It could not be.
For an entirely different reason. Gray felt like a racquetball, bouncing around a small, enclosed room, hitting wall to ceiling, wall to wall, wall to floor...
When he’d freed Sage from himself, she hadn’t gone out and found the man she’d needed? The one who would...
So yeah, he’d figured that there’d been a bump in that road...the woman was living alone, raising a child, but...marriages broke up for various reasons.
He glanced at her. Saw her following Leigh’s antics playing with the collie, Angel. Smiling. The first true Madonna smile he’d ever seen in real life.
And when Sage started talking about the advent of her very special daughter into her life, Gray saw just how much having a family had meant to her.
Way more than he’d even realized.
More than he ever had, for sure.
“I’d been on an adoption list for a couple of years,” Sage said, “and then one night I get a call. A woman had picked me just that afternoon. She’d gone into premature labor, had signed necessary papers and had died giving birth. A blood pressure thing. The baby was mine if I wanted her. There’d be some legalities, of course, but, if I was interested, they needed me to get to the hospital right away. Because...”
She stopped. Couldn’t go on.
She’d thought telling Gray about Leigh would cement the closure. Sever whatever thing kept trying to bud up inside her.
But as it turned out...she couldn’t let him see her that deeply. That clearly. Not anymore.
“Because why?”
The tone in his voice, the soft depth that had always reached her...pulled her gaze away from her very safe and happy child, to peer into the eyes of the man who could have been her child’s father.
“They didn’t think she was going to make it. I...um...wasn’t going to lose my place on the adoption list if I took her. They just wanted to let me know...because technically, and more, morally, I had the right to be with her...and they didn’t want the baby to die alone if she didn’t need to do so.”
“You went.” He didn’t guess. Or ask. He told. They’d been apart for ten years, and she’d changed some, but the type of person she was...he knew that person almost as well as she knew herself.
She nodded. “Scott didn’t think I should at first. It was the middle of the night, and my call woke him up. But when I told him that they expected the baby to live for a month or more, not just a day or two, he supported my decision to be there for her. And...there was a chance that she was going to make it to a more normal lifespan. What kind of mother would I be if I just presented myself for the sure thing? The celebration? Without being willing to be a part of the fight?”
She couldn’t read Gray’s glance. She saw no approval there. Or disapproval, either. No judgment. Not even a knowing, like he’d have expected her to make the choice she had. It was almost as though he was studying her. Which made no sense at all.
He’d started the conversation.
And she finished it. “I lived at the children’s hospital for almost three months. Took a leave from my job. Touched her when I could. Learned how to change tubes, how to reinsert them, how to read monitors and finally, how to hold a baby hooked up to so many life-maintaining machines. I talked to her all day. Kissed her good-night every night, even when they could only be blown through glass. They’d said she’d probably have brain damage. Would be slow to develop. And for the first year, they were right. About the development part.”
She could be done. The happy ending, Leigh, was yards away in front of them, looking as though she was trying to employ all her cuteness to coax one more treat out of her uncle. At the moment, Sage didn’t care if Scott gave in or not. One more piece of sugar before bedtime wasn’t going to hurt the little girl.
Leigh had fought so hard, been through so much...
“She had to have six surgeries that first year,” she said softly. “But they didn’t seem to faze her. Every time I’d smile at her, she’d smile back. And now, she doesn’t even remember that year. She calls her scars her birthmarks...”
Sage didn’t pay attention to the tears on her cheeks. Didn’t care.
Until Gray reached over to softly wipe them away.
What in the hell was he doing? Walls were in place for reasons. You didn’t reach through them.
In the dark, with friendly people right there, with Sage’s daughter right there, he didn’t feel the danger.
Rather, he saw a new beginning. A place where he and Sage Martin could be friends.
Because Leigh was the wall between anything else that could have tried to re-blossom between them.
And she was as much of a guaranteed constant as they’d ever get, right there in Sage’s world day and night.
