Chapter Three
“N o,” Rosie said, immediately.
And Ryder thought for a moment that he might actually spontaneously combust, right here and right now—
But she didn’t look obstinate. She looked flustered. “I mean, of course. We will talk. We will. But not…”
She looked down at the two toddlers clinging to her legs, almost helplessly.
He could feel his blood pounding in every part of his body, and he’d felt something like this before. It felt a lot like getting tossed off the back of a nasty, mean-tempered bull at a terrible angle. And then, while hurtling through the air, he would have just enough time to wonder if this was the thing that was going to kill him. Snap his neck. Break every bone in his body.
Ryder felt like that now.
Like he was somewhere up in the air, waiting to see how he was going to land.
Only this was a lot worse than getting thrown.
He didn’t know what to think. How to breathe. What to do .
Except follow her gaze down to those boys. Both of them were staring up at him, eyes wide with curiosity. Two little boys with dark blond hair and dark eyes, like red-cheeked memories in parkas and tiny snow boots.
Ryder didn’t need any DNA tests to know whose kids these were. He knew them as if he could feel them in his own bones. He recognized them instantly. He’d spent his entire life looking at a face that had started out exactly like theirs, then turned into his. These boys looked so much like Wilder and Ryder as kids that it was uncanny. And in case he was tempted to question that, there were also old pictures of the two of them all over the ranch house.
He had been looking at a whole set of them last night, because he’d walked down that long hall with all the family photos on display on his way out.
There was no doubt about it. The two boys looking up at him could be Ryder and Wilder reincarnated.
Except he wasn’t one of them. So that could only mean one thing.
He was a father. He was their father .
Everything had changed, right here on this hill that looked back down into the valley that was Cowboy Point. He could tell that his life whole life would forever hinge on his decision to swing by this house today. Everything would now be filed as before and after this moment.
This shocking understanding that he and Rosie had made babies that night.
And his pulse didn’t slow down any, but he’d landed. Gotten his feet under him.
Ryder blew out a breath, aware of Rosie’s pleading gaze on his. He squatted down, getting face-to-face with these twins— his twins —who made him feel like time travel had to be real.
He felt an overwhelming urge to simply… pick them up. To put his hands on them. To assure himself they were real. To take them away from here, from her, so he could learn every single thing there was to know about both of them. So he could catch up—
Another breath was necessary to keep himself even. Not calm , exactly, but in control.
“Gentlemen,” he said, formally, looking from one pair of dark eyes just like his to the other. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
He tipped his hat, then held out his hand, like his own father had taught him when he was about their age.
They stared at him. Then looked delighted .
“Boys, this is…” Rosie faltered. Cleared her throat. Ryder couldn’t look at her. “Introduce yourselves.”
“Eli,” said the quieter of the two, the one who had seemed shy. He wasn’t at all shy about sticking out his hand, and he looked nothing short of delighted when Ryder shook it.
Ryder found he felt the same way. Like there had been ice around his heart his whole life and he’d never known it until now, as it cracked wide open.
“I’m Levi,” said the other little boy, shoving in to get his hand in Ryder’s in place of his brother’s. Then he looked up at his mother. “That’s Mommy.”
Ryder took his time shaking Levi’s hand. Then Eli stuck his hand back in too so he was shaking both of their little hands, and they were both giggling so hard he couldn’t help but smile. Then the two of them started speaking in what sounded like nonsense, but he figured it was their own, private language, a lot like the one Wilder and he had made up when they were little, too.
He didn’t think about anything but the simple joy of it. The two of them so unaware of the way they’d changed the entire course of his life, as was only right and proper. The two of them so completely themselves, two happy little boys in snow clothes on a winter afternoon.
Two adorable twin boys and a brand-new father, shaking hands like men.
“Look,” Levi shouted, turning away from the handshaking. “Uncle Wyatt!”
Ryder held onto Eli’s little hand until he pulled away too, running after his brother. Only then did Ryder take his time rising back up to his feet.
He didn’t look at Rosie. He couldn’t. It all felt too raw.
But the sight greeting him on the road wasn’t any better. Wyatt Stark had been a friend of his for as long as he could remember. The same went for the other two Stark boys—who, like the so-called Carey boys, were all fully grown men now but rarely referred to that way—who piled out of the same truck at the edge of the yard.
He heard Rosie take a quick breath behind him, and glanced back despite himself to see that she looked nothing short of stricken.
Well , he thought. Join the club.
The twins went running toward their uncles and Ryder watched them go, with the strangest aching sensation in his chest as he watched how comfortable they all were. The ease with which those big, tough Stark brothers threw the little toddlers up in the air, passed them back and forth, and had them squealing with delight.
All things he’d imagined he would do, one day, when he was a father. Before reminding himself that he was never going to be a father.
No wonder it hit different today, now that he was one.
He glanced back at Rosie to find her eyes wide and filled with something like misery. Or maybe it was just plain old misery.
“Heard you were in town,” Noah Stark said, drifting closer. “Keep thinking we’ll see you in the Copper Mine now that your brother’s abandoned us for the ball and chain lifestyle.”
Noah was the youngest of the Stark brothers, and was roughly Ryder’s youngest brother’s age. The three Stark brothers lined up in age, more or less, with Ryder and Wilder, Boone, and Knox. They’d caused a ruckus or two in their time, that was for sure.
But today was something else entirely. Ryder couldn’t think of a thing to say, and the longer the silence dragged out, the more Noah narrowed his eyes suspiciously as he looked between Ryder and Rosie.
Ryder didn’t have it in him to play this off. He just stood there, fully aware of the way his jaw was flexing, and stared the other man down.
Levi and Eli came running back again and careened into Ryder’s legs this time. And Ryder got to watch as the three Stark brothers went through the same gamut of emotions that he had.
They looked at the boys.
They looked at Ryder.
They glared at Rosie.
“Rosie,” Logan said in a low voice. “You don’t really—”
“Why don’t you take the boys up to the lodge,” Rosie said, cutting him off. And though she forced a smile, it was clearly for the benefit of the boys because her gaze was anything but happy. “I’ll text you in a little while.”
“If you put a hand—” Wyatt began, with the bluster that had served him well in many an almost-barfight.
But Ryder was the one who’d taught him how to fight in middle school.
He cut his gaze toward the man he’d known all their lives, and let whatever expression was on his face do the talking.
Wyatt lifted his hands, palms up. He jerked his head at his brothers, and the younger two rounded up the twins. For a moment it was all the high-pitched, exciting chattering of the toddlers, then the truck engine starting up.
And then there was nothing but the kick of the wind on the mountains, that same wild drumming of his heart, and Rosie.
The woman who’d made him a father.
The woman who hadn’t, as far as he could tell, ever intended to fill him in on the fact that they’d made themselves a couple of whole humans.
Rosie cleared her throat. Then again. “You’d better come in, Ryder.”
She didn’t make any eye contact as she turned back toward her car, but Ryder beat her to it. He told himself it was because he needed a task to focus on. It was better than focusing on this terrible sense of betrayal he felt. Besides, he’d had two mothers in his lifetime and they’d both taught him to mind his manners, no matter the circumstances.
He took the grocery sacks out of her arms, jerking his chin toward the front door of the house when she started to protest.
“Fine,” she muttered, her cheeks looking red—redder than they would have anyway, having been outside in all this cold for this long. “Um. Thank you.”
To calm himself, he forced himself to think about the little house that she hurried toward. There was the lodge up on the top of this particular hill, standing there as a glamorous memory of a bygone age. And then, scattered all the way down to the valley floor were little cabins mixed in with slightly more expansive homes, like this one. They had all been built as outbuildings for the lodge in its heyday, as well as housing for the lodge’s workers. He knew the Stark brothers lived in these houses, somewhere—and probably not all piled into the one he was pretty sure they’d commandeered at sixteen and had used to get up to all kinds of no good when they were all in high school. He was pretty sure someone had told him that Jack Stark now lived in the house on the lodge’s grounds. Many of the cabins were short-term rentals these days, something he knew because he’d listened to his brother Knox, the youngest, lay out an entire retirement plan over Sunday dinner that involved short-term rentals and building a portfolio while the rest of them sat there experimenting to see which one of them could roll their eyes the hardest.
Big talk from a man who was MIA all morning today , Boone had said. Boone was built like a linebacker, or possibly a bear. He always looked like what he was, to Ryder’s mind. Solid. Dependable. And perfectly capable of kicking some butt along the way.
You have to have a job to retire from it , Harlan had pointed out. In that drawl of his that was as much a smack as a backhand would have been.
He thought about HGTV shows he’d watched while working through his endless physical therapy exercises, for maintenance these days rather than repair. He’d watched the home renovations. Real estate. Properties flipped and fancied up and sold.
It had always seemed like shell games within shell games to him.
By the time Rosie pushed her way to the front door that she apparently didn’t keep locked—as he remembered it, no one locked anything this high up in the mountains, because why bother when there were so few people—he thought his blood pressure was back within manageable limits.
Inside, the tension rose again as the door swung shut and closed them in. But it was tempered somewhat by the fact that they had to stand there in the small foyer, shrugging out of their heavy coats, kicking off their boots, and adjusting to the heat indoors.
It was hard to keep the tension at its height when a man was padding across the living room floor in his socks.
Rosie didn’t sit, so he didn’t either. She stood there, closer to the door, like she wanted the option of bolting if necessary. Then she crossed her arms and looked at him as if she was waiting for him to roll out the nearest guillotine.
All those things he wanted to shout at her out there in the front yard, all of that disbelief and fury and something like betrayal, were… not exactly gone. But that roaring boil of too many feelings had calmed itself down into a simmer.
“What I need you to tell me,” he said, as carefully as he could, “is—”
“They’re yours,” she snapped at him. “I realize you don’t know this about me but I don’t, in fact, get naked with every cowboy I meet.”
“I know they’re mine.”
That came out a lot less careful. Their gazes slammed together, and that wasn’t the greatest idea. Because her gaze was wide and that remarkable shade of blue. And he didn’t need the word naked hanging there between them, either. He remembered her beneath him, gazing up at him, those too-blue eyes wide and glazed with heat and—
Rosie cleared her throat again. “Oh. Okay. I guess I thought the first thing you would ask me was to go get a blood test or something.”
“Those little boys look exactly like Wilder and me when we were their age,” Ryder said, forcing himself to keep his voice even, if not anything like easy . “I remember, but there are also pictures all over the house I grew up in. There are only two men in the entire world that could be their father, Rosie. And if a woman he’d slept with was suddenly walking around pregnant, then produced twins, Wilder would probably have some questions. So that leaves me, doesn’t it?”
He watched as she stood a little straighter. Squared her shoulders. How she took her time doing it, like she, too, was trying to keep it smooth. Like she wanted to actually talk, not give into the heightened emotion that was pressing in on them in the small, tidy living room with windows that looked down the hill and into the valley.
And Ryder counted himself lucky to have known a whole lot of beautiful women in his time. So many that they sometimes seemed to blend together, and that was a shame. But this was the one that had haunted him.
This was the one that had really gotten to him, apparently, because after Rosie, it was always and only her face that he saw before him. Though he knew better than to say something like that, no matter how many unkind thoughts he might have been tempted to have about Rosie in that moment.
She was still gathering herself, so he did the same. Though what gathering himself looked like in this scenario was studying her.
Like she was a mystery that needed solving, and quick.
The most obvious thing about Rosie was that she looked exactly the same as his memory of her. That pretty gold and copper hair of hers that gleamed like summer even now, in the depths of February, was tucked back into something smooth and elegant. That perfect face, with a stubborn chin and the sort of mouth that made a man’s imagination take over, was actually even more beautiful than his memories.
She had been dressed in jeans and cowboy boots down in Austin, with one of those strappy little tank tops for maximum distraction, and it had worked. Today, she was dressed for Montana cold, and that was never too fancy—though she was making a run at it. She was wearing jeans that did fantastic things to her bottom, but they also looked pristine. Not the least bit ratty or ripped or even stained. And the sweater she wore looked like one of those thin wool jobs, all about heat with none of the bulk, and he appreciated that, because he could see she was exactly as attractive as he remembered. Long legs. Wide hips. That indentation between them that he’d spent a lot of time appreciating that night, with a decent handful up top besides.
Rosie Stark was pretty. There was no getting away from that.
There was something else about her that he hadn’t been able to define. Not that night and certainly not that morning after, when he’d been tempted to break his cardinal rule of one night only to see if maybe two nights might be even more fun—
But she’d woken up and looked at him with her heart in her eyes, and he’d reacted badly.
Now, under completely different circumstances, he could still see her heart in her eyes. Difference was, he now had a better idea of what it was about her that got to him.
It was that Stark stubbornness, very obvious to him now, as she made no attempt to explain herself. She simply stood there as if awaiting his judgment.
“I’ve been going over the reasons that I didn’t tell you, and I still think they’re all as valid as they were then,” she said, after a good long while. Before he could react to that, she inclined her head a little. “I also don’t think they’re a good excuse.”
That took a pretty decent swipe out of his outrage, and so Ryder listened as she laid it all out. Her thinking. Her notion of what he might do, should do, and hadn’t. The fact that—valid or not—her life had felt like rolling heavy stones down a steep hill and at some points, it was all she could do to not get crushed.
He tried not to react, though he could feel the urge to respond, to fight, to argue, well up in him—
But this wasn’t about him. He kept reminding himself of that. Whatever he felt—and he felt plenty—he would deal with. In the meantime, he had to think about those little boys. The sweet heartbreak when they’d gripped his hand, because they were here and they were his and he didn’t know them at all.
And they didn’t know he was their father.
Yet.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that shouting at their mother wasn’t a smart way to go about gaining access to them. Ryder didn’t question that he wanted that access, because it was already deeper than that.
He was a different man than the one who’d driven up here to offer a likely awkward apology to a woman he’d expected would have been happily married and moved on by now—and he didn’t just want to know his kids. He needed to know them.
“That’s how it happened,” Rosie told him, when she came to a stop on a jagged sort of breath. She squared her shoulders again. “But I realized today, right outside in the driveway, that I’ve been kidding myself the whole time. The whole entire time, because if you knew with one look it was only a matter of time until everyone else did, too. It’s been months since your father ran into us and I was so sure he knew too, immediately, but nothing happened so—”
Everything inside Ryder went very, very quiet. And still. “What did you just say?”
Rosie looked alarmed. “Didn’t he tell you? I thought that’s why you were here.”
“He didn’t tell me anything.” Ryder had to fall back on the control that had kept him competing with minimal injuries all these years. “I came here to apologize. I was a dick that morning. You didn’t deserve it. I’ve been carrying that around with me and I wanted to say so.”
It was almost funny now, to think about how little his morning-after behavior mattered in the grand scheme of things. Now that there were two little lives in the mix. Though really, that was a pretty good reason not to come rushing to tell him, wasn’t it?
“Thank you,” Rosie replied. “You were a dick. But that hardly matters.”
Then they stood there a while longer, on opposite sides of the cheerful little space, staring at each other.
Ryder had been treated to a great many out of body experiences in his lifetime. Pain could do that to a man. So could terrible defeats, unexpected victories, and pretty much everything in between. He’d wanted a life of more and he’d gotten it. More of everything meant… more of everything .
But this was something else.
He could remember with entirely too much detail how that night with Rosie had started. She’d found him at the meet and greet that night, pretty as a picture in a cowboy hat and a big grin.
Didn’t expect to see a hometown girl in a place like this , he’d said, grinning, like the Moody Center was a den of iniquity instead of a world class arena.
I came to see the bulls , she’d replied. With that slow smile of hers aimed right at him and the sweet little pop of challenge in her gaze.
Well , Ryder had drawled, I sure do hope I can drag your attention away. For seven seconds or so.
He’d done better than that. He’d won the damned thing.
And he’d won the girl, too. Then he’d tossed her away, and hard, but they weren’t here to discuss that. Yet what they were talking about was dangerous, because it had happened during all those glorious hours wrapped around each other in her pretty little apartment. Her roommates had been out of town.
She’d trusted him, because she knew him.
Ryder had sunk into her like he never meant to come up for air again.
There were two little boys running around because of that.
It wasn’t like Ryder didn’t know that sex led to babies. But knowing how something worked in theory and then living through it happening in practice wasn’t the same thing.
“My family probably wouldn’t have given you my cell phone number,” he told her, instead of wading through too many feelings he couldn’t quite name. “You would have had to tell them why you needed it, and who’s to say they even would have believed it. Because it was you, maybe they would have. Over the years, there’s been some weird stuff.”
She blinked. “Okay.”
“Not bragging here, Rosie. I’m telling you that it’s unlikely they would have given you my cell phone number, and even if they did, I wouldn’t have answered it. Two things can be true at once. I can recognize that you didn’t have a lot of options and also be furious that there are two little boys that don’t know that I’m their father.”
“I guess I can’t tell you not to be upset,” she said, but she said it belligerently, to his ear. “But don’t worry, Ryder. It’s exhausting to be a parent. Taking care of two babies at once is no picnic, either. I’m lucky I had so much help, but you better believe that there were a lot of sleepless nights. And more tears than I can count. Mine, not theirs.”
She didn’t say that like she wanted sympathy, so he didn’t offer it. “I know you’re not saying that like you don’t know that I couldn’t possibly have helped you with that, because I didn’t know it was happening.”
“While we’re throwing truths out on the table, why didn’t you know?” she asked. “You were the one with all the experience. Everybody knows that Ryder Carey loves his buckle bunnies.”
“I thought you were auditioning for the job.”
She laughed at that, genuinely enough that he decided he regretted saying it.
“Oh, I was. Nothing could have been more unlikely, but I was going to have one night of fun and then get back to reality. But I guess the joke’s on me, because it wasn’t much fun, was it?”
“Are you going to stand here and tell me you didn’t have a good time?” He could hear his voice drop. He could hear his own drawl. “Because that’s not how I remember it. Time after time after time, what I remember is you seeing stars.”
“Sure,” she agreed. He didn’t know when they’d come so close that they were standing just a whisper apart. “But so did you.”
That felt like another terrific kick to the midsection, and it left him winded.
It made the room seem to spin, and the last time he’d felt that way in her presence, well. That had led to a pair of twins.
The twins. That was what he needed to concentrate on.
He moved away, tossing his hat aside and running a hand through his hair.
“I don’t need to litigate a one-night stand,” he muttered.
“Maybe you should.”
“I’ll tell you what, Rosie,” he began.
“By all means,” she said in that snotty way of hers that he really should hate, and didn’t, “tell me.”
He couldn’t hate her, not even now, and that was concerning. He wasn’t happy with her, but that wasn’t the same thing. He didn’t know this was. What he did know was that driving over here, he’d been a little too excited about the prospect of seeing her again, and he didn’t like to think what that might mean.
He focused on her. “You can bring out your big guns, scream yourself hoarse about the indignities you suffered that night. I support it. I came here to apologize for it. But how about we wait on that until we nail down a few other critical issues at hand.”
She didn’t like that. He thought there was little extra color in her cheeks as she folded her arms over her chest, but her voice was significantly less snotty when she spoke. “What do you want to nail down?”
“What do you think?” He frowned at her. “What’s going to happen here, Rosie? The secret’s out. Those are my kids.”
“What does that mean to you?” And she laughed a little bit as she asked that, but he thought that sounded more hysterical than anything else. “How are you going to have custody of them if you’re in a different city every weekend? How would that work? Are you going to drag them from rodeo to rodeo? Get a babysitter?”
“That’s how some folks do it.”
“You mean that’s how some families do it,” she corrected him. “But we’re not a family. So forgive me, but I’m not exactly in a hurry to hand my babies off to someone who, let’s be honest, I don’t know at all.”
It was his turn to not like the turn of the conversation. “You know me well enough.”
“I know stories about you from growing up. I know how you smile when you’re flirting. I know you get mean when things get intense.” Rosie lifted a shoulder, then dropped it. “So, you’re right. I do know you. That’s not exactly working in your favor when it comes to my babies. My babies ,” she repeated, in case he didn’t get it. “I’m not denying that you’re their father, but they don’t know you.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“That doesn’t matter either.” She slashed a hand through the air when he started to argue that. “What matters—the only thing I can let matter now, in fact—is that. I didn’t mean for this to happen. Kind of like I’m betting you didn’t mean to get me pregnant in the first place. But here we are.”
“Don’t absolve yourself too quickly, darlin’,” Ryder suggested, and told himself the heat in him was temper. Not memories.
“Rule number one,” she shot back. “Don’t call me darlin’ . You think I don’t know that’s the name you use when you can’t remember the name of the girl you’re with?”
“I always knew your name.”
“Right. That’s the hometown advantage, I guess?” She glared at him. “Don’t start mixing me up with someone else now, please.”
“That’s unlikely, Rosie,” he said, emphasizing her name. “Because as far as I know, you’re the only baby mama I have.”
“Rule number two,” she continued, her voice stern. “The boys come first. That’s the beginning and the end of everything. I mean it,” she added, because he must have made some noise or something in response.
“You’re laying down rules and I don’t know anything about my own children,” he said, after allowing himself a beat or two to simmer down a little. To remember that passion was what had caused this in the first place, so no need to let temper do the same. “You’re going to have to give it a little space, Rosie. And thank you for thinking I’m some kind of monster. I’m not going to rip them away from you.” He held her gaze. “I would never do that.”
He remembered being a little kid when his mother died. When he and his brother made it all worse, though that was a different core memory that didn’t need excavating just now. And he remembered when Zeke had first told him about Belinda, and how they’d all been afraid—even Harlan, who in those days had liked to act as if he was never afraid of anything—that she would be the kind of wicked stepmother they’d heard about in books and movies.
But she’d been Belinda instead. She was no replacement for Ryder’s mother and had never tried to be. What she was, in every conceivable way, was a beautiful addition.
He’d met too many others, out on the tour, who’d had more typical stepparent experiences.
Ryder knew all about broken homes. They couldn’t do anything about what had happened so far, but from this point forward, that was not going to be what happened to his boys. They might have two homes, but he by God was going to see to it personally that they were both happy.
“I don’t know what you’re going to do,” Rosie said, mulishly, to his ear. “I also think that you don’t know, either. We’re still in the heat of the moment. Things could change. One thing that won’t change, though, is that this is the only home those boys have ever known. I am the only parent that they’ve ever known. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, that’s just how it is. That’s what we need to be careful with as we proceed.”
“So tell me how we’ll be proceeding, then,” he said. Maybe he was daring her. “Tell me how it’s going to work?”
“It will work in baby steps,” she replied, her brow wrinkling.
“Bullshit.”
The furrow between her brows became a full frown. “What?”
“That’s bullshit. You had years of baby steps, Rosie. I don’t want to overwhelm them. I don’t know what the hell I want, if you want to know the truth. But I’ll tell you this. I’ve known that I was a father for less than an hour and I’m already determined I’m going to be a good one. Whatever that looks like. And you don’t get to decide how that happens, all on your own. You’ve already done enough of that.”
He felt something like winded, but he meant every word he’d said. She looked like she wanted to argue, but instead she moved, jerkily. It was almost as if she was thinking about sitting down on the sofa, but decided to pace instead, and there was something comforting about that.
If he had to feel this agitated, he was glad she did too.
“They are funny, sweet, impossible, magical little boys,” she told him, and her voice sounded something like urgent. “Levi is bossier. Eli is dreamier. But they’re both wildly stubborn. And they’re a unit. They don’t like to do things without each other. I used to dress them differently when they were little, partly because it helped in telling them apart, and also partly because some people suggested that’s what I should do.”
“What people?”
Her cheeks flushed a deeper shade of red. “Books. Lots of books. I read that it was good to present twins with autonomy. But the funny thing is, now that they throw fits to wear what they want to wear, they prefer to dress alike. Maybe autonomy will come down the road, but as for now, what they like is being twins.”
Ryder also liked being a twin. Their family had been sprawling and loud, with a lot of chaos and shifting alliances as everyone tried to do their thing in such a big crowd. But what Ryder and Wilder had always seen as the best stroke of luck imaginable was that they had each other. Sometimes they operated as a voting block. Sometimes they employed a little two on one to shift matters in their favor. They were a team.
But it was more than that. Having a twin had always meant, to Ryder, that there was just… more of him walking around. He and Wilder were connected in ways that Ryder didn’t try to make any sense of.
It was just how it was. The two of them were never out of touch. They texted all day every day, and called each other a fair amount too, because they didn’t catch each other up on the big events in their lives. They shared every last detail of their lives, so the big events seemed like theirs , not his or Wilder’s individually. Another shared experience.
He didn’t know how to explain this to Rosie.
“Of course they like being twins,” he said instead. “Particularly identical twins. Fraternal ones got shafted. Some of the fun, fewer of the benefits.”
She was still pacing and he looked past her to the fireplace. And new things seem to bloom just to twist up inside of him. He walked that way, and probably should have noticed the way her eyes widened, as if she thought—
But no , he thought piously, that isn’t what’s happening here.
He reached past her and picked up one of the framed picture that sat on the mantel. It was of two toothy little chunks in baby clothes, all round faces, bright and happy with wet smiles.
That things inside him twisted, hard.
Ryder found himself running a hand over his face and for a moment that stretched out much too long, he wasn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t do something that he’d regret later. Like puke out his guts. Or worse, double over in the face of all these things he felt inside.
Instead, he put the picture back, very carefully. He scanned the rest of them, documenting two very short, very cute lives that he’d missed so far. When he turned to look at her, she was staring at him with that stricken expression on her face once more.
“Ryder,” she began.
“Why don’t we start with some pictures,” he said, cutting her off, his voice hoarse. “I want to see what I missed.”