Page 44

Three years into our marriage, Laura asked if I’d thought about having a baby.

She pointed out that I was thirty-five, she was thirty-four, and that her reproductive clock was ticking—loudly.

She was worried that the longer we waited, the harder it would be to get pregnant—given her advanced maternal age and all.

Her words, not mine.

She wasn’t the only one who’d mentioned it either.

Dad had brought it up numerous times throughout the years, much like that first time on Christmas.

My sisters, who had been busy building their own families, were also regularly dropping hints that a little Max or Maxine would be a great addition to my pack of four.

I had dodged every comment, every hint, but when Laura brought it up, it was hard to ignore.

“So, what do you think?” she asked, stretching her arm out across my chest and resting her head against my shoulder .

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly, curling an arm around her waist and staring toward the ceiling.

I had only just gotten home from work about fifteen minutes ago, and I was exhausted. It was never the best time to have a serious conversation, but there were very few times throughout the day when we were able to talk like this—alone.

“What don’t you know about?” she asked, snuggling into my side and wrapping her leg around one of mine.

In the years we’d been together, I always made it a point to be honest with Laura. But approaching this topic suddenly felt like walking on a frozen lake. Saying the wrong thing might cause the surface to crack and shatter, leaving me drowning in frigid waters.

“I mean,” I answered hesitantly, “we’re good, right? So … why unsettle the balance? We have the girls already. We—"

“No, I know that. But I want another baby. I want a baby with you . You don’t ever think about that?”

I did think about it. I thought about it a lot. But clearly, it wasn’t in the same way Laura did.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to pass my DNA on to anyone.

I didn’t want my blood running through their veins.

I didn’t want to look at a child and see my father’s face looking back at me.

I didn’t want to chance unleashing a sleeping monster within me by reproducing someone just like me, someone that might flip the switch in my brain and turn me into him .

But how could I make her understand that ?

When I didn’t answer right away, she rested a palm against my cheek and said, “It’s okay. You don’t have to think about it right now. But … will you? Please?”

I bit the inside of my lip, then nodded. “Yeah,” I replied. “I’ll think about it.”

And I did think about it. God, I really did.

But every time I thought about it, all I could picture was the hatred my father had held toward me until just a few years ago, when I finally walked through his door with a wife.

It had taken the man over thirty years to look at me with any semblance of pride and respect, and it had taken my union with another person to break that spell—I couldn’t even do it on my own!

Something had made him that way. Something had awoken inside of him to treat me like some kind of hellspawn.

I didn’t know what that was, or when it had happened, or even why , but it had , and I couldn’t stomach the thought of being that way to my own kid.

Fuck, and what if I was even worse?! I had the added trauma of being at war. I was deaf, damaged, broken, and somewhere in me, I just knew a demon was lying dormant, and what if my own son pulled it out of me?

So, when Laura approached me one night and announced hesitantly that she’d missed her period, I didn’t jump for joy. I didn’t cheer or feel any sense of pride whatsoever.

All I could do was look at her and demand to know how .

How could this have happened? How could we have been so careless?

Fuck, hadn’t we been careful? I knew she had stopped taking her birth control pills years ago—something about drug interactions—but we continued to use protection.

We were never reckless. Or at least, I never had been.

“Some things are just meant to happen, babe,” she said gently, the twinkle in her eye dulling.

When she reached out to touch me, I flinched and pulled away.

“But not this ,” I muttered, like an absolute asshole.

Then I left.

I drove all the way to Boston, where I banged on Sid’s door, despite knowing his own baby—a little boy named Liam—was being put to bed.

I banged and banged and banged until I thought I would break the fucking door down before either he or my sister opened the damn thing, but it was still on its hinges when Sid threw it open and glared at me with nothing but pure rage reflecting in his eyes.

“This’d better be fucking important, Serg,” he growled.

Breathless, I held on to the doorframe and said, “Laura’s pregnant.”

His anger was quickly extinguished as he narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest. “Are we celebrating or panicking?”

“What does it fucking look like?!” I shouted, my chest tight and my lungs breathless.

Sid nodded once, stepped aside, and I walked into the house.

They’d just moved in shortly after Liam was born a few months ago, and there were still boxes piled everywhere the eye could see.

I guessed that was what happened when you tried to pack too many major life events into a short span of time.

You didn’t have the time or energy to take care of it all at once.

Holy shit. We need a bigger house.

The thought struck out of nowhere, like a bag of bricks to the chest, and I reached my hands up to squeeze the back of my neck as I stared at the empty fireplace, surrounded by plastic storage bins.

Grace called down the stairs, “Sid! What’s going on?”

“Your brother’s freaking out,” he called back, coming to stand beside me.

“What?! Max! Are you okay?”

We both left her unanswered as Sid said quietly, “Talk to me, bro. What’s wrong?”

I dropped my hands and slowly turned to stare into his eyes. “I can’t be a dad, man.”

He chuckled a bit and tipped his head with a grimace. “Hate to break it to you, but you kinda already are.”

“No, you know what I mean. Lizzie and Jane … they’re not mine .”

He reeled back a bit, appalled that I’d said such a thing. “What the hell are you talking about? Of course they’re yours . You’re their papa. You’ve been raising those kids for years now, and don’t say they’re not yours just because—"

“You know what I mean!” I hissed, turning to drop onto the couch.

He sat on a bin in front of me and let his hands dangle between his knees. “Are you saying that just ‘cause they’re— "

“Biologically, they’re not mine,” I clarified. “My DNA isn’t swimming around in them. They’re fine because they don’t have any part of me.”

Sid nodded, poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “So, you think that, if a kid has your DNA—"

“My father fucked me up, Sid,” I told him, as if he didn’t already know. “And I’m worried … I’m fucking terrified that … what if it’s genetic? What if this kid is born and I just …”

“What? You think you’re gonna snap the second your wife pops your kid out?”

It sounded ridiculous when he put it that way, and I rolled my eyes. “I’m not … I’m not saying that. I’m—"

“Max, dude …”

He ran his hand through his floppy hair. I liked mine shorter—it was easier that way—but Sid had let his grow out a bit over the years since the Army. He said Grace preferred it that way, and so he preferred it that way too.

He exhaled and leveled me with a glare. “I’m gonna say something, and I want you to listen to me, okay?”

“Yeah, okay. Sure.”

He reached out with both hands, pressing them to my cheeks.

“Your father is the biggest fuckin’ asshole I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.

I tolerate him because, for some fucking reason, my wife wants a relationship with him.

But I don’t like him, I’ve never liked him, and I’m never going to like him. ”

“Okay,” I said, wondering where exactly he was going with this.

He removed one hand from my face and held up a finger. “But you wanna know who I do like? ”

I sighed and grumbled, “Who?”

His finger poked at my chest. “I like Max ,” he said, enunciating every word with a tap, tap, tap over my heart.

I groaned, wishing I’d known better than to think he’d take this situation seriously. I brushed his finger off my chest and moved to stand up, but he moved his hands to my shoulders and held me on the spot. I’d continued to work out since the military, but Sid was still stronger.

“I love you, man. Do you think I’d love you if you were an asshole? Do you think I’d love you if you were like him?”

I couldn’t bring my eyes to meet his gaze. “I dunno …”

“The answer is no. I wouldn’t. I’d fuckin’ hate you too. But I don’t.”

I rolled my lips between my teeth and fought the knee-jerk reaction to protest.

“And it wasn’t you who turned your old man into an asshole. I’m willing to bet he was an asshole long before you came around.” He dipped his head to find my diverted gaze. “You hearing me, Serg? You are not your dad.”

I felt his sincerity and found myself nodding, a ragged sigh ripping through me. “Something made him hate me, Sid.”

“Well, he’s a hateful kinda guy,” he said with a helpless shrug, like that explained everything. Like that made it okay .

“He doesn’t hate Grace or Lucy,” I pointed out, furrowing my brow.

“They’re the little princesses,” he countered, as if it was all so obvious.

“That’s how it is with some families. Some kids get the love the others aren’t worthy of or some shit.

Maybe it’s because you’re the boy. Maybe it’s a sexist thing.

Or … I don’t know. Maybe he hates that you’re not more like him.

Maybe he hates that he couldn’t break you the way his dad broke him. ”

There could’ve been truth to that. I had never met any of my grandparents.

They’d all been dead by the time I came around—or at least as far as I knew.

It was certainly a possibility that Dad’s father had beaten the shit out of him and broken his spirit, and so that was the only way Dad had known to raise me.

Maybe it went back to my great-great-great-grandfather, a multigenerational cycle that couldn’t be broken.

Until me.

I made up my mind then that Sid was right. I had a choice. I wasn’t like my father now, and I wouldn’t be like him after my son or daughter was born. I would be good . I would be forgiving . I would be every bit of the man I was now but better.

I drove home to my wife as fast as the speed limits would allow and apologized profusely for leaving. But she’d never been upset to begin with. She understood and blamed me for nothing, which was far more than I deserved for running when I should’ve stayed.

“We need a bigger house,” I said, pulling her into my arms.

Laura smiled against my chest. “I was thinking the same thing. Where do you want to live?”

“Somewhere closer to work, I think,” I replied, tipping my chin to touch the top of her head. “Maybe somewhere on the water.”

She sighed happily, content. “Yeah. I think we’d all like that.”