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“You poor thing,” Tali says. “You just landed, didn’t you? You look more exhausted than I do.”

“I wanted to see her before I sleep for a thousand hours,” I reply. “How’s the vagina? How ruined is it on a scale of one to ten?”

Hayes shoots us a quick, alarmed glance while Tali laughs. “I wound up needing a C-section, so I imagine things are intact,” she replies. She turns to her husband. “Hayes, you have to share the baby.”

Hayes gives her a sheepish grin and rises with the baby in his arms. “Do you want to hold her?” he asks.

I blink uncertainly, looking from him to Tali. Does anyone really trust me with the baby?

"I don't know," I say. "I've never really… She’s so small."

"You'll be fine," Hayes says.

I wash my hands and sit before he places her in my arms. She’s the most darling human I have ever seen in my life, with her tiny rosebud mouth pursed, sucking in her sleep as if she's dreaming of being fed. Her fingers are impossibly small, clutched into tiny fists, and I feel something unfurl inside me as I look at her. "She's perfect," I whisper, and to my horror, my voice cracks.

Hayes glances over at Tali. "Do you think she's hungry?" he asks. "She's doing that sucking thing with her mouth."

Tali smiles at him adoringly. "You worry too much," she says. "I assure you she will not just forget to eat."

He takes the seat beside her and their eyes meet. For a quick second, it’s as if they’re the only people in the room. I used to claim that I didn’t want what they had, that I didn’t want a little girl like the one in my arms, but it was simply that I thought those things were impossible for me.

And it turns out I was right.

But it hurts a lot more now than it used to.

46

JOSH

She’s blocked my calls. I have the insane impulse to get on a plane and beg her back, and I fight it every day. She could have gotten killed coming here the way she did, and if she had, it would have been my fault. Just like it’s my fault that she got hurt by this whole thing. I knew better than to start this, and I certainly knew better than to continue it.

I get through work every day, but my heart is no longer in it. I find myself wishing I’d never gone into medicine in the first place, simply so that I wouldn’t have come, so they wouldn’t need me to stay.

I’ve told the director of operations I need out, and he asked me to give him a year to find a replacement. It’ll take every day of that year. We just had another bomb threat yesterday, one of our guards was shot this morning and a refugee camp to the south was attacked while I was in Hawaii. No one with an ounce of sense would choose to come here now.

So…a year. It will be too late to win Drew back by then, but what was I going to do anyway, under the circumstances?

“You look awful,” my mom says when I call.

She does too, but I keep that to myself. “Just busy here,” I tell her. “How are you feeling?”

“I’d feel a lot better,” she says, “if you were home and your brother was okay. Have you spoken to him?”

“We’ve texted,” I tell her, though in truth it was just one text I sent asking him to look in on our mother, to which he did not reply.

“The breakup with Drew has really hit him hard,” she says. “I think he’s drinking.”

I laugh, scrubbing a hand over my face. For once my brother and I have something in common. “Mom, was there ever a time when he wasn’t drinking? He spent most of the trip to Hawaii drunk. Aside from the part he spent in jail for drugs.”

She sighs. “Your father thinks he needs to go to rehab, but I just think if Drew would come back he’d—”

“Do not suck her into his spiral, Mom,” I say. Her eyes widen at my tone. “She’s got enough going on. She doesn’t need to be dealing with an addict on top of everything else.”

“But…he could support her too,” she argues. “They could be there for each other. Marriage and a baby would change everything for both of them.”

“A baby?” I repeat, aghast. Aside from the fact that marriage and babies didn’t seem to improve my parents’ life much, it’s not really ideal for a guy with addiction issues and a very recent arrest record. Mostly, though, it’s for selfish reasons I want to derail this entire line of thought.

“He’s been talking about it,” she says. “The other day he was here. I guess that friend of Drew’s, the writer, just had a baby. She posted about it. Joel thinks maybe if he made a grand gesture, she’d come back.”