✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

Act IV: 99. My Perfect Moment

Weeks passed. For a couple of days I was half expecting to hear from Tess that the boy who kept bothering her had stopped paying so much attention; or that he had said something to make her uncomfortable. Either way would have been fine with me, but whatever happened, I didn't hear about it. The best guess I had was that he was quietly backing off, but she didn't think that was worth mentioning. But I knew that there was still something going on.

It started to get under my skin that there were things going on in my house that I didn't know about. I could keep on watching Tess and Ffrances whenever they found time to indulge their little sides, and I knew I only had myself to blame for them not wanting to tell me about that. But I knew there was another secret as well. I started to wonder if I'd done something wrong, that Tess didn't feel she could confide in me. Or was she so stuck in the mindset of trying to be grown-up that she didn't feel like she could ask for help?

That really hurt. I'd told her pretty soon after she moved in that there would be no secrets here. This was a house where we could all trust each other, and the easiest way to do that was if we knew everything that was going on. Even if she hadn't meant it as a direct insult, I was sure that Tess should be telling me all about her problems, because she was still my little and I knew she would need my help so that she could actually deal with those problems. And I knew that I had to get her to talk to me before I could punish her for lying; but that was going to be hard anyway, because I couldn't admit how closely I'd been watching her.

I decided that she would feel better after another wet night; just to remind her that she was supposed to let the grown-ups deal with everything. She'd been back over a week by that point, and hadn't had an accident yet, so I could imagine that was the real cause of her worries. But after that, when I went into the nursery to top up the supply of diapers in the changing table drawers, I found something that I really hadn't been expecting.

There were new diapers in there; not the ones I had bought her. I didn't understand how that could have happened; was I not giving my baby enough? But again, there was no easy way for me to mention it, without having to explain that I had been tidying up her room while she was out.

But the part I really didn't understand was that these diapers weren't even cute. There was no childish print, no baby trappings at all. They looked more like something that an elderly patient at a retirement home would be resigned to, with the company name printed in a dozen different places and a thick blue line that had to be a wetness indicator. Why would she wear something like that, when she already had soi many designs to choose from? It wouldn't make her feel cute at all, and that was a problem because it would make it a lot harder for her to automatically drop into her littlespace when she wore one. I couldn't understand why she would buy something like that, so much less effective, when she already had such a wide selection.

It was a lot later in the day that the answer came to me, and then I couldn't believe that I hadn't seen it sooner. She was always trying to do things by herself, that was almost a defining characteristic of Tess. So of course she wouldn't take it for granted that I would keep on replacing her diapers. She didn't want to ask, so she'd looked for somewhere she could buy some of her own. Maybe she was even hoping to convince me that she had stopped needing them, if she had a new supply that I didn't know anything about. I didn't think that was likely at all, but it certainly wasn't impossible.

I wanted to talk to her about this new problem, but I knew that I couldn't. There wasn't anything that I could say without sounding like I was spying on her, and that was the last thing that I wanted. Still, she wasn't talking about moving into the spare room from the nursery; I knew that she was slowly accepting herself as a little, and I didn't want to risk that in any way. So I just watched,m and made an effort to keep an eye on what they were doing in my absence. And as far as the medical diapers went, I could only try to discourage her from using them.