“He saw me going through my clinic’s donor catalog last year and asked if I’d rather have a known donor. Lú and I talked about it, and we decided we liked the idea.”
“No, and I get that, but—” Tom struggled with it. “Okay, sure, your kids will probably be happy if they look like Boyd. But you’re really going to raise kids with him? Boyd with the frog venom? Boyd with the car crashes?” Boyd, who somehow got endless forgiveness forhisscrewups?
Ximena shrugged. “It’s not like he’s moving in with us. He said he’ll make sure to show up at Christmas and for birthday parties, and that’ll be nice for the kiddo, but he’s not going to co-parent. He doesn’t want to be adaddad, which is why he’s donating instead of having his own kids—”
“I mean, it makes sense,” Rosie said, frowning at an unconvinced Tom. “That’s the kind of setup you want. Adrian said he’d be my donor if I hit thirty-five and I was still single, but can you even imagine him in the same room as a screaming baby?”
“What?”Tom said, head snapping back like he’d taken a hit to the face.
Rosie froze. “Wait, he didn’t tell you about that?”
“No.”No, his best friend had not cleared with him a plan to knock up his wife.
She shifted uncomfortably, expression turning a little guilty. “Well, I turned him down.”
“Of course you did,” Tom said, trying to calm his heart rate by repeating that important fact. Though it was bad enoughthat there was some alternate universe in which Rosie had a passel of snobby redheaded cherubs. He hoped the Tom in that universe had been long ago hit by a bus and did not have to mail darkest-timeline Rosie baby shower gifts and pretend to be happy for her. God, the terrible turn his life had nearly taken.
“This was before he was dating Caroline, anyway, but I never wanted to have kids without a partner,” Rosie clarified, as though this was the chief reason she wasn’t having babies with Adrian.
Tom squeezed Rosie’s knee as hard as he dared, willing Ximena to look away from this tense moment.
“Of course you’re not having them without a partner,” he said intently.Why wouldn’t you be having them with me?
Rosie stilled, blinking.
“Um,” she said, apparently realizing that this subject had gone from awkward to painful for everyone involved. “That’s a…really serious conversation. For us to have later.”
“We can have it whenever you want,” Tom said.
The comfortable, celebratory mood of a few moments earlier had dissipated, leaving now-familiar expressions of exasperation on Ximena’s face and vulnerability on Rosie’s.
“Tom,” she said, trying to pitch her voice in an undertone. “Let’s figure out first whether you want to seemewhen your theater schedule picks back up before we think about adding a baby to the mix.” She took the pile of phones back from him and reopened the calendar app.
As he had not realized that Rosie was at all concerned about that, or considered that to be an open question, Tom sat backheavily. Rehearsals had crept up on him, and he hadn’t counted the days until he needed to go back to New York, but he’d assumed that if he managed not to mess anything else up before they got there, then on their return they’d just…be together. Their lives would recover from their decade-long divergence and fit together like the final pieces of a Lego model.
“It wouldn’t matter if the ghost of Stephen Sondheim cast me as a lead in his new musical, Rosie, I’m not going to be too busy—” he began to say, but Snow Wolf clattered down the basement stairs and waved her arms at the room.
“We need more pots,” she announced. “There are leaks all over the bunk room.”
“New leaks?” Rosie asked, looking out the basement window at the pouring rain. “Oh crap.”
She bounced up and out of Tom’s lap and headed toward the stairs. Tom hadn’t noticed, but most of the fangirls had vanished from the basement along with Boyd.
With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Tom followed Rosie up to the third floor.
Snow Wolf and the Great Puffin had tried to contain the water in a variety of pots and pans, but there was a puddle on the freshly refinished wood floor by one of the windows, and there was water dripping straight through a light fixture on the highest beam of the slanted room. The ceiling bore two spreading damp spots.
Rosie covered her cheeks with her hands and took in the scene with dismay.
“Oh crap,” she said again. “The wind must have dislodged the tarps. Or there’s just too much water…” She spun, tryingto decide what they could possibly do in the middle of the rainstorm.
“I’ll get some towels,” Tom volunteered, even as a sludgy feeling of failure began to sink in.
Rosie nodded anxiously, gaze still flicking from disaster to disaster. “When is the roof going to be done?” she asked, already moving to pick up a nearly full basin.
Tom swallowed. This had happened over and over again. This moment of cold sweat, when he realized he’d put things off too long. Wile E. Coyote looks down and realizes there’s no runway left, plus he’s tied an anvil to his ankle.
“So, I haven’t actually found anyone who can repair the roof yet,” Tom said.
