I had a feeling that’s what he would say. Every night, he stayed late enough to put Mo to bed. I lightly patted Mo’s bottom and then ran my hand up her spine as she made a little whimpering sound against my chest, since she’d leaned totally against me, needing me to hold her up. My poor baby. “Come on then, you.”

The three of us headed up the stairs, the sound of voices and laughter from the deck making their way up the stairs as well, the same sound I had heard so many times growing up when people would come over. There were always so many voices at the house it never felt empty. It reminded me of who I was and what I had.

I started humming to Mo, then turned into her doorway—the fourth one on the floor—the one in the middle of all the bedrooms, feeling the heat of Jonah’s body directly behind me when I stopped briefly. Flicking the lamp switch on with my foot, I carried our girl in.

I glanced at him as I moved to lower Mo into her crib. “Can you turn on the sound machine? Just press the button in the center,” I asked him as I started to massage the bottom of her foot the way she liked; that usually helped put her to bed. Every other time he’d been upstairs with us, he’d been the one carrying her. For “practice.”

He did it. And I took the time to move my eyes around the pretty neat room we had all pitched in to set up for her before she’d come along. It was the most well decorated room in the entire house. With light gray walls, a crib that one of Grandpa’s friends had handed down to us for a deal of one hundred bucks, and with a white dresser she would grow into, an enormous stuffed giraffe that had also been a hand-me-down gift, and a rocking chair in the corner… I liked it. I liked it a lot more than my plain-ass room.

Jonah came to stand beside me as I kept on rubbing the tiny foot that had slowly stretched to get closer to me as she relaxed.

“Look how tired she is,” I whispered, trying to stifle a laugh. “Her mouth is already falling open.”

Jonah covered his mouth and nose to muffle his chuckle as he gazed down at Mo lying in her crib, trying her hardest to keep her eyes open even as her little mouth gaped wide enough for a fly to go into it.

It was so fucking adorable.

I wished I hadn’t left my phone downstairs so I could take a picture.

“She’s so cute. I can’t even be mad or annoyed with her for keeping me up last night,” I whispered to him.

“Did she keep you up a lot before?”

Before. Right. “I barely slept the first… four months. She was waking me up every other hour to feed her or change her diaper, and I’d still constantly wake up to come check on her even if she didn’t make a peep. I worried that she’d stop breathing or someone would climb in the window while I was sleeping to steal her or something. It was kind of bad, but right after that, she started sleeping almost through the night.” I had done some difficult things in my life, but none of them were anywhere near as hard as this parenthood thing. I didn’t know the meaning of pressure until I had the responsibility of keeping a mini life alive.

But hey, she was still here, so I couldn’t be fucking up the job too badly.

At least not yet.

“I had an air mattress in here at first so that I wouldn’t have to walk all the way back to my room.” AKA all the fifteen feet down the hall, which had been more like a mile and half when I could barely keep my eyes open and my body hated me for the trauma I’d put it through after so long of taking care of it.

Jonah didn’t say a word, but I could hear his steady breathing beside me as I kept rubbing Mo’s sole, her little eyes fluttering closed and then reopening with a jolt, over and over again. I’d read her book too early, I guessed.

The sigh that came out of his mouth had me glancing over at him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Those two hands went to the top rail of the crib, fingers curling over the edge, his attention totally focused on the squirming body inside of it. “I can’t help but wonder… if I hadn’t gotten hurt, if I hadn’t gone off to my granddad’s farm to sulk about for so long… if I would’ve hardened up and come before or answered the damn phone or messaged you back or checked my fucking email… if I wouldn’t have felt sorry for myself like a selfish fucking arsehole….”

Oh.

That’s what he meant.

“I don’t know how you can forgive me for leaving you. For leaving you both,” he whispered in a voice rougher than I’d ever heard him capable of before.

He sounded so damn upset, it made my heart hurt, and I wasn’t expecting that.

His right hand reached inside the crib, and his thumb and index finger took hold of the other tiny heel just as he sighed. “I should’ve been here.”

Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve. One of my coaches had told me once that those were the most pointless set of words in the world. But you learn to live with them, you learn from them, or you let them weigh you down for life.

And maybe I had been pissed off at him for so long for not being around. But he was here now, and, mostly, I understood why he’d done what he did. Not totally, but mostly. He was sensitive and apparently shy.

I knew all about what I expected of myself. So I could understand the expectations someone else would put on themselves too. I wasn’t that much of a hypocrite.

Those shoulders of his were enormous, but there are certain weights that no one could bear.

Especially alone.

And really, seeing his profile, hearing his words, I couldn’t help but forgive him for what he’d done. He was going to beat himself up over it more than I ever would. He’d suffered enough maybe, I thought with surprise. I hadn’t even made a shitty comment to him in a while because there hadn’t been anything to complain about.

He should’ve been here, yeah. But he hadn’t. But he was now.

I didn’t hesitate to lean my shoulder against him, just a little, that ache in my heart still faintly there. “It would’ve been nice to have you around so I could blame you for all those months of morning sickness,” I told him quietly, sucking up the heat of his clothing against my bare arm. “Or to bitch when I was sleepy all the time, didn’t want to eat anything but fruit, and on the nights I couldn’t sleep or be comfortable or hold in my pee. It was rough. I was mad. Then I went through a period of feeling sorry for myself and confused and scared. I was worried the baby and I wouldn’t bond or that I would resent her because I thought my life was over.

“Those months were rough, and I wasn’t the same person. To a certain extent, I’m not the same person I was then or even before then.” That was the understatement of a lifetime. I hadn’t just been mad; I’d been hurt too. “I thought you didn’t want to have anything to do with us, and that pissed me off. But she’s here, and I’m here, and you’re here, and I love her so much I can never explain it, even to you. We can’t turn back time, but I thought we were trying to move forward. I haven’t thought about pushing you down the stairs in at least two weeks,” I tried to joke.

But he didn’t take it. Instead, Jonah murmured, “I’m so damn sorry.”

“I know you are.” Because I did.

“I wish I could go back in time and change it all.”