She looked like she wanted to say more but then like she wasn’t sure what to say. She nodded. Finally, she added, “Shelly is a good person. She’ll take good care of him.”
She wouldn’t take care of him as well as James and Harper would, but James didn’t say that. He just nodded.
Lexi followed Shelly, and they left, pulling the door shut quietly behind them.
James and Harper sat together on the couch in stunned, pained silence for several long minutes. Eventually, Isaac started to fuss and Harper rose. James followed. Both without speaking. Together they changed him, fed him, rocked him, and when he was asleep, put him down in the bassinet next to the bed.
Harper stood staring down at him for a long moment, then she reached out and ran a hand over his head. The baby took a deep breath and let it out with a little, contented sigh.
That was when she broke.
A sob escaped. She put a hand over her mouth, squeezing her eyes shut. But she couldn’t keep it in. Another sob, then a shuddering breath, then another sob. Tears started.
James reached out and pulled her in, feeling his own eyes burning. His throat was tight. His chest was tight. He had no words.
He couldn’t comfort her. He couldn’t say it would be okay. He couldn’t say that he’d fix it. He couldn’t say they’d make a plan.
So he just held her. Tightly. Feeling her tears wet the front of his shirt, feeling his tears track down his cheeks. Sharing the pain.
He turned them, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling her into his lap. They sat like that, holding each other and crying until, finally, they lay back and eventually fell asleep.
At some point in the night, he pulled the comforter up over them both. But neither of them moved out of the other’s arms.
Isaac didn’t stir all night, and in the morning, when James woke up and realized that, it made him sad, too. He would have loved a few extra stolen hours with the baby in the night.
Then he rolled over and realized that Harper was no longer in his bed, and the huge, cold ball of dread got even bigger.
The pounding on her apartment door didn’t surprise her.
It frustrated her a little because she was only about ten minutes away from walking out and heading to work, and she could have avoided this.
But it didn’t surprise her.
She also knew there was a good chance he would have come to the campus to find her if she’d tried to sneak out and avoid him, so this was maybe for the best.
Harper took a deep breath and pulled her door open.
Ami ran past her feet and headed for the food bowl in her kitchen.
The hot-firefighter-jazz-musician-wannabe dad from across the hall was standing in her doorway looking the opposite of flirtatious and charming and laid back.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about why my fiancée snuck out this morning without waking me up after the hellish crap we went to bed with last night?” he asked, his eyes stormy.
She flinched.
She couldn’t help it.
It was the fiancée thing. That just drove it all home hard and fast, like a right hook to the jaw. It was ridiculous that she was even kind of, sort of, his fiancée. And after the news last night, she really didn’t need to be anymore.
It was also the way this was so like all the other times he’d come across the landing, knocked on her door, and asked if she knew something about what was going on in his life.
But it simply magnified the fact that she didn’t. She didn’t know crap about what to do about this situation.
The only good news in this mess was that she didn’t need to know how to fix it. James had never really needed her help, and he would just roll with this like he did everything else.
“I have to go to work,” she said simply.
“You couldn’t kiss me good morning and tell me that?” he asked.
She noticed his apartment door was open, so James could hear the baby, and she assumed that meant Isaac was still asleep. Good. She knew she couldn’t see him this morning. Not knowing that James was going to have to take him to meet Shelly. And turn him over to the State of Louisiana. Her heart felt like it was being shredded all over again. She hadn’t thought there was anything left to hurt. She’d had nightmares all night long after crying in James’s arms for almost an hour after Shelly and Lexi left.
“I knew you’d figure it out,” she said.
“What’s really going on?”
“You know what’s really going on,” she said.
She looked up at him. She was exhausted. She was feeling beat up. She was grieving. And she didn’t want to dance around all of this and pretend it was all fine or that everything would go back to how it had been. Everything was different now. She’d fallen in love—twice—in the span of just a few days.
She’d tried rolling with it. She’d tried just going with it and getting caught up in the adventure. She’d said yes to his proposal but mince! she’d made a plan. Automatically. The plan had been for them to be together, for it all to work out, for the happily ever after to happen. And now, surprise, they had something new to deal with, and the plan was all different again. She didn’t think she could keep up with this.
“I don’t,” he said. “I thought we were in this together.”
“There is no this anymore,” she said, throwing up her hands.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Isaac isn’t yours. He certainly isn’t ours. You are taking him to foster care today. So this”—she waved her hand between them—“isn’t a this anymore.”
“What did you think this was, exactly?” he asked, his voice low and almost ominous sounding.
Harper took a deep breath. “We were taking care of a baby together. We were planning for a future because we suddenly had a baby. Now… we don’t.”
“So everything else is just over, too?” he asked incredulously. “Nothing else means anything without him?”
“It doesn’t mean… the same thing,” she said truthfully. “It will go back to how it was before. Fred. Ami. All of… that.”
“I see.” The muscle along his jaw tensed. “So you’re not interested in fighting to get him back? In applying to be foster parents or to adopt him? You’re just done?”
She blew out a breath. She was interested in that. But it would take a lot of time, and it might be a long shot anyway. “You think that we should get married on the chance that they’ll let us have him?” she asked.
“Yes. Don’t you?” he asked.
Of course, he was ready to just dive in anyway. James always dove in. He didn’t worry about tomorrow. He was Mr. Right Now.
She took a deep breath. “Having a baby wasn’t part of the plan. Losing him once we had him certainly wasn’t part of the plan. Becoming a foster mom right now wasn’t part of the plan. Trying to become a foster mom to him and having that not work out”—she sucked in a breath as that painful thought went through her mind—“is not part of the plan.”
“What of any of this has been part of a plan?”
“Exactly.”
James gave her an exasperated but affectionate look. “You’re good without a plan, Harper. I know you don’t think so. I know you think you want binders and lesson plans and to know what’s going to happen two hours from now and tomorrow and next week and next year. But you can roll with it. You’ve been showing that over and over again.”