She dumps her bag behind the bar and squints at me. “You look like hell.”
“Thanks.”
“Long night?”
I swallow against the dry laugh that wants out. Long doesn’t cover it. “Something like that.”
She doesn’t push, bless her. Just ties on an apron, starts pulling clean glasses down, humming under her breath. Normalcy. Routine.
I latch on to that and force myself to move. Inventory check. Restock. Wipe down the taps. The motions are second nature, muscle memory doing the work while my brain burns itself down to the foundation.
What-if’s chase each other in circles.
What if Jason finds out tomorrow? What if he somehow hears it from someone else before we tell him? What if Paige waits too long, and it looks like I hid it from him deliberately?
Which I am. It’s exactly what I’m doing.
I slam a keg into place harder than I mean to. Charlotte flinches. I mutter, “Sorry,” and rub a hand over the back of my neck.
What if Paige doesn’t want me in the picture beyond “acknowledge the biology, stay out of the way”? She said she wasn’t asking me for anything. She made that crystal clear. She’s keeping the bakery, the lease, her independence, all of it intact.
And I believe her. She’s the kind of woman who will drag her own body across the finish line before she lets anyone accuse her of needing help.
But I want to help. I want to… hell, I want to be there.
And what if that’s not what she wants from me?
“Earth to Ben.” Charlotte snaps her fingers in front of my face.
I blink. “What?”
“You’ve been standing there with the same bottle of bourbon for, like, five minutes.”
I look down. Sure enough, I’ve been holding it, label pressed into my palm hard enough to leave an imprint. I set it on the shelf carefully. “Guess I’m more tired than I thought.”
“You should crash in your office for an hour before we open,” she says, but she knows I won’t.
I don’t. Instead, I pace. I wipe down the same stretch of counter twice. I pull a crate of limes onto the bar and start slicing, even though we won’t need that many until tonight. The knife moves rhythmically, neat wedges dropping into the pan.
And in the space between the thunks of steel on wood, the what-if’s creep back in.
What if the kid has her eyes? What if the kid has my temper? What if Paige hates me for giving her this complication when all she wanted was to open her bakery and start her new life?
I picture her last night, fingers wrapped tight around the sweating glass, voice small but steady when she said, I’m keeping it.
It gutted me and lifted me at the same time.
I don’t know the first thing about being a father. My own barely qualified as one. A man who taught me how to fight dirty before he taught me how to drive, who thought bailing on bills was easier than paying them, who left the moment he could.
But the idea of Paige carrying this alone makes something in my chest ache. No. Not happening. She said she doesn’t want me to fix it, but that’s a far cry from vanishing.
I want to go with her to that appointment on Tuesday. I want to hear the doctor say the word out loud, to see the grainy shape on a screen, to hold proof in my hand.
And then what?
Then it gets real.
Then Jason has to know. Then Gwen and Don have to know.
