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“I’m going to keep the baby,” I blurted out. The decision wasn’t set in stone yet. I was only halfway through the list of pros and cons of having a baby—eighty percent were cons—but now, hearing Alex wonder whether or not I was going to keep the baby, somehow that answered those loaded questions.
This baby was mine—unexpected, yet undeniably mine.
“Okay,” Alex muttered. He took a deep breath in, his shoulders dropping as if a weight had been lifted, and then gave a curt nod. “Good.”
“Is that why you came?” I asked, itching for Alex to leave. “To find out if I was keeping the baby?”
He shook his head and gave a resigned sigh. “I guess so . . . But more importantly, I want you to know that Iwantto be a part of the baby’s life.” His words hit me like a downpour on a clear day.
Not that they should. It wasn’t exactly a shock.
At the hospital, when Alex had found out I was pregnant, he had looked stunned but there had been no sign that he had wanted to bail, to flee from the news.
Quite the opposite, actually.
“I . . . I really don’t want to have to think about this right now . . . I need some space, Alex,” I said, rising to full height.
If Alex wanted to be a part of this baby’s life, not only did we have to see each other again, and again and again, but we’d have to tell Vicki. Worst case scenario, this could be a way for Alex to get back with her.
None of those options sounded particularly appetizing.
I was at the door, opening it before Alex could say anything else. When he reached me, standing so close I could feel his warm breath on my cheeks, I noticed three freckles on his nose I hadn’t seen before and a cloud of desperation in his eyes. A part of me didn’t want him to leave.
“Call me, okay?” he said, holding my gaze for a few seconds longer. “You’ve got my number.”
“I will,” I said, meaning it.
As soon as Alex stepped out into the evening air, a hue of lavender making its way into the sky above him, I closed the door behind him and slumped against it.
CHAPTER 12
Alex
“Have you even thought this through?” asked Sam, waving his clipboard in the air and barely missing the head of a nurse, who gave him a venomous look as she passed. “Because what you’re thinking is crazy. You don’t even know her.”
“It doesn’t matter if I do,” I said, sidestepping a young man lying on a gurney with his leg in traction, the injury clearly a serious femur break. “I’ve got a responsibility. You know that.”
Sam stopped dead in his tracks, not noticing that a group of interns had nearly collided with him. For a man his size—six foot five with football player shoulders—it wasn't surprising he was always bumping into something. He turned to me, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked me dead in the eye. "Have you ever considered how everything in your life is going to change?"
“Are you saying that as a father or a concerned friend?”
“Both,” he declared, stepping back and leaning against the counter of the nurses’ station. His elbow knocked over a stack of papers, some of which dropped to the floor. “Sorry, Janet,” he said quickly, glancing at the woman with the rimless spectacles and an embroidered bone on her scrub top, before scrambling to pick up the papers.
When Sam stood back up, having neatly stacked the papers while Janet looked satisfied, he took up his position once more. “My kids are great. You know I love them to bits, but damn, they’re a handful. Everything changed when Anderson was born, and when Kaycee came along a year later, I literally thought Maya was going to have a mental breakdown. It was hard, Alex . . . Really hard. Are you sure you want to do that to yourself?”
“I’m sure,” I said with no doubt in my mind.
If there were any reservations about being a father, about sharing the responsibility with Sophie, well, then they were deeply hidden—so deeply I didn’t feel any need to bother looking for them. In fact, as soon as I’d heard Sophie was pregnant, I knew I wanted to be involved. Not because I felt completely ready, especially after the recent breakup, but because I had been raised by a single mom. Actually, there is something more than that. If I'm being truthful with myself, I can't get Sophie out of my mind. She's stunning and resilient, especially after she told me she would keep the baby no matter what.
That was justification enough for it all.
My dad had left when I was two. There was no real reason except that he wasn’t ready to be a father, and obviously not a husband either. It wasn’t that my mom hadn’t done enough. She’d done plenty, played the roles of both parents beautifully, and worked her butt off to get me to where I was today. It was just that I’d spent a lot of my childhood dreaming up a father figure. Sometimes he wore a cape like Superman, other times he battled fires in his turnout gear, and once he was the neighbor two blocks down who also loved to collect rocks at the local park. To imagine a baby growing up wondering who their father was, and whether he cared so little as to not be present, was a thought that struck a chord with me.
A chord too close to home.
If Sam knew how I felt about it, he wouldn't be asking these questions. Not that I would share it with him. The only person who knew all the intricacies of my childhood was Vicki, and she hadn't exactly been empathetic. People with big, happy, let's-get-together-every-weekend-for-a-barbecue families rarely were.
And above all, my affection for Sophie has grown stronger. Her pale gray eyes are like the moonlit sky on a dark night, subtle yet breathtaking. Even under her dull work uniform, her gorgeous blonde hair shines through.
