Page 180 of Slapshot Baby

"Then I tried to see the weeks after that. Coming to visit a man who didn't know you while our baby grew. Watching me learn to walk again and knowing you were carrying my child and I couldn't even find plates in my own kitchen."

My vision blurs.

"All the times you told me there was something important you needed to say but you couldn’t because your father taught you what happens when men find out they're obligated to stay."

A sound comes from my throat. I press the Allen wrench against my mouth. He reaches across the crib frame and takes the wrench from my hand, sets it on the floor, and holds my fingers instead.

"You carried all of that by yourself because you thought telling me would ruin out relationship."

"I was wrong," I say. "I was so wrong."

"You were scared."

"That doesn't make it right."

"No. But it makes it real."

I'm crying.

Not the pretty kind with a single tear rolling gracefully down one cheek. The ugly kind where my face crumples and my nose runs and my whole body shakes because this man just walked me through every impossible thing I carried alone and he's still here.

He didn't list those things to punish me. He listed them because he needed me to know he'd actually walked through them.

"I love you, Ava," Kai says. "I have loved you since you reorganized my kitchen cabinets and told me I was more than hockey. I loved you before I remembered why, and I love you now that I know everything you kept from me."

His thumb traces the back of my hand, slow and deliberate. "I want to be here. Not because you're pregnant. Not because it's the right thing. Because you're the person who rebuilt my entire life and I'm not willing to lose you."

"I should have told you. Every single day I should have told you. I practiced the words in the shower, in the car, in your bed while you slept. And every time I swallowed them because I was more afraid of losing you than I was of lying to you, and that's the worst thing I've ever done."

"I know."

"I don't trust easily. I may never trust the way you deserve."

"I know that too."

"Can you live with that?"

“We will find a way.”

He stands. Comes around the crib. Offers me his hand.

I take it. He pulls me to my feet and the momentum carries me into his chest. His arms close around me and I press my forehead into the space below his collarbone where his heartbeat is solid and steady and exactly where I need it to be.

His hand slides down my side and stops on my belly. He spreads his palm wide, fingers curved over the roundness, and holds it there.

The baby kicks.

Kai goes completely still.

"That's our baby," I whisper.

"I felt it." His voice cracks on the second word. He presses his forehead against mine. "Do it again."

"I can't control it," I laugh.

The baby kicks again anyway, a solid thump against his palm. Kai makes a sound that is halfway between a laugh and something much more breakable.

"I missed everything," he says.