He’s mine. He’s Yours, Logan. But... he already looks so much like you, Caleb. When he blinks those big brown eyes, he’syou. He cries when he’s hungry, and there’s a demanding note to his cry that, to me, sounds like you. It is eerie. His jawline is you, his nose is you. The bridge of his nose is you. God, he’syou, Caleb.
I ruminate on it as You drive us home, Logan, driving slowly, carefully, defensively. Braking gently, accelerating gently. Music low, tuned to classical.
I am still deep in thought when we get home. You carry them in, instructing me to stay put, and then You come back for me. They are sleeping, so we leave them in their seats. We collapse together on the couch, and You pull me against Your chest, so I can hear Your heartbeat. I begin to doze. Sink, drift—thumpthump, thumpthump, thumpthump—sun warm from the windows soaking into my skin, bathing my closed eyes.
And then a cry. Small and quiet at first, a hesitant quavering.
Just one.
You get up, unbuckle the crying child—Jakob. Hand him to me, and I cradle him against my chest. God, so tiny. So warm, so soft. So sweet. I lift up my shirt, expose my breast, and tickle his quivering lips with my nipple. He works his mouth, snuffles and snorts, shakes his head side to side, and then latches on with ferocious hunger and alert determination. He’s so tiny still I can support him with one hand, and stroke his thick black hair with the other.
You watch, a little awed, a lot moved. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” Your voice is low, rough.
I keep stroking little Jakob’s hair but my eyes are for You. “I have to say it, out loud, at least once.” I glance down at Jakob, then back up. “Caleb is Jakob’s biological father, and you are Camila’s.”
“But they’re both mine.”
“I know. And I—I don’t doubt that for a moment,” I say.
“It might be a little tricky to explain, if he ever starts asking questions when he’s older.”
“We’ll figure that out when it happens.” I smile. “I just had to say it, because... inside, it doesn’t feel as if it matters.”
“It doesn’t. Not really.” You offer me a smile, a quintessential Logan Ryder smile, the one that warms me from the inside out. “It’s nature versus nurture, Isabel. If you were to separate identical twins, and one was raised in a hellhole of rage and violence, and the other in a loving home full of affection, you’d very likely have two wildly different people emerge as adults. Because the environment in which a person is raised makes all the difference. Caleb could have been... someone totally different had his parents lived. Had his cousin not turned him out on the street. Had any number of events in his life been different.”
“You came out of some very difficult circumstances yourself, and look at the kind of man you are.”
A shrug. “We each can only do the best with what we’re given. That’s all I’ve done. Yet, too, we each make our own choices in life. I chose to change. To try to improve myself. To be better. I think at some point, Caleb just... gave in to the kind of man his environment was conspiring to create, rather than trying to rise above it. It’s not up to me to judge him, to either absolve him or vilify him. I didn’t know him well enough, and it’s not my place even if I did. I know how I feel about him, based on myinteraction with him, and based on the way he treated you, but that’s it.”
“So what you’re saying, then, is that despite being Caleb’s, genetically, how we raise him will determine the kind of man he’ll become.”
“Right. He’ll have the admittedly impressive genetic potential of Caleb, but you and I will raise him to not have the... questionable ethics Caleb showed as an adult.”
“I like that idea,” I say with a smile.
“So do I.”
Camila starts crying just then, right as Jakob unlatches, a little milk dribbling down his chin. You unbuckle Camila, hand her to me and in exchange for Jakob, cradle him to Your chest, settle onto the couch beside me. You hold a sleepy, milk-drunk Jakob, I feed Camila, and we relax together.
A family.
That’s when it dawns on me, hitting me like a ton of bricks, like a freight train:
I have a family.
The realization brings tears of happiness to my eyes. I let them roll, because it is a beautiful thing, this understanding. I was orphaned, not just of my parents, but of my entire self, of my life. I’ve come to find myself, but now, with You and Camila and Jakob, I have a family of my own.
And now, with these two little lives dependent on me, with Your love to sustain me, my past doesn’t matter quite as much.
Perhaps not at all, honestly. Madame X is no more, except in being part of the formation of the woman I am now, Isabel de la Vega.
A wife, someday.
A mother now.
And, in time, a philanthropist.
Chapter
