Page 63 of The Yips

“But, Sam, what if he wants to take him?” While not knowing Tom’s last name was true, I had selfishly loved having Crew to myself. Yes, it was a lot of work, scary as hell, and incredibly lonely, but Crew was mine and mine alone. I had started to share him with Sam, but we were both getting to know him and learning to trust him. Crew’s father might share DNA with my son, but he was a stranger, an abstract.

Sam shook his head, “That’s not going to happen. He may want to know him and spend time with him, but no judge would look at you as his mother and think anyone would do a better job at this. And I would go bankruptbefore I would let that happen. He can help us find him, and then you can make the call on what to do.”

I found it impossible not to gain some measure of reassurance in Sam’s statement, “So even if he finds him, I don’t need to tell him?”

“Not right now, but if I ever planned to adopt Crew, we would need him to sign away his parental rights.”

“Even if his name isn’t on the birth certificate?” I had left the father blank on the birth worksheet. Only having his father’s first name made it a little challenging to fill in his name.

“Yes.”

“You’ve already checked into this?” I asked incredulously. Here I was, wondering if I could leave a couple of changes of clothing behind at Sam’s place, and he had checked adoption laws, just in case.

“I did. I haven’t dated anyone seriously, as I’ve told you before. I had reasons related to my parents and my experiences of being caught in the fallout of their disastrous marriage. I met you, and I felt ready to take the risk. I needed to look into all possibilities because I knew losing either of you wouldn’t be something I could recover from. So yes, I’m at least four steps ahead, but Crew’s existence makes that necessary.”

Sam’s green eyes searched my face for a reaction, and I knew he wanted reassurance that he hadn’t overstepped. “You’d want to be a father to Crew?”

“You guys are a package deal. There is no way to separate my feelings for you from mine for him. But the more I get to know you, the more I wish that it had been me that you’d met in Cancun. I wish I’d been there through every single day of your pregnancy. I wish I’d held your hand and coached you when you gave birth to him and cut the cord.And while I will never get that, knowing how I feel for missing it, I could never prevent another man from knowing and loving him. But I would destroy that man if he did anything to hurt either one of you.”

In Sam, I recognized fear as one of the drivers of his actions. He feared losing us, the same as I feared what would happen if and when we found his biological father.

CHAPTER 56

Sam

Iwoke to my phone ringing at five the following day and immediately worried that there was an issue with Crew. Kelsey still slept soundly beside me, and her phone was dark, with no sign of a message. I stumbled across the bedroom when my phone rang again, and I rifled through my discarded clothes to find the source. Monica. She wouldn’t be calling me at this time unless shit had hit the fan.

“Hello?” I huffed out in a panic.

“Sam,” Monica breathed out. “I’m sorry to call, but it’s your father.”

“What happened?” I asked, my heart hammered in my chest. I’d waited for this call for the last sixteen years, but nothing could have prepared me for when it finally arrived.

“He’s in the hospital, recovering. But Sam, he’d devolved overnight. When you feel up to it, you need to listen to the voicemails he left you. He had a fall. And yes, he was intoxicated.”

“How bad was the fall?”

“It was out a window. It’s not clear if it wasa failed suicide attempt or an accident. But he got lucky.” Fuck, suicide? Had things gotten so bad for my father that he’d felt like that was his only option? Did I miss the signs because I selfishly cut him off?

Kelsey had woken up and was trying to figure out what had happened from my one-sided conversation. I covered the mouthpiece and said to her, “It’s my dad.” Her eyes widened, and she immediately covered the distance from the bed to where I stood. I turned the phone on speaker so she could hear what Monica said.

“Where is he now?”

Monica gave me the hospital address as Kelsey started to get dressed and pulled out some clothes for me. Would this have happened if he’d been able to contact me? Fuck, what if my boundaries had pushed him to the edge?

“Monica, can you tell them I won’t be at the game tonight? Tell them it’s a family emergency.” I wasn’t supposed to miss games; my contract required me to be in the bullpen, even on nights I wasn’t pitching. Shit, guys had to fight to get time off when they had babies, but I trusted Monica to work with the team, and I’d figure out my consequences later.

“Of course, do you want me to call you a car to bring you to the hospital?”

“Yes, please.”

I hung up the phone and turned to Kelsey, my hands shaking as I reached for her. “Can you come with me?” I didn’t know what I was walking into, but I didn’t want to handle it alone.

“Of course, do we have time for me to nurse Crew first? If not, my dad should have plenty of milk.”

“Yeah, he’s stable. I don’t think twenty minutes will make a difference.”

“Okay. I’ll be quick. I promise,” she said, slipping out the door.

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