Straight Up Love (Boys of Jackson Harbor 2)

She doesn’t register it’s me for a few moments, and the seconds stretch between us, full of silence because I’m still staring at Noah. My nephew. He’s beautiful, and my heart feels too big for my chest as I try to take him in, to memorize his perfect face.

He’s not a Jackson. I didn’t realize I still doubted it.

I sink down to my haunches and offer him my hand. “Hey there. I’m Ava.”

“I Noah,” he says with a toothy grin.

“I’m Noah,” Molly corrects him.

Noah giggles. “No, you Mommy.”

Shaking her head, Molly sighs and holds the door open wide. “You might as well come on in, Ava.”

“Thanks.” I follow her into the little apartment. It’s small but nice—clean and tidy, with the modern industrial flair of exposed brick and piping overhead. Noah stops in the living room, a space with a couch and a chair, and a toy train track on the rug in the middle.

Molly leads me to a round table with four chairs in the kitchen. “Coffee?”

I nod, then think better of it. I’ve been cutting down on caffeine . . . just in case. “Decaf?”

She makes a face. “That’s against my religion. Water?”

I laugh. “Yeah, water’s fine.”

She fills a glass from the tap for me and fills a mug with coffee for herself, bringing both to the table. “Now you know my secret.”

“You only have one?” I take a sip of my water and do my best to act like meeting Noah isn’t a big deal when, in truth, it’s everything.

“Only one that matters,” she says.

“Molly, why didn’t you tell anyone?” I look over my shoulder to where Noah is leading his trains delicately around the track. I feel like I might already know the answer, but I want to give her a chance to explain.

She rubs her temples. “I already had this conversation with Jake, as I’m sure you know. I’m not interested in rehashing it with you. Noah is my son, and his father’s not in the picture. That’s not a big deal here. It would have been at home.”

I open my mouth to protest, then close it again. The single mom part of Molly-and-Noah isn’t what would have been a big deal. “Okay,” I say. “I’m not here to fight.”

She stares down into her coffee. “I know it seems crazy, but it was what I had to do at the time. And then a couple of years passed, and I had this big secret.” She shrugs without looking up at me.

“Does Jill know about him?”

Her eyes fill with tears, and she nods. “Yeah. But Dad doesn’t. Mom was reluctant but understood why I couldn’t tell him . . .” She winces and rubs her thumb against her first two fingers to signify money. “Grad school.”

“Wow.” I can’t imagine Jill keeping that secret, but I have no doubt Dad would have refused to pay for Molly’s expensive graduate program if he’d known she was pregnant.

Molly turns her face toward the living room, and the tenderness in her expression tugs at my heart. “I thought about giving him up for adoption, but when I heard his heartbeat at my first ultrasound, I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“He’s beautiful.” I shake my head. I could just stare at the kid all day.

She exhales heavily. “He was born not long after your wedding, which is the real reason I didn’t come home for it, and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want everyone to see me and find out about the pregnancy. It would have changed everything.”

I have to wonder at my own stupidity. I thought I had Molly figured out—that I knew who she was and what she was about. But “Mother Teresa” would never have kept a pregnancy from Dad. She never would have gotten pregnant to begin with, let alone had a secret child and refused to talk about his father. I’m floored by the complexity of this woman and by my own failure to see it before. I’ve always assumed she had such an easy life because she made it look easy, but that’s a bit like thinking an egg is indestructible because the shell is solid.

She swallows hard. “I don’t regret my decisions. Only that from the outside it might look like I’m ashamed of him, when the truth is that he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made.”

“And his father?”

Laughing, she scans my face as if searching for hints that I might understand. I give her my best poker face, and she shakes her head. “I’d just found out I was pregnant the night I hooked up with Jake.”

I blink at her. “You did? I thought you were both drunk.”