The Good Father

* * *

ELLA WAS AT work Monday, eating crackers for lunch, when her pager went off.

She’d had her first checkup with the obstetrician. Everything looked perfect. She could expect to give birth to a healthy son or daughter in thirty weeks.

Other than Ella’s medical history, the doctor didn’t know the circumstances of the baby’s conception.

Ella didn’t share them with her. There was no need.

Rounding the corner into the B pod, the area to which she’d been paged, she expected to see a nurse there waiting for her.

Instead, it was Jason. Standing with a charting tablet.

“How are you?” he asked, his glance more intimate than she’d have expected.

“Good.” She smiled. Because she was going to have a baby. She was being given a new life. One she desperately wanted.

“I’ve been...well, thinking...” He looked down at the tablet, dropped his hand, tablet dangling at his side, and said, “Did you speak to the baby’s father?”

A couple of the people at work already knew what was going on with her. Partially because she’d been sick at work. And because a doctor on the ward—Jason—knew. She walked Jason into her office.

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He wants to help where he can.”

“Are you getting back together?”

“No!” When she heard the sharpness of her response, she tempered it with a softer one. “We aren’t getting back together. I told you, it was a one-night thing,” she said. Adding that she’d had her first appointment and that everything was fine.

“So...I guess this is kind of strange, but...would you be willing to have dinner with me sometime?”

Her mouth fell open. “I’m pregnant, Jason.”

“I know. I was there.” He blushed. And grinned. “When you found out, that is.”

“You don’t want children.”

He shrugged. “There is that.”

So what was he doing?

“The thing is I want you in my life.”

“I’m pregnant.” She repeated the obvious, but only because he didn’t seem to be getting it. Or she wasn’t.

“Yeah, and I’m not as appalled by that idea as I’d thought I would be.”

Really.

A small flower bloomed inside Ella. Right alongside the baby that was growing there. She was wanted. Her baby wasn’t appalling.

That concept shouldn’t be so unfamiliar to her.

But it was. And in that moment, standing there, Ella realized just how much of an effect Brett’s inability to love fully had had on her.

“I’m not in love with you, Jason.” She couldn’t do to him what had been done to her. Couldn’t promise something she was incapable of giving.