“Ma’am, you are still listed as his emergency contact and I’m going to need you to come down to the hospital.”
CHAPTER 13
Ambrose
“No, no,” I insisted, waving the nurse away and attempting to sit up. “I have to be there to see the birth.”
The room spun around me as I clutched my head.
Across the room, Astrid was deep in the throes of labor, and I was doing my best to keep up. It was very important to me that I was there for my. . . new half-brother.
My stomach roiled with nausea and I turned over, heaving into the trash can.
I wasn’t going to be a father at all. At the age of 45, I was finally going to be a big brother.
The nurse was a stern, no nonsense woman, and she looked at me like I was the most useless kind of person in existence, and I could not really blame her.
So you are the kind of high maintenance baby daddy who demands all this attention during labor, her glare said clearly, even though I desperately did not want to be.
“I have to be there,” I insisted, attempting to get up from the chair.
Perhaps if I did not look directly at Astrid and stayed up by her head, reminding her of various birth mantras.
After all, it seemed awfully wrong that this baby was going to come into the world with no one there to care for him but me. Astrid had made it very clear she did not want her son. Maybe she would change her mind once she saw him? But otherwise she had made it very clear that I was going to be doing 100% of the care.
I stumbled toward the bed and Astrid let out a full-body scream when she saw me.
“Get him out of here!” Astrid shrieked. “He’s in love with his ex-wife!”
They all looked at me as if I was even more of a worm.
“We're going to break your water now,” the doctor said, and I found myself fainting dead away again, and as I floated dreamlike, I remembered.
I remembered the day it had happened.
“Monogamy is such anunnaturalconstruct,” Astrid said, her breast brushing past my arm as we worked through a stack of recently-acquired documents together in the library.
Since she specialized in anthropology and I specialized in archeology, our departments worked very closely together.
I should have cut it off then and there. She’d been flirting with me for months. But women often flirted with me and I never thought much of it. But the problem this time was I didn’t stop it. I didn't remind her that I was happily married, that I loved my wife more than anything. That I wasn’t the type to cheat.
The type to cheat was a sleazebag, some grungy kind of fellow with a golden chain and a name like ‘Vinny.’
Not a man like me. And so I teased her back and didn’t think I was in danger.
Of making the stupidest and most sleazebag mistake of my life.
“The high status men in old Germanic tribes had multiple women,” Astrid said.
I knew she was attempting to seduce me, but at the moment, I didn’t care. I didn’t think I was at risk.
She was a beautiful, intelligent woman and it was a flattering distraction that she was so interested in me.
Now, naturally, I still loved Indi, but everything with her had been so tense and stressful lately.
She was due to take a pregnancy test again, and I felt like I couldn't take another failed test.
I couldn't shake the feeling that somehowIwas doing something wrong. I could not fathom what it could be. I had read all of the books. I was a supreme physical specimen. My sperm count was exemplary. I ate healthy, I exercised. I was planning to run a marathon.
