I felt hope bloom in my chest.
I wanted that.
I wanted what everyone else had.
Always had.
“Now,” Travis said. “Let’s talk about who and what we’re going to press to get that baby home and in your house and not Eerie’s.”
Chapter 20
When I said I was normal, I might’ve exaggerated slightly.
-Text from Reggie to Nathan
Reggie
Two weeks later
Other than the setback the day that Eerie had thrown her attitude around for all to see, the baby had done surprisingly well.
I’d started calling him Darren instead of his ‘legal’ name. Dare for short.
And the entire NICU staff had started that as well.
Today was the first court hearing that would be hammering out a custody schedule for the baby. The judge would also be hearing about why we wanted to change the baby’s name.
I sat biting my nails as I looked at the judge staring hard at Eerie. She was kicked back in her chair, glasses perched on the end of her nose, just glaring.
Swayze got up and walked a pamphlet of information up to the judge, a sweet, older woman that looked like she would take no crap. Honestly, she looked like Mrs. Claus with her white hair, rosy cheeks, and quick smile.
“What have we got?” Judge Barron asked.
“The information you requested,” she said. “It’s all there.”
Over the last couple of weeks, Wolf and Silas, as well as a few other people, had been busy.
They’d dug up every bit of information they could on Eerie, the doctor, and Eerie’s attempts at keeping the baby a secret and put it into a nice, pretty little bow for the judge to read with her own two eyes.
Swayze had also laid out a very eloquent case for the judge to decide on.
“Ms. Foster,” Judge Batista said softly. “Were you aware that your contract was legally binding when you signed it?”
Eerie looked like she wanted to throw up.
“I just wanted to have a baby,” she said softly. “I wanted a kid. Is that bad?”
That also didn’t answer the question.
She knew just as well as I did.
“It’s not a bad thing to want a child, no,” the judge said. “But what is bad is to force a child on a man that didn’t know that he was having one. Now he has a child with another woman that isn’t his wife. How do you think that makes him feel?”
“I didn’t ask him to take care of this child,” Eerie snapped. “He can go and have babies with his wife and let me have this one.”
“Why do you say that like she’s a disease you don’t want to catch?” The judge tilted her head and inspected Eerie as if she was an interesting bug that’d just crawled across her path.
“I…” Eerie started.
“My client had cancer, Judge Barron. She can’t have any more children naturally. Without the eggs that she had frozen, she has zero chance of having a child ever again. This was her only way to do it. The measures were quite extreme…” her lawyer, Mr. Talb, admitted. “But she wanted a child. A mother’s love knows no bounds.” He pointed at Nathan. “He didn’t want this child. We all know it.”
What a crock of bullshit.
From what I’d heard, her chemo hadn’t taken that option away from her. This option had only been a more viable one because of who the father would be.
I hadn’t heard her actually say it, but I had a feeling that this was convenient for her. That her having this child had nothing to do with her wanting a baby, and everything to do with something else. Something we hadn’t learned quite yet.
“Regardless of whether my client wanted the child or not.” She paused. “Which, might I add, wouldn’t be something that a married man would want—a child that was born while married to his wife. Can you understand the rumors that will flow following this? Nathan Cox isn’t some run of the mill man. He’s a retired baseball player. He’s an upstanding member of this community. He also has his wife to worry about. Him just popping up with a child while being married to his wife will raise quite a few questions, don’t you think?”
The lawyer didn’t have anything to say to that.
Eerie, however, did.
“Nathan doesn’t care about his reputation.” Eerie snorted. “If he did, he wouldn’t have done half the things that he’d done during his baseball career.”
I wanted to throat punch her.
Nathan hadn’t done anything bad during his career.
I would know. I’d borderline stalked him his entire life.
The most risqué thing he’d done was marry me. And that had been way out of his comfort zone.
I kept my trap shut, though.
They didn’t need my input. Especially when all it would’ve been was a couple hundred ‘fuck yous’ aimed Eerie’s way.
“Nathan does care about his reputation. He also cares about his family. Do you know why he quit?” Swayze asked. Not waiting for a reply, she continued. “He quit because the media was pulling up information on his father—his biological father—that had been murdered, along with his mother and unborn sibling. After asking them to cease their probing, they just ramped it up. So to keep himself out of the limelight, he retired.”
“That’s the biggest bunch of…” Eerie started, realizing that what she’d said wasn’t quite as quiet as she’d intended for it to be.
The judge gave her a sharp look that had her trailing off before she’d even finished her sentence.
Seriously, if looks could kill, she’d be a glowing cinder right then.
“Be that as it may,” the judge said, “that has no relevance to what we’re discussing today.”
I gritted my teeth so hard that I heard my molars creak in protest.
“There’s a possibility that he’s not even Nathan’s kid,” Eerie’s lawyer
