Chapter 11 #2
I wasn’t going to give Duke Rhodes a legal claim to my daughter's life and then spend years hoping he'd honor it. Hope was my mother's drug. It kept her at the kitchen table for three years, setting a place for a man who was never coming back. I saw what hope did, and I learned.
I believed Duke wanted this. I believed he meant it yesterday when he stood at the foot of my bed and said my child like the words cost him something.
But I'd worked this floor for six years, and I knew what wanting looked like on the first day.
I'd seen the man in the delivery room who held his partner's hand through every contraction, who cut the cord, who cried when the baby was placed on her chest. I'd seen some of those same women come back months later for a follow-up, and the man wasn't with them.
He'd been there for the birth, there for the first week, maybe the first month.
Then the visits got shorter. The excuses got longer.
One day, the car seat was only in one car.
Wanting wasn't the problem. Wanting was easy on the first day. The birth certificate was the part where wanting became legal, and legal didn't guarantee he'd still be standing in the room a year from now.
I left the father's fields blank.
The pen moved past the empty boxes, down to the signature line. I signed my name. The ink went down clean. The form went from a decision to a document in about thirty seconds.
I put the clipboard back on the tray. My hands were shaking. Not a lot. Enough that I noticed.
Tita came back ten minutes later. She picked up the clipboard, glanced at the form, and tucked it under her arm. She didn't look at the father's section.
"I'll get this filed, honey."
She left. The form left with her.
The knock came a few minutes later. I was expecting Colleen.
"Come in."
The door opened.
Duke.
He was in a clean T-shirt and jeans. His hair was damp, pushed back from his forehead, and he hadn't shaved. He looked like he'd slept about as well as I had, which was hardly at all, and he was still handsome in a way that irritated me. The dark circles under his eyes didn't help. The jaw did.
His hands were at his sides. Not in his pockets. The man who came through this door yesterday was stunned. The man standing in the doorway this morning had spent the night staring at the ceiling and had arrived at something.
He stayed near the door. His eyes went to the bassinet for a second, then back to me.
"How are you feeling?"
"Like I had a baby on a highway."
His mouth twitched. Not the full grin. Just the corner. "Fair."
A beat. He shifted his weight. Whatever he'd come here to say was sitting behind his teeth, and I watched him work up to it.
"I thought about it," he said.
I waited.
He took a breath. When he spoke, the words came out plain, with nothing underneath them. No grin. No charm. No room-reading posture. He sounded like a man who had practiced what he was going to say, decided the practiced version was wrong, and settled on the truth instead.
"I want to be part of her life. I understand if you don't trust me. I'm not asking you to. We don't have to be partners. I'm not asking for that, either." He paused. "But you have to let me be her father. I'll do whatever you need me to do to prove it."
He wasn't selling. He was standing at the door offering the smaller version of what he'd asked for yesterday, because yesterday, I'd given him a smaller door. He took the smaller door. He didn't argue for the bigger one.
I felt it land. The offer, stripped bare. Duke Rhodes, who had spent thirty-two years being the man every room needed him to be, was standing in this room being nothing.
My mother's voice was still in my head. Paperwork is hard to undo.
The form had been on the tray table, three feet from where he was standing, the father's fields blank, my signature at the bottom.
I thought about the version of this where I said no, where my daughter grew up with one name on every form, and the clean, weightless safety of never needing a man who might not stay.
Then I looked at him. His eyes were green, tired, and holding nothing back. The man who had delivered my daughter on the shoulder of a state highway and sat in a waiting room for hours afterward because he couldn't leave.
"Okay," I said.
I watched the word land on his face. His jaw loosened. His chest moved.
"You can be her father."
He nodded. He didn't speak for a second.
"We're going to need rules," I said. "I don't know what they are yet.
I'm not making them up the day after I had a baby on a state highway.
But we'll figure them out together, and you have to be okay with that.
You have to be okay with the version of this where I get to say no to things. Where I change my mind."
"Yeah." He nodded again. "Of course. Yeah."
Neither of us moved. The room held us in the quiet of two people who had agreed to something.
"You wanna hold her?"
His face shifted. Like he hadn't expected to be asked. Then he nodded, one side of his mouth pulling up a little.
He crossed to the bassinet and bent over it, one hand sliding under the baby's head, the other under her back, and lifted her against his chest. Her face settled into the space below his collarbone. He stood there holding her. He didn't say anything. He didn't move.
I couldn't see his face from the bed. I could see his shoulders go still. His hand spread flat across Nova's back, his fingers covering most of her.
When he turned back toward me, his eyes were wet. He didn't say anything about it. I didn't either.
"Does she have a name yet?"
"Nova."
He looked down at her. "Nova," he said. Quiet, like he was giving it to her.
He stood there holding my daughter, his daughter, our daughter, with the morning light coming through the blinds.
The form was already gone. Tita had taken it down the hall ten minutes before he walked in, and it was somewhere in the system now, becoming official, becoming permanent. His name should have been on it.
He was standing in this room, and he didn't know.
I watched him with Nova against his chest, and I felt it—the want, quiet and constant, the same want I'd been running from since the night of the wedding. I wanted to tell him what I'd done. I wanted to say I left it blank, and I'm sorry, and I don't know if I'm protecting her or punishing you.
I wanted to tell him the truth, and the truth was that I'd signed that form with my mother's fear in my hands, and I didn't know yet whether the fear was mine or hers.
I said nothing. The form was already down the hall. The blank fields were already in a file. And the man holding my daughter didn't know they existed.