“I didn’t mean anything, I just—” Barry squeezed the bridge of his nose. “I haven’t been here to help you the last few months, and I would’ve been if you’d just fucking told me, but you didn’t. And now I feel like I need to make up for lost time.”
I leaned back in my chair and watched Barry watch me. It was the longest eye contact I’d allowed since running into him yesterday morning.
When I spoke again, my voice felt loud in the dense quiet between us. “How would you have been here when you were a star defenseman in Columbus?”
“I mean. . .” Barry shrugged. “I couldn’t have been physically here much during the season, but I would have been helping. Sending money, or I don’t know, maybe I’d have asked you to come there?—”
I couldn’t keep the incredulity off my face.
“Fuck, I don’t know, Hannah, I would have donesomething.”
“Why?”
Barry let out a big breath. “Well, why do you want to keep her?”
I didn’t know how to answer this in a way that made sense, but a shrug wasn’t going to suffice, so I gave it some thought.
“I think, at first, I wanted to prove to myself and my family that I could do it,” I said. “Not a great reason, but it was what it was.”
Barry didn’t say anything. It was almost infuriating how good a listener he was in all the ways I was too anxious to be; he never filled the silences between thoughts, just let them happen.
“But then I got to thinking about what she would be like, how she would sound, if she would be good at dancing or take after me. I thought about my mom buying her things and my dad taking her to get ice cream when she was mad at me. I don’t know.” I stared at my hands, which were dry from the cleaning, my cuticles a wreck. “I don’t think I would have let myself even consider being a mom if it wasn’t by accident.”
“Is it so hard to believe I would want to be a parent, too?” Barry asked.
It was and it wasn’t. I remembered what he’d told me about his ex, the one who broke up with him when he proposed, and the way he talked about his big family like he loved nothing more than holidays with them.
It wasn’t that it was hard to believe Barry wanted to be a father. I just couldn’t believe he wanted to parent withme, someone he hardly knew, who had ghosted him for months and didn’t tell him about his forthcoming child. Especially as a professional athlete, because wasn’t that a thing? People trying to trap them into fatherhood for money? Or was that just a misogynistic myth?
I was a mess, certifiably, and had convinced myself in the last twenty-four hours that if he wanted anything to do with the baby, it was to take her far away from me.
“I just turned thirty-two,” Barry said. “I know I’m still young, we both are. But I’ve always wanted kids.”
Barry stood up then, and where his knees touched mine went suddenly cold. He pushed the stool beneath the table and staredout the wall-length window where the sun was ghosting behind the mountain.
“I know none of this is ideal, but I think we should do it together.”
I stood and leaned against the edge of the tall table.
“I love my house,” I said. “I’ve been fixing it up. I’m just finishing the baby room.”
It was perfect. Butter yellow and perfect wallpaper with these beautiful little birds printed on it in a pattern.
“Then what if I stay with you for a little while?” Barry asked. That was a presumptuous offer if I’d ever heard one. “I’m quiet as a mouse and super helpful. Roommate of the year material.”
I thought about Stephanie, the last person who wanted to live with me, and how I’d frozen up entirely at the thought of it. Moving in with someone was big, it was sharing things and running the risk of breaking up and having to decide which one of you got to keep the best fish spatula, the one that was the perfect size for eggs and didn’t have a wobbly handle. It was horrifying. I wasn’t even dating Barry, much less ready to commit to sharing spatulas.
“Is that wise?” I asked.
“To my mind, I think it would beunwisefor you to live alone.”
“I know you weren’t offering, but I need to be clear now that I don’t think we should try anything romantic,” I said. If he was going to be hanging around a lot more, and it appeared he absolutely would if he had any say about it, then I couldn’t have him getting any ideas. The heart of Hannah Harvey was closed for business for the foreseeable future. At least until I could have the baby and figure out a new normal as a mother. And who knew how long that would take?
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” I had a hard time looking at him. “We can’t dive into a relationship. There’s this baby to figure out.”
“Our baby,” he said.
