My neighbor, Susan, brought over a sterilizer and enough baby clothes to fill an entire dresser.
By midnight, our living room looked like a small nursery had exploded inside it.
Neither baby seemed interested in sleeping for more than an hour.
When Ava finally settled, Lily woke.
When Lily stopped crying, Ava needed changing.
At two in the morning, I found Josh sitting on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets, feeding Lily while trying to finish a history assignment on his laptop.
Something inside me broke.
“Go to bed,” I told him.
“I’m okay.”
“You have school tomorrow.”
“So do other teenagers with babies.”
“These are not your babies.”
“They’re my sisters.”
“And you are their brother, not their parent.”
He stared at the bottle.
“Dad said the same thing.”
“When?”
“Before he passed out. He kept saying he was sorry. He said I shouldn’t have to fix his mistakes.”
For once, Daniel and I agreed.
I sat beside Josh on the floor.
“Why did you contact him?” I asked.
Josh was silent for a long time.
“He contacted me first.”
“How?”
“Through social media. He sent me a message on my birthday.”
My chest tightened.
“What did he say?”
“That he didn’t expect forgiveness. He just wanted me to know he thought about me every day.”
“And you believed him?”
“I didn’t at first.”
“But you replied.”
“Two weeks later.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
His jaw tightened.
“Because every time someone mentioned Dad, your whole face changed. You tried to hide it, but I saw it.”
“I would never have stopped you from speaking to him.”
“I didn’t know that.”
The answer hurt because it was honest.
I had spent five years building a safe home for Josh, but perhaps I had also built walls so high that he had learned to hide parts of himself inside them.
“What were the meetings like?” I asked.
“Awkward.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled.
“He apologized a lot. I didn’t make it easy for him.”
“Good.”
“He told me leaving was the worst thing he’d ever done. He said he had convinced himself that you and I would be better without him.”
“That sounds like something cowards tell themselves.”
Josh nodded.
“I told him that.”
This time, I did smile.
Then Josh’s expression changed.
“When Claire got pregnant, Dad was terrified. He kept saying he didn’t deserve another chance to be a father.”
“And yet he took one.”
“He was trying, Mom.”
I wanted to dismiss that.
But Josh had seen something I hadn’t.
Maybe Daniel had changed. Maybe he hadn’t.
What mattered was that Josh believed his father was trying—and Josh needed space to understand that relationship for himself.
“I’m angry you lied to me,” I said. “But I’m even more upset that you thought you had to handle all of this alone.”
“I didn’t want you to think I loved you less.”
