He took a breath. When he spoke, the words came out plain, with nothing underneath them. No grin. No charm. No room-reading posture. He sounded like a man who had practiced what he was going to say, decided the practiced version was wrong, and settled on the truth instead.
"I want to be part of her life. I understand if you don't trust me. I'm not asking you to. We don't have to be partners. I'm not asking for that, either." He paused. "But you have to let me be her father. I'll do whatever you need me to do to prove it."
He wasn't selling. He was standing at the door offering the smaller version of what he'd asked for yesterday, because yesterday, I'd given him a smaller door. He took the smaller door. He didn't argue for the bigger one.
I felt it land. The offer, stripped bare. Duke Rhodes, who had spent thirty-two years being the man every room needed him to be, was standing in this room being nothing.
My mother's voice was still in my head.Paperwork is hard to undo.The form had been on the tray table, three feet from where he was standing, the father's fields blank, my signature at the bottom. I thought about the version of this where I said no, where my daughter grew up with one name on every form, and the clean, weightless safety of never needing a man who might not stay.
Then I looked at him. His eyes were green, tired, and holding nothing back. The man who had delivered my daughter on the shoulder of a state highway and sat in a waiting room for hours afterward because he couldn't leave.
"Okay," I said.
I watched the word land on his face. His jaw loosened. His chest moved.
"You can be her father."
He nodded. He didn't speak for a second.
"We're going to need rules," I said. "I don't know what they are yet. I'm not making them up the day after I had a baby on a state highway. But we'll figure them out together, and you have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with the version of this where I get to say no to things. Where I change my mind."
"Yeah." He nodded again. "Of course. Yeah."
Neither of us moved. The room held us in the quiet of two people who had agreed to something.
"You wanna hold her?"
His face shifted. Like he hadn't expected to be asked. Then he nodded, one side of his mouth pulling up a little.
He crossed to the bassinet and bent over it, one hand sliding under the baby's head, the other under her back, and lifted her against his chest. Her face settled into the space below his collarbone. He stood there holding her. He didn't say anything. He didn't move.
I couldn't see his face from the bed. I could see his shoulders go still. His hand spread flat across Nova's back, his fingers covering most of her.
When he turned back toward me, his eyes were wet. He didn't say anything about it. I didn't either.
"Does she have a name yet?"
"Nova."
He looked down at her. "Nova," he said. Quiet, like he was giving it to her.
He stood there holding my daughter, his daughter, our daughter, with the morning light coming through the blinds. The form was already gone. Tita had taken it down the hall ten minutes before he walked in, and it was somewhere in thesystem now, becoming official, becoming permanent. His name should have been on it.
He was standing in this room, and he didn't know.
I watched him with Nova against his chest, and I felt it—the want, quiet and constant, the same want I'd been running from since the night of the wedding. I wanted to tell him what I'd done. I wanted to sayI left it blank, and I'm sorry, and I don't know if I'm protecting her or punishing you.
I wanted to tell him the truth, and the truth was that I'd signed that form with my mother's fear in my hands, and I didn't know yet whether the fear was mine or hers.
I said nothing. The form was already down the hall. The blank fields were already in a file. And the man holding my daughter didn't know they existed.
CHAPTER 12
Duke
The first time I changed a diaper, Audrey watched me from the doorway with her arms crossed and her mouth pressed into a line that was either patience or the early stage of laughter. I got the tabs wrong. Twice. Nova screamed through the whole thing with the committed fury of a person who had been alive for four days and already knew when she was being handled by an amateur.
Audrey didn't step in. She let me finish. When I picked Nova up and held her against my chest, Audrey said, "The diaper's on backward," and went to make coffee, laughing as she went.
