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“You weren’t supposed to know I was here.”
Her eyebrows pinch together in a frown. “I suppose it makes sense. What I don’t know won’t hurt me, right? Isn’t that your philosophy on everything?”
“I was just—” I run my hand over the crib before sighing and slumping towards the door. “I was just leaving.”
“Wait.”
I freeze, caught in no-man’s-land in the middle of the room. Wren’s not looking at me, though—her eyes have floated past to see the work of the last few hours.
“That wasn’t there before,” she whispers. She’s staring at the rocking chair I sacrificed a thumbnail to build. It’s toying back and forth gently in the breeze from the fan overhead, bumping with a tiny thump into the padded footrest I constructed to go with it. “And you put up a swing?”
I swallow. My throat is suddenly dry. “You mentioned once that you had fond memories of the swing you used to have in your backyard.”
She nods without taking her eyes off it. “My father installed it with Rose and me. We loved that damn swing. Rose carved our names into…”
She trails off as she drifts closer, noticing that unlike all the other pieces in the nursery, this one’s not shiny or new.
“Oh my God.” She drops to her knees in front of the swing and snatches it up in both hands. Even from where I’m standing, I can see her fingers passing reverently over the two names etched crudely into the surface.
Rose + Wren
No one breathes for a few long moments. Then she looks up at me with her mouth hanging open. “This is our swing,” she rasps. “This is the swing. You… What… How?”
“I went back to your old neighborhood,” I admit quietly. “The new owners kept the swing up, so it was just a matter of convincing them to let me take it. I had to replace the rope, of course, but I was able to salvage the seat.”
She gulps hard and turns back to stare at it. “I can’t believe it.” She keeps running her fingers over Rose’s name again and again.
I don’t move. The clouds outside the window part and let in a brief blip of moonlight that catches Wren’s cheeks and shows me tears glistening there like diamonds.
Slowly, slowly, she gets back onto her feet. Her stomach has grown since the last time I saw her. I want so badly to touch it and feel my baby boy moving inside of her.
But I keep my hands to myself.
Wren looks at me, solemn and still. “Thank you,” she whispers. “I don’t even know how to—just, thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I turn for the door. “I’ll see myself out.”
I’m halfway gone when she speaks again. Just my name at first, barely audible over the whirring fan blades. Then: “This doesn’t change anything. It… it can’t.”
Fight her, bellows that voice in my head. The primal voice, the warrior’s voice, the voice I’ve always listened to. Go to battle to prove she’s wrong about you. Wage war to show who you really are.
It’s the first time that the instinct has come up so fast and so fierce that I can’t deny the need, the desire to fight for her, for the baby she’s carrying and the family we could be building together.
But the truth is, I’ve reserved all my fight for my business and my Bratva. I don’t have the faintest notion of how to fight for a woman or a relationship.
The problem is this: if there’s one thing I learned about war, it’s that you never get out unscathed. Everything you bring to the battlefield can be lost if luck turns against you. So to fight for Wren, I have to risk losing her. To fight for my son, I have to risk never holding him in my arms.
I can’t do that.
So I take the coward’s way out. I yield the battle before it’s even begun.
I nod.
And I leave.
65
WREN
