I wiped my face aggressively with the back of my hand, turned on my heel, and walked down the short corridor to the nursery wing. I pushed the small white door open, the hinges silent.
The room was bathed in the soft, warm green glow of a turtle nightlight sitting on the dresser. I walked over to the small ,wooden bed and looked down.
Ian was peacefully asleep.
He was two-years-old his small body curled into a tight ball beneath his fuzzy blue blanket. He had a thick, beautiful mess of dark, pin-straight hair that was currently a chaotic disaster across the mattress, a direct, gorgeous marker of his biological father’s Japanese heritage. But beneath those long, dark lashes were a pair of eyes that I knew, when awake, carried stark, brilliant blue clarity. He was a perfect, innocent blend of worlds he didn’t understand yet.
My heart broke in my chest as I stared down at him.
The parallel was too precise. It was a vicious, cruel joke from the universe. This beautiful, sweet little boy’s mother just walked out on him in the dead of night,leaving him stranded in the dark, exactly like Fiona had done to me. He was a ghost of my own childhood, staring me right in the face.
The grief hardened into iron.Not him,I thought fiercely to myself, the vow sealing itself into my marrow.He is never going to feel cold. He is never going to wonder why he wasn’t enough to make someone stay.
I reached into the bed, my arms sliding beneath his small frame with a practiced gentleness. I scooped him up against my chest. He didn’t wake up. He just let out a soft, milk-scented sigh into the dark, his small head rolling over to rest perfectly in the crook of my neck, his tiny fist instinctively bunching into the fabric of my black hoodie.
I held him tight, anchoring his weight against my ribs, and walked back down the hallway to the master bedroom.
I pushed our bedroom door open with my shoulder, the sliver of hall light cutting across the mattress.
I didn’t try to be quiet this time. I stepped up to Silas’s side of the bed, my breathing ragged, the tears still hot on my cheeks. “Silas. Si, wake up.”
He shot up instantly. His athletic instinct responding to the raw panic in my voice jump started his brain in a fraction of a second. He threw the covers off his torso, his chest heaving as he squinted through the dim light, his eyes wide with a frantic concern.
“Cal? What’s wrong? Is—”
His eyes dropped to my chest, zeroing in on the small, dark-haired boy tucked securely into my arms. Then, he looked up at my face, at the raw, tear-streaked ruin of my expression behind my reading glasses.
“Cal…” Silas whispered as he slid to the edge of the mattress. “Why do you have Ian? Where’s Josie?”
“She’s gone, Si,” I choked out, the words cracking in my throat as I stepped closer to the bed. “She just packed her shit and walked out the front door. She said she can’t be a mom.”
Silas stared at me, the words hitting his black-and-white, organized mind like an explosion. “What? No… no, that’s a mistake. She’s just stressed. We need to go get her, we need to call Scott—”
“No!” I snapped, my voice a fierce command that stopped his brain from calculating. “We are not calling anyone. I gave her an ultimatum. I told her if she walked out that door tonight, she was finished. She doesn’t get to come back and mess with this kid’s head when she’s bored. She didn’t even answer me. She just left.”
I walked around to my side of the bed, carefully climbing onto the mattress while keeping Ian securely cradled against me. I slid down until I was lying flat on my back, and gently, with a reverence that felt like a sacrament, I laid Ian down directly in the center of the bed between us.
The small boy shifted, let out another soft hum, and curled his body toward my warmth, oblivious to the fact that his entire universe had just been dismantled and rebuilt in the span of twenty minutes.
Si watched the movement, the shock in his eyes finally fracturing into a soul-shattering grief. He reached out, his shaking fingers gently brushing a strand of dark hair away from Ian’s sleeping forehead..
“She doesn’t get him back,” Silas whispered fiercely through his tears, his jaw locking as he looked across the baby’s form to meet my eyes. “She doesn’t get to come back and put his life in shambles.”
A heavy, stuttering breath rattled in his throat as he looked down at the tiny fist resting on the sheets.
“God, Cal…” He choked out, the raw reality of the responsibility hitting his system. “This is going to be so hard. How the hell are we going to do this? How do we help him adjust to her being gone?”
I reached across Ian’s sleeping form, my fingers tangling firmly with Silas’s, squeezing with an ironclad, unbreakable strength that carried the entire weight of our marriage.
“We’re going to do it together. We’ll change the travel schedules. We’ll bring him on the road. We’ll buy a house near the PC. I don’t give a fuck what it takes.”
I leaned down, pressing a soft kiss to the top of Ian’s dark head before leaning up to press my lips against Silas’s forehead.
I pulled the duvet up, covering all three of us, and held the small boy against my side, my hand resting flat against his back to feel the steady, safe rhythm of his heart.
The End.
