Page 1 of Life’s Too Short

CHAPTER 1

HEARD CRYING FROM NEXT

DOOR, WHAT I FOUND WAS SHOCKING!

ADRIAN

Wailing.

Banshee, demon-baby wailing from the apartment next to mine for the millionth hour straight. I lay in bed, looking at the ceiling in the dark.

Rachel groaned from beside me. “You have to do something. Go over there.”

I scoffed. “I’m not going over there. I don’t know her.”

I think I’d seen my neighbor in the lobby getting her mail once, but she was on the phone and she didn’t make eye contact with me, so I didn’t say hi. Now I wished I’d at least gotten to know her well enough to be able to text her and ask her to please move to a room that didn’t share a wall with my bedroom.

Rachel let out a frustrated breath, and I rolled over and hugged her back to my chest.

She tensed up. She’d been tensing up since she got here three days ago, actually.

“What’s wrong?”

She spoke over her shoulder at me. “Nothing. I’m just tired. I’m two seconds from getting a hotel room so I can sleep. Without you,” she teased.

I chuckled tiredly. She knew how to poke me, that was for damn sure.

I only got one weekend a month with my girlfriend. Losing the last night with her to a hotel before she went back to Seattle was a price I was not willing to pay for my neighbor or her baby.

Fuck.

I begrudgingly climbed out of bed, put on a T-shirt and slippers, and let myself out into the hallway of my apartment building.

No idea if she’d answer the door. It was 4:00 in the morning, and I was a stranger. Rachel probably would have called the police if she’d seen a man she didn’t know knocking on her apartment in the middle of the night.

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called over the wailing.

“Your neighbor.”

The chain raked from the other side and the door opened.

Yup, the woman from the mailbox. She looked like hell. Baggy faded black T-shirt with a hole at a seam on the shoulder and some drawstring sweatpants with stains on them. Dark circles under her eyes, wild frizzy hair.

“What?” she said, looking at me over the tiny, loud bundle she had pressed to her chest.

I’d never seen a baby that small. I had bricks of cheese in my fridge bigger than this kid. It didn’t even look real.

It sounded real though.

She eyeballed me impatiently. “Yeah?”

“I have a deposition in four hours. Is there any way you can—”

“Any way I can what?” She glared at me.

“Any way you could maybe move to another side of the apartment? So I might be able to sleep?”

“There is no other side of this apartment. It’s a studio.”