Maybe they can fix you too.
Even though there was no one in the room but the baby, Joshua shook his head. That wasn’t a fair thing to put on either of them.
“Joshua?”
He looked up and saw Danielle standing in the doorway. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, the hem falling to the top of her thighs. He couldn’t see her expression in the darkened room.
“Over here.”
“Are you holding Riley?” She moved deeper into the room and stopped in front of him, the moonlight streaming through the window shadowing one side of her face. With her long, dark hair hanging loose around her shoulders, and that silver light casting her in a glow, she looked ethereal. He wondered how he had ever thought she was pitiful. How he had ever imagined she wasn’t beautiful.
“He was crying,” he responded.
“I can take him.”
He shook his head, for some reason reluctant to give him up. “That’s okay.”
A smile curved her lips. “Okay. I can make him a bottle.”
He nodded, moving his hand up and down on the baby’s back. “Okay.”
Danielle rummaged around for a moment and then went across the room to the changing station, where he assumed she kept the bottle-making supplies. Warmers and filtered water and all of that. He didn’t know much about it, only that he had arranged to have it all delivered to the house to make things easier for her.
She returned a moment later, bottle in hand. She tilted it upside down and tested it on the inside of her wrist. “It’s all good. Do you want to give it to him?”
He nodded slowly and reached up. “Sure.”
He shifted his hold on Riley, repositioning him in the crook of his arm so he could offer him the bottle.
“Do you have a lot of experience with babies?”
“None,” he said.
“You could have fooled me. Although, I didn’t really have any experience with babies until Riley was born. I didn’t figure I would ever have experience with them.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “No. I was never going to get married, Joshua. I knew all about men, you see. My mother got pregnant with me when she was fourteen. Needless to say, things didn’t get off to the best start. I never knew my father. My upbringing was...unstable. My mother just wasn’t ready to have a baby, and honestly, I don’t know how she could have been. She didn’t have a good home life, and she was so young. I think she wanted to keep me, wanted to do the right thing—it was just hard. She was always looking for something else. Looking for love.”
“Not in the right places, I assume.”
She bit her lip. “No. To say the least. She had a lot of boyfriends, and we lived with some of them. Sometimes that was better. Sometimes they were more established than us and had better homes. The older I got, the less like a mom my mom seemed. I started to really understand how young she was. When she would get her heart broken, I comforted her more like a friend than like a daughter. When she would go out and get drunk, I would put her to bed like I was the parent.” Danielle took a deep breath. “I just didn’t want that for myself. I didn’t want to depend on anybody, or have anyone depend on me. I didn’t want to pin my hopes on someone else. And I never saw a relationship that looked like anything else when I was growing up.”
“But here you are,” he said, his chest feeling tight. “And you’re marrying me.”
“I don’t know if you can possibly understand what this is like,” she said, laughing, a kind of shaky nervous sound. “Having this idea of what your life will be and just...changing that. I was so certain about what I would have, and what I wouldn’t have. I would never get married. I would never have children. I would never have...a beautiful house or a yard.” Her words got thick, her throat sounding tight. “Then there was Riley. And then there was your ad. And then there was you. And suddenly everything I want is different, everything I expect is different. I actually hope for things. It’s kind of a miracle.”
He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t a miracle. That whatever she expected from him, he was sure to disappoint her in some way. But what she was describing was too close to his own truth.
He had written off having a wife. He had written off having children. That was the whole part of being human he’d decided wasn’t for him. And yet here he was, feeding a baby at three in the morning staring at a woman who had just come from his bed. A woman who was wearing his ring.
The way Joshua needed it, the way he wanted to cling to his new reality, to make sure that it was real and that it would last, shocked him with its ferocity.
A moment later, he heard a strange sucking sound and realized the bottle was empty.
“Am I supposed to burp him?”
Danielle laughed. “Yes. But I’ll do that.”
“I’m not helpless.”
“He’s probably going to spit up on your hot and sexy chest. Better to have him do it on your T-shirt.” She reached out. “I got this.”
She took Riley from him and he sat back and admired the expert way she handled the little boy. She rocked him over her shoulder, patting his back lightly until he made a sound that most definitely suggested he had spit up on the T-shirt she was wearing.
Joshua had found her to be such a strange creature when he had first seen her. Brittle and pointed. Fragile.
But she was made of iron. He could see that now.
No one had been there to raise her, not really. And then she had stepped in to make sure that her half brother was
