“No, I know that. But Iwantanother baby. I want a baby withyou. You don’t ever think about that?”
I did think about it. I thought about it a lot. But clearly, it wasn’t in the same way Laura did.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to pass my DNA on to anyone. I didn’t want my blood running through their veins. I didn’t want to look at a child and see my father’s face looking back at me. I didn’t want to chance unleashing a sleeping monster within me by reproducing someone just like me, someone that might flip the switch in my brain and turn me intohim.
But how could I make her understand that?
When I didn’t answer right away, she rested a palm against my cheek and said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to think about it right now. But … will you? Please?”
I bit the inside of my lip, then nodded. “Yeah,” I replied. “I’ll think about it.”
And I did think about it. God, Ireallydid.
But every time I thought about it, all I could picture was the hatred my father had held toward me until just a few years ago, when I finally walked through his door with a wife. It had taken the man overthirty yearsto look at me with any semblance of pride and respect, and it had taken my union with another person to break that spell—I couldn’t even do it on my own!Somethinghad made him that way.Somethinghad awoken inside of him to treat me like some kind of hellspawn. I didn’t know what that was, or when it had happened, or evenwhy, but ithad, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of being that way to my own kid.
Fuck, and what if I was even worse?! I had the added trauma of being at war. I was deaf, damaged, broken, and somewhere in me, I justknewa demon was lying dormant, and what if my own son pulled it out of me?
So, when Laura approached me one night and announced hesitantly that she’d missed her period, I didn’t jump for joy. I didn’t cheer or feel any sense of pride whatsoever.
All I could do was look at her and demand to knowhow. How could this have happened? How could we have been so careless? Fuck, hadn’t we been careful? I knew she had stopped taking her birth control pills years ago—something about drug interactions—but we continued touse protection. We were never reckless. Or at least, I never had been.
“Some things are just meant to happen, babe,” she said gently, the twinkle in her eye dulling.
When she reached out to touch me, I flinched and pulled away.
“But notthis,” I muttered, like an absolute asshole.
Then I left.
I drove all the way to Boston, where I banged on Sid’s door, despite knowing his own baby—a little boy named Liam—was being put to bed. I banged and banged and banged until I thought I would break the fucking door down before either he or my sister opened the damn thing, but it was still on its hinges when Sid threw it open and glared at me with nothing but pure rage reflecting in his eyes.
“This’d better be fucking important, Serg,” he growled.
Breathless, I held on to the doorframe and said, “Laura’s pregnant.”
His anger was quickly extinguished as he narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. “Are we celebrating or panicking?”
“What does it fucking look like?!” I shouted, my chest tight and my lungs breathless.
Sid nodded once, stepped aside, and I walked into the house. They’d just moved in shortly after Liam was born a few months ago, and there were still boxes piled everywhere the eye could see. I guessed that was what happened when you tried to pack too many major lifeevents into a short span of time. You didn’t have the time or energy to take care of it all at once.
Holy shit. We need a bigger house.
The thought struck out of nowhere, like a bag of bricks to the chest, and I reached my hands up to squeeze the back of my neck as I stared at the empty fireplace, surrounded by plastic storage bins.
Grace called down the stairs, “Sid! What’s going on?”
“Your brother’s freaking out,” he called back, coming to stand beside me.
“What?! Max! Are you okay?”
We both left her unanswered as Sid said quietly, “Talk to me, bro. What’s wrong?”
I dropped my hands and slowly turned to stare into his eyes. “I can’t be a dad, man.”
He chuckled a bit and tipped his head with a grimace. “Hate to break it to you, but you kinda already are.”
“No, you know what I mean. Lizzie and Jane … they’re notmine.”
