”
“Poorly.”
Alex sighs. “Right.”
“So the reduction?” I remind him.
“In a reduction,” he explains, “the flavors are… richer. It’s everything you had to begin with, just intensified. Theodora to Ted… felt like that.”
“Ted.” I tip my head. “I think I like it.”
“I think it was a bad cooking metaphor,” he mutters, peering out at the lawn, where Argos is sniffing around. “Thanks,” he says, “for singing to Mia.”
“Happy to.” I don’t tell him that singing his kid to sleep was the best part of this awful day, that singing my own kid to sleep has been something I’ve wanted to be the best part of my day for years. But I almost want to.
He glances my way and like a mind reader asks, “You have any kids?”
My stomach knots sharply. “No.” I watch Argos roll onto his back, pawing at a firefly. “I wanted them. Ethan didn’t. ‘Notyet,’ he said.”
Alex taps the cigarette against the planter’s edge again. “You’d be a good mom.”
My heart lodges right up in my throat. I swallow thickly. “What makes you say that?”
“Mia,” he says, “is an excellent judge of character. She doesn’t ask just anyone to sing her to sleep. And she sure as shit doesn’t go to sleep for just anyone, either.”
I smile faintly. “Well, I’m flattered.”
For a moment, we sit in silence, watching Argos being weird, as he froggy crawls across the grass, a not-so-stealthily prowl toward who knows what.