The Child Who Changed Them, page 7
She used to always pack her lunch, mostly made up of leftovers Wood had made for dinner the night before. Perhaps she should take up cooking again. She’d done all the cooking when she was married to Peter. Had actually enjoyed it sometimes.
And her baby was going to need to eat.
She wanted to sit together with her child at the table every night for the next eighteen years minimum, share a meal while they talked. About big things, little ones, nothing at all.
She wanted her baby. Did Greg?
Feeling as though her life was on hold—still, even after the revelation—she picked up her phone to call him, and put it back down without doing so. A repeat of an action she’d done half a dozen times since leaving The Parent Portal.
Because she hadn’t been inseminated with the help of The Parent Portal, she no longer technically needed their services. But Dr. Miller had agreed to keep her on as a patient and birth the baby anyway. She and her little one had had an unusual start. And Dr. Miller understood the situation with Greg. Felt for him.
She’d told Elaina that morning that Greg would come around.
Elaina wasn’t so sure.
Nor was she sure she wanted him to do so.
She was thrilled he was her baby’s father, as opposed to an anonymous donor. Maybe even just thrilled that her baby would have his genes, period.
But they weren’t a couple. Never really had been. Not in any facing-life-together sense. They’d had lunch and sex for over a year.
They’d never been on a date or even out together anywhere. They’d eaten in the cafeteria. And when they’d had sex, she’d always followed him to his place after work.
But she couldn’t stop thinking about him. About how he was feeling. What he wanted.
She wanted to wrap her arms around Greg and just hold on. That scared her, too. She couldn’t revert back to her old ways, letting a man prop her up. The fact that she hadn’t known she was doing it was no excuse.
She’d seen the light.
She had to be strong. In body, spirit and mind. She truly wanted to be.
For herself. Her baby. And others in her life.
Holding it together that day because that was all she’d ever known how to do, she finished her shift and drove home. At almost eight weeks pregnant, she had to start making plans. Figuring out the nursery. Shopping. Painting.
Finding a pediatrician. Changing her insurance policies.
Starting a college fund.
Telling Wood and Cassie that they were going to be an aunt and uncle.
She wanted little Alan to know that she’d always love him specially, that she was bringing him a playmate. A family member who would be there for him for life.
She wanted to call her mom. That yearning had never quite left, even after more than fifteen years since the car accident that had taken both of her parents from her.
And then another one had taken Peter, too.
But she couldn’t dwell on that. Couldn’t be the needy woman who’d been so ripe to marry Peter, simply because he’d loved her. Who’d perhaps fallen in love with him, or thought herself in love with him, because of the power of his love for her. Who’d leaned so heavily on Wood for so long, for the same reason.
Her dependence on Peter had eventually led her to believe she couldn’t exist without him. But there she was, still standing. Miraculously standing after being confined for months to a wheelchair.
She could have a baby on her own. Raise that child in a healthy, loving home.
She didn’t need Greg.
Still, her mood shifted, became less rigid, when she pulled down her street and saw Greg’s shiny blue sports car parked on the far side of her two-car drive. The side she didn’t use.
Opening the garage with the button in her car, she pulled into her usual spot, telling her heart to stop pounding so hard. Taking a deep breath to help herself where she could.
Greg met her at the bumper. “I owe you an apology,” he said before she could even form her lips around a hello. “I’m sorry. I...needed some time to assimilate and I acted like an ass.”
“No, you didn’t.” He’d walked out. He hadn’t been brash or purposefully unkind.
“I handled the situation all wrong,” Greg said, meeting her gaze. “Can you grant me a do-over?”
There were no do-overs in life. There was only going on from where she was, but still...
“You want to come inside?” she answered his question with one of her own.
Still in the jeans and black shirt he’d had on that morning, he looked...wonderful. His sandy hair was windblown, giving him a carefree appearance that she, at that moment, found so appealing.
“I’d like to talk,” he said. “How about if we do something we’ve never done and go get some dinner?
It might be easier for us if we were in a generic place, with life going on around us.” His tone was serious.
She knew he was right. With a nod, she headed back toward her car door.
“Elaina?”
“Yes?”
“I thought maybe we could drive together.”
Oh. Well, it made sense. It wasn’t like they were going to have sex. It was only dinner. Between parents.
With another nod, and an admonition to her emotions to mind their manners, she followed him out to climb into his highly efficient, but not parenting-practical, lovely blue car.
* * *
They decided together where they’d eat. Truth was, Greg didn’t figure either of them for being all that hungry, but the location allowed for the fact that they could have private conversation without being easily overheard. The restaurant, set on a cliff overlooking the ocean, was pricey, with high booths set up against a wall of windows. There were tables, too, set far enough apart to allow for the private high-powered business conversations that took place there regularly.
It was early yet for the evening crowd and they were shown a corner booth, offering them the privacy they’d need.
He ordered a mineral water, though a shot of scotch would have been nice to go with it. And he wasn’t a scotch drinker.
She opted for cranberry juice with a side of water.
“I’ve had the day to process and I want to say, first and foremost, that I respect how difficult this must be for you.” He started to speak as soon as their waitress had left, their menus still lying unopened in front of them.
“It can’t be easy for you, either.” Her gaze was clear, if distant, and he wondered if maybe he should have given her time to go in and change out of her scrubs. If maybe the doctoring attire was like a shroud of distance in which she’d wrapped herself.
So much for the clear thinking he’d thought he’d reached.
Of course, she could have said she wanted to change.
Maybe neither one of them was thinking all that clearly.
Maybe that was okay.
But he had things to say, and now was the time to say them. “I appreciate that you planned to raise this child on your own,” he said, pulling from the mental list he’d spent the day preparing. “And I understand that there’s going to be emotional residual on your part due to the fact that your husband was supposed to be the father of the child...”
Yeah, he’d been processing the things he needed to say—and her probable responses—all day long. Over and over again.
“I’m glad you understand, Greg, but this...isn’t what we need to talk about.”
“What do we need to talk about?” he asked, partially just out of curiosity. He’d spent the entire day figuring everything out. She’d had an hour at most during lunch and on the drive home.
“What role, if any, you’re going to play in this baby’s life, starting with the prenatal portion. How we work together to be the best parents possible, even if you aren’t going to play a role after the child is born. We’ll still need to figure out how we’d handle that for the best of the baby. How would I eventually tell a child that its conception wasn’t planned?”
“We won’t be telling this baby that.” The words came out a little stronger than he’d have liked. The plan had been to have a calm, kind conversation where they acknowledged each other’s positions and found a way to respect both. Assuming she understood that there was no way on this or any planet that he was going to walk away from his child. He’d never imagined he could have a child of his own—and he’d be there for every step of its life.
“We won’t.”
“No.”
“What part of that won’t we be telling it?”
“All of it.” He heard his tone and thrummed his fingers against the expensive linen tablecloth. “I’m open to discuss the actual child’s not being planned, if there’s a need for it that I am not currently seeing, though I can’t at the moment figure out why a child should need to know the details. However, as I’ve just stated, I’m open to discussion on that point. As to the rest of it...unless you plan to give up custody of the child to me, or one of us dies, it will have two parents for its entire life.”
Her expression didn’t change. The straight line of her mouth remained firm. And yet, he sensed a lightening, maybe a relaxing in the chin. Or a glint in those big, expressive brown eyes. No way was any of the conversation going as planned. At the moment, the only thing he appeared to have gotten right was the need for them to be someplace public, where they were forced to keep some decorum between them.
“I told you two weeks ago that you would be welcome to be a part of this baby’s life, Greg. Just as I told you that if you didn’t want to be, I’d understand and leave your name off the birth certificate.”
Right. She’d already established answers to the questions he’d spent the day thinking about.
“I wasn’t listening with the ear of a father, then.”
He hadn’t really been listening at all, he admitted to himself.
“I won’t do that again,” he added, figuring she deserved the honesty and commitment to hearing what she needed.
Her gaze darkened. He resisted the urge to lean closer in. To take her hand. He was not going to jump into a relationship.
He was going to be a father.
Chapter Eight
As if by unspoken agreement, the conversation stayed neutral for the rest of the evening. They kept to work talk, and Elaina was grateful for the respite.
It felt good to be eating with Greg again. A little odd to be out in public, rather than the hospital cafeteria, but with the past couple of weeks she’d had, that little bit of odd barely fazed her. Brooklyn’s testing was proving exactly what Greg had suspected. When the girl was at the hospital and administered a larger dose of drug that would stay in her system three to five days, her scans showed up markedly different, and her symptoms lessened accordingly. During the week she was at home, supposedly on prescribed medication, the lower, daily dose, the scans were as they’d always been: high in cortisol levels, indicating stress. It appeared that Brooklyn’s mother wasn’t medicating her at home as directed.
Out of the realm of Elaina or Greg’s level of control, but if the next two scans showed the same results, they would have something concrete to send to Brooklyn’s pediatrician and to report to Social Services, as was their duty. Martha’s mistake had probably been a blessing in disguise, leading them to discover the child’s real problem.
“It’ll be cleared up before you go,” Elaina said without thinking, and then, fork in hand, froze. He was leaving.
She’d miss him. Just as she’d been missing their meals—and more—since she’d broken things off with him, like she missed a good television series when the last episode aired. She didn’t want him to go. He brightened her days.
But he was just that—a great series, not part of her real life.
And...
They had to discuss how they were going to handle long-distance, shared parenting. LA wasn’t that far, only an hour, but it was far enough that their child couldn’t go to the same day care or school from both homes.
“I don’t want my child to live in two different homes,” she said suddenly. They weren’t there to enjoy a meal together like the olden days. It was time to sit up and be the single mom she’d devoted herself to becoming. “To be split between two bedrooms, two routines, two sets of boundaries...”
She knew it often happened successfully. She just didn’t want to raise her child that way if she didn’t have to.
“I don’t want that, either,” he said, and then clamped his lips together, as though he’d already had second thoughts. Frowning, he put his napkin on his plate and sat back. “I spent my day thinking about being a father,” he said. “I didn’t plan out the next eighteen years of my life or envision how they might look.”
Her heart lurched again, as it had been doing with him on and off for a while. The feeling was both invigorating and off-putting, and she shied away from giving it focus. But she most definitely wanted to be aware of his emotions. His needs. To understand as best as she could. And make certain that their association wasn’t all about only her.
“So let’s start there,” she said, smiling across at him. The muscles in her face thanked her for allowing them to relax and be natural. “How do you feel about all of this?”
Shaking his head, he raised his brows, shrugged, and then broke into a grin. “I’m thrilled, of course. Thankful. In shock. Amazed. Confused. Overwhelmed—that whole shock thing. And certain that I want to be a father.”
Little arrows of something good shot off inside her.
“You aren’t sorry?” Wanting to be a father, she got that. But what about the rest of it? Finding out he was a father with a woman he wasn’t even in a relationship with? A woman he didn’t love?
“Hell no! How could I be? I’ve just been given back something that I thought was lost to me forever. My biggest disappointment, a life sentence, has been miraculously overturned. I’m still in the process of believing it’s real. I mean the chances of a healthy sperm getting past my army of haters...”
Smiling for a minute, she absorbed his pleasure. Happy with his happiness. And wished that they could stay just like that.
But life didn’t work that way. No one got to just keep their happiness forever. Each moment brought another move. Some good. Some so horrible they stopped you in your tracks.
Some were just...perplexing. Like her finally having a plan, being ready to have Peter’s baby, and getting pregnant by an infertile man.
Not quite infertile, as it turned out.
“How do you feel about the fact that I’m the mother?” she asked him.
Her question didn’t change his expression much. She got another shrug. “I’m fine with you as the mother,” he said, though she couldn’t tell if he was being kind, practical or completely honest. “I do find it ironic that I couldn’t impregnate my wife, and then manage to successfully plant my seed in a woman who just broke up with me...”
There it was—the truth, out in the open. And he was still kind of grinning.
“Just like I find it ironic that you were in the process of trying to have your deceased husband’s child when you found out you were pregnant with mine.”
She didn’t grin but nodded. She couldn’t refute the facts.
“So we go on from here,” she said. Nothing had been resolved about their situation, and yet, it felt as though she was no longer frozen in place.
“We go on from here.” He’d pushed his plate to the side but didn’t reach for her hand. Instead, he folded his hands together on the table in front of him.
A prayer?
A blessing?
A sign that he had no intention of holding hands with her, even in the sense of a friend helping a friend across the street?
She could get to the other side just fine by herself. It was time she took pride in her own abilities.
“I’m not sure how we incorporate you being a father who lives in LA with the baby not having two bedrooms, two sets of routines, two sets of boundaries...” How could she keep her mind on the future, how could she plan, if she had no end in mind? No final picture to envision?
Shaking his head, he threw up a hand. And she pushed aside what was left of the mammoth salad she’d been delivered.
“I’m not sure, either,” he said. “Right now, I’m not sure about anything, in terms of practical planning where all of this is concerned. But I think I can’t go to LA. At least not right now. Not while you’re pregnant. I need to be here...to help where I can. That’s my role, my duty and my right as that baby’s father. I want to feel him kicking. To have him hear my voice. I want to carry your groceries when you’re so big carrying our child that your back is aching. To do what I can to ease the burdens of everyday chores when pregnancy fatigue hits. Or if you suffer from morning sickness.”
He paused, his eyes widening. “I haven’t asked... You’re almost eight weeks now...have you experienced any discomfort in that area? Nausea and such?”
She hadn’t. Was feeling a bit warm...thankful...and simultaneously alarmed, by his invasiveness. “No.”
“And if there’s a problem, I need to be here, to do what I can to help you get our child through it,” he was continuing. “I need to be here when you go into labor. To make the process as smooth for you as I possibly can.”
She’d been thinking his fatherhood would start when there was a child in the world to father.
His take was completely different.
And didn’t seem unfair. Or wrong. She was already being a mother—in her food choices, her need for rest, her lack of a glass of wine at dinner, wearing protective gear at work when she did her radiological scans. She knew no one would’ve known the difference or guessed the reason. She was already falling in love with the being inside her body. He had a right to be a father, too.
