The Baby Arrangement (The Daycare Chronicles 3)

He’d just lied to her. That wasn’t what he’d intended to call her about at all. He’d been going to tell her that he’d be back in town midweek if she’d like to schedule a meal together. And at the meal he’d have brought up the other topic.

“Now that there are two babies, it just seems more pertinent that we get this settled. You don’t want to take any chances that they get split up.”

He was pressuring her. He could see it, but it kept coming out.

?

?I’m just not sure it’s fair to you,” she said. “It leaves the door open for all kinds of things to get messy down the road.”

“Not if we neatly and legally tie up all ends beforehand.”

“What happens when one of them needs to see their birth certificate for something, like getting a marriage license or a driver’s license or a passport, and sees your name? What if he or she decides they want to meet you?”

She was planning to tell her children that they’d been conceived by artificial insemination by a donor. How confusing would it be to have a father’s name on the birth certificates?

“I was thinking about that, too,” he said, tense and wanting a shot of whiskey. Since he was driving, he’d have to settle for ordering one at dinner.

That would amount to him having more whiskey in the last four months than he’d had in the last four years. This woman and her babies were driving him to drink.

“You were thinking about them wanting to meet you?” she prompted him.

“Thinking about them not knowing about me. Don’t you think, if something ever happened to you, it would be better for them to have heard that I exist before they’re suddenly faced with being uprooted and having to come live with me?”

“If they know about you they’ll want to see you. This is why I didn’t want to do this to begin with. It’s already getting too complicated.”

He’d talked her into it. Promised her it wouldn’t be complicated. That he’d let her do her thing.

“You’re right,” he said, and meant it.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that he was going to have two children in the world who might one day find out that he’d known about them and then think, by his lack of participation, that he hadn’t wanted them.

True, he’d had no plans to have children, at least not then, and not with their mother. He’d donated his sperm for Mallory because she’d wanted a baby and his sperm gave her the security she wouldn’t have had with an unknown donor.

His intentions had been good, but he couldn’t have his own children thinking he didn’t want them.

Except that he had no other choice.

He had to find a way to let this go.

* * *

The nights were the worst. She knew this. Clarity was less prevalent in the dark. When one slept, one let go of one’s control of rational thought. And Mallory’s uncontrolled, irrational thoughts were the stuff nightmares were made of.

She’d had more than she could count since she’d found out she was pregnant.

She’d been prepared for them, she’d thought.

But the night after she saw Braden, after his phone call, she had a doozy of a nightmare. The twins—they’d been a boy and a girl—had disowned her because she’d smothered them. At first the smothering had been emotional. She’d just been trying to be a good mother, but somehow she’d become needy and controlling, with no life but them. And then suddenly she was outside with flashers blinking around her house—rescue and police vehicles—and her babies were inside, smothered in their cribs. She’d been sobbing, looking at their window, knowing that she’d done it.

As soon as she woke up, trembling, sweaty, with her heart pounding fast and hard, she got out of bed and went to the kitchen to brew a cup of chamomile tea.

She grabbed her phone as she sat down at the table with her drink. This was a time to call Tamara. But her friend would be in bed with Flint. The call might wake up little Diamond Rose.

And she didn’t really need Tamara. She knew what was going on. The fear didn’t have her in its grip.

She was in her own grip.

Braden wanted to have a place in the lives of his children. She didn’t know how she was so certain, but she knew.