Page 77 of Blueline Baby

“You bought all that blue. You were so sure. It’s okay to be a little disappointed.”

“Disappointed?” He lets out a wet, breathless laugh and drops to his knees beside the hospital bed, eye-level with the baby on my chest. “Chloe. I’m the happiest man in the world.”

“But you wanted a boy.”

“I was terrified to have a boy,” he rests his forehead against the edge of the mattress. “Do you have any idea what kind of nightmare I was as a kid? I raced cars. I got kicked out of so many places. If we had a boy, he would have been exactly like me, and I would have spent the next twenty years having one continuous heart attack.”

He lifts his head and looks at our daughter, and his eyes are shining.

“But a little girl,” he whispers. “A little girl is going to be quiet. And sensible. And sweet. She’s going to read books and do math and avoid danger, exactly like her mother.”

I look down at the baby and decide not to point out the glaring biological flaw in his logic. This child is fifty percent Jack Anderson. She’s going to be a menace. I give him six years, maybe seven.

But he can have his illusion for today.

“Do you want to hold her?” I ask.

“Yeah.” He stands up fast, wiping his wet face with the sleeve of his shirt. “Yeah. Give her to me.”

I lift her up, and Jack slides his arms under her and pulls her against his chest.

The second she’s tucked against him, the baby stops crying. She settles into the heat of him, lets out one tiny, shuddering breath, and falls asleep.

Jack stares down at her looking ruined in the best possible way.

“Hey, baby,” he whispers, his voice stripped of every ounce of its usual cockiness. “I’m your dad. I’m right here. I’m never going anywhere.”

I watch my giant, aggressive, hockey-playing husband rock our tiny daughter in the middle of a hospital room, and I realize Lorelei had it backwards. I’m the one who got lucky.

“We don’t have a name,” I remind him. “You refused to make a girl list.”

Jack doesn’t even look up from the sleeping baby.

“MacKinnon,” he says.

I blink at him. “What?”

“MacKinnon.” He traces the curve of her cheek with his thumb. “It was my grandmother’s maiden name. The one whose ring you’re wearing. I’ve always loved it.”

“You had a girl’s name picked out this entire time?”

He finally looks over at me, and a slow, arrogant smirk spreads across his tired face.

“I told you, Backcheck Girl,” he says. “I have never once in my life been surprised. I knew she would be a girl the whole time.”

I stare at him for a long moment. Then I look down at our daughter, sleeping in the arms of the most stubborn man alive.

“MacKinnon Anderson,” I say out loud, testing the sound of it.

35

JACK

EXACTLY WHERE I BELONG

I haven’t slept more than two consecutive hours in almost a month. My whole body aches. I’ve lost track of what day of the week it is, because my existence has been stripped down to a loop of dirty diapers, warmed bottles, and pacing the hallway at two a.m. with a seven-pound human being who refuses to sleep unless she’s moving.

It is, without a doubt, the best month of my life.