Abby Girl: I’m so mad at you.

Jo-Jo: Jesus, again?

Abby Girl: Ugh, Joey, stop

Jo-Jo: What did I do now?

Abby Girl: You didn’t tell me you were home

Jo-Jo: you changed your number!

Abby Girl: Oh. That.

Jo-Jo: Well, I’m sorry, I’ve shipped out again.

Abby Girl: Why are you always leaving?

Jo-Jo: maybe next time, Abby.

I froze. Even in the fading twilight, I knew Abby didn’t want me to come any closer. “I’m sorry,” I started. I didn’t know how to fix this. All I knew was that leaving my parents, hearing my father tell me not to bother setting a foot in his house again, I’d walked away from all of it, for her. I felt like I was leaving for my second deployment all over again. I opened my mouth to tell her everything: “My father is an asshole.”

“Stop,” she said, exasperated. Zoey whimpered at her hip. “I can’t do this anymore, Joey.”

“What?” I backed up.

“I’m over this,” she sighed. “I’m tired of people judging me, hating me, leaving me behind. You’ll do it too, just like the rest of them.”

I wasn’t going to let her go this easy. I stepped forward and touched her arm. She pulled away. “Abby, tell me what happened that night. With Evan.”

“Didn’t your father explain it clear enough?” she snapped at me. “Just go, Joey. Leave us alone.”

“Is that what you really want?” I searched her eyes. I couldn’t tell if she was lying, and I was normally good at that sort of thing. Her face was a blend of anguish, sadness, and anger. I’d never seen her in this state before.

She stared at me.

“I just need to know what you want,” I said, exasperated. “God, Abby, I love you. I love Zoey. I’m not ready to let you both go that easily. Don’t send me away like this. I promise you I’m never going to leave you behind.”

“I’m pregnant,” she blurted, and every thought I’d had of going to one knee fled from my mind.

I felt like she’d shot me. I stumbled backward. “You’re what?”

She met my stare fiercely. “Congratulations, Joey Harrison. You’re going to be a dad.”

Zoey looked between us, her little face twisted in confusion. “Mommy?”

“How?” I couldn’t get the words out. “How did this happen?”

She glared at me. “You see, Joey, when a man and woman love each other very much, things happen—”

“Stop,” I held my hand up, not amused at her joke. “I know how it happens. I meant, ya know. Shit, Abby. Are you sure?”

“Call my sister, she saw the test.” She turned away from me and headed toward the house.

I followed her; something had changed between us and I wasn’t sure she wanted me to go away now. “Where are you going? We need to talk about this.”

She spun at the front door, hoisting Zoey higher on her hip. “I swear to Christ, Joey, if the next words out of your mouth are: ‘will you keep it’ I will punch you in the throat. While holding a baby. Because I’m that badass.”

“I have no doubt that you actually will.” Damn this woman! She opened the door and I froze on the threshold. “At least let me come in and kiss Zoey goodnight?”

She shrugged. “If you want.”

I shut the door behind me and locked it. She threw me a look but said nothing. I shrugged—we didn’t need another Malachai incident, even if that bastard was locked up. She padded down the hallway and I followed.

She changed Zoey and put her down, flipped on the video baby monitor next to the crib and turned to me. I eased past her and kissed Zoey on the forehead. She smiled up at me, but her eyes were already rolling to the back of her head in exhaustion. I gently shut the door behind me.

“Why are you still here?” Abby asked, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Zoey.” I didn’t have any other excuse, but then one hit me. “Just to make sure you two are safe. Habit.”

Abby shook her head. “Fine, whatever. God, I need a drink.” She headed to the kitchen without even seeing if I would follow.

We sat at the table a few minutes later with tumblers of some girly blue liqueur she had in her freezer. “You don’t drink much, do you?” I asked her as I choked down a gulp. It was painfully awful.

“It was Evan’s. A mixer, I think.”

“Jesus, you need whiskey.”

“I hate whiskey.”

“Tequila then?”

“Joey.” She looked at me. “Why are you still here, anyway?”

“I don’t have anywhere to go, really,” I answered honestly.

“Well, there’s Randy’s.”

“Randy lives in the dorm, four hours away.”

“Sam?”

“Sam has kids!”

“Jason?”

“Jason? From class?” I sputtered. “Fuck that guy. He annoys me.”

“You don’t have to grade his papers. Jesus, he can’t figure out that Lincoln lived in the nineteenth century and not the twentieth, and don’t get me started on his views about slavery.”

“Uh-uh!” I interrupted. “Zoey can hear you.”

She just glared at me. “She’s out like a light. Your father’s yelling saw to that.”

We sat there in silence for a minute, tasting the awful alcohol. I suddenly realized something and snatched the tumbler away.

“Hey!”

“Pregnant women can’t drink!”

“I—oh, shit. You’re right. Damn it! Oh well, it tastes like crap anyway.”

“You swear a lot when you’re tired, you know that?”

She groaned.

“It’s cute.” I downed my tumbler and hers one right after the other. “I hate to tell you this, but now I can’t drive. You wouldn’t send me away drunk, would you?”

“Goddammit,” she mumbled under her breath. She pulled her hair down and pressed her hand to her head, her golden curls cascading around her face. “God, I’m having a baby.”

I pulled a hand away and squeezed it. “I meant what I said out there. That means we are having a baby.”

“I’m sorry, Joey.”

“Shh.” I pulled her other hand away and kissed her. “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

“I need to eat. I haven’t all day.”

“Fine, I’ll fix you something. Eggs?”

She nodded. “I think I can handle eggs.”

I nearly skipped around the kitchen fixing her a meal. I was going to be a dad—I couldn’t get the mantra out of my head, or my heart.

Daddy.

Zoey had called me that a few weeks ago.

Technically, I already was.

“Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked Abby as we lay in bed the next morning. Abby had been up early, hit with the sickness she’d been hiding from me for the last couple of weeks.

“I’m just glad the term is almost over,” she had told me as she slid back into bed. “What time is it?” She groaned, looking at the clock. “Five in the morning? Ugh!” She pulled the blankets over her head. “I’ll never get back to sleep before the alarm goes off in an hour.”

I gently pulled them back down, wiping the sleep from my eyes. “Did you even hear me?”

She tried to glare at me but ended up laughing instead. “Who cares if it’s a boy or a girl? It’s ours.” She snuggled close to me and I wrapped my arm around her.

“I know I’m a dude and all, but maybe you should go see a doctor.”

She looked up at me. “Yeah, maybe. After finals, I definitely will. Soon.”

“Okay.”

“We get to hear the heartbeat then.” She smiled.

I kissed her forehead, but my toes wiggled under the blanket we shared. Was that what it felt like to be giddy? I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d felt this way. I told her as much.

Her lip trembled. “I wish Evan had been this excited.”

“He wasn’t?” I frowned.

“Well, all he said was, ‘I guess we have to get married now.’”

It was my turn to frown. “What?”

“His mom is crazy, remember? He had it in his head that she’d cut us from her will if we didn’t. So, I agreed.”

“Wow.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

I tipped her chin up. “Come now, surely there must be some part of you that protested?”

She shook her head, holding me closer. “He scared me most of the time. Even before he deployed. Evan was…fickle.”

I remembered Evan had a bit of an anger problem. It seemed to come from nowhere when we were kids. Even into high school, he had skipped class quite a bit. His anger at teachers, his parents, it seemed strange to me, but I had dismissed it, then.

“He did have his moments,” I said slowly.

“Moments?” Abby propped herself on her elbow. “Jesus. You have no idea. When he got out, just after Zoey was born, he used to disappear for days. He’d come back angry, convinced I had another man in the house. I had just started teaching then, and I couldn’t leave Zoey with my mom anymore. He used to harass them all the time about picking up Zoey. Even when he had been drinking.”

“Jesus,” I said. I couldn’t imagine. “Did he hurt you?”

Her lip trembled, and she nodded. “He broke my arm once.”

“He what?” It was my turn to sit up, but she pushed me down with her hand.

“Shh. It’s okay. It’s taken me a long time to realize that it wasn’t my fault, that he was an abusive asshole. It’s over now, thank God.”

The way she said it had red flags waving wildly in my head. Her definite statement, that it was over, made it sound like she’d ended it.

I ignored it as I ran my hand over her stomach. “I guess this is really one of those ‘when a door closes another opens’ moments, isn’t it?”

She stared at me, confused. “Even if Evan was still alive, I think we would end up together eventually.”

“Well, professor,” I hovered over her as she turned on her back, “why are you so sure of this?” I kissed her softly.

“Don’t call me that,” she said, glaring up at me. “I won’t let you.” She giggled as I touched her. “Okay, I might let you.”

Zoey’s piercing cry destroyed our intimate moment. I rolled back to my side of the bed. “Goddammit. Why is she up so early?”

“Get used to it,” she said, pushing out of the bed and throwing her robe on. “Soon we will have two.”

I was already out of bed and pulling on my shorts. “I’ll take care of Zoey. You get some rest. It’s the last week of class, and us students need you.”

“The students need me, or you need me?”

I smiled at her. “Both.”

She laughed and leaned backed in the bed, her hand absently on her abdomen.

I kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” I smiled.

Zoey was standing in her crib with one pajama-clad leg over the railing. “Hey now,” I said, scooping her up, “You can’t do that, little girl.”

“Daddy,” she said, wrapping her arms around my neck and placing a wet kiss on my cheek.

“You can call me that all day long, Zoey girl,” I told her as I hugged her.

Unfortunately, she was wide awake now, and I didn’t know if there was any chance of getting her back to bed. Abby insisted I was good with kids, but I wasn’t sure I agreed with her. I walked the hallway like Abby did, trying to get Zoey back to sleep, but to no avail.

I tried to think of all the ways my mother had got me to sleep. I had a vague memory of my childhood, as most people do, except I knew I had night terrors. I always thought horrible monsters were out to get me. What had my mother offered me to get me to sleep?

Milk, I remember. Warm milk.

It seemed so cliché, but would it work? I hadn’t ever seen Abby give it to her warm. As I passed our bedroom, I could hear Abby snoring softly. In her state, she needed all the rest she could get. I didn’t dare wake her.

So, I tried the milk.

If nothing else, it would calm Zoey down. I plopped on the couch with her next to me and put on cartoons. Something ridiculous with bubbles and puppies. I don’t know. I’d been up late studying, and as bad as it sounds, I started to nod off myself.

Before I knew it, Abby was kissing my forehead. I opened my eyes to see the sun had finally risen and streamed through the plastic over the broken kitchen window. She leaned over me, her hands on either side of my chest. “Well, if this isn’t the most beautiful sight first thing in the morning, I don’t know what is,” she said.

I felt a weight on top of me, and I looked down to see Zoey snuggled up on my chest, snoring softly. Her little eyes flittered as if she was waking up, then calmly slid shut again. I brushed her hair from her forehead.

“I don’t want to move her,” I whispered.

“It’s still early,” Abby said, “you have time. I’m gonna go.”

Still looking up from where she was behind the couch, I reached up and grabbed her hand as she drew away from me. “Marry me?”

Oh, damn it. I cursed myself silently. Why, Joey? Why did you let yourself say that?

She blinked at me, her eyes wide, her mouth open in shock. “Joey…”

I gently, slowly, adjusted Zoey so she wasn’t kicking me in the kidney. I was angry I’d let it slip so casually, but I’d always thought dramatic proposals were for pussies, anyway. I turned on the charm, instead, and smiled brilliantly. “Come on, would you say no to a guy who’s pinned under your daughter?”

She pulled her hand away. “It’s too soon. We’ve barely reconnected. It’s been four weeks.”

“But ‘I did my waiting!’” I tried to sound upset, but a chuckle erupted after it. “Eight years of it! In Afghanistan!” She eyed me. I couldn't tell if she was mad. “What? It sounds like Azkaban. It's pretty close, I think. There are dementors but they are dressed like insurgents and boy, do they suck the happy right out of…”

“You can’t win my heart by quoting Rowling!” She tried to yell at me in a whisper, but it just made me laugh even more.

“‘It’s hard being left behind!’” I quoted again.

“Is that The Time Traveler’s Wife?”

I nodded. “There’s not many options for reading in Afghanistan.”

“Joey.”

“If that doesn’t work, then there’s this: ‘There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison…’”

“Oh, come on, Austen? You haven’t read Austen.”

“I have, and I have more.” I paused, inhaling in preparation of my best British accent, which I was almost certainly going to butcher. “‘Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.’”

“Nice try, but you can’t swoon me with Wilde, either.”

“I can butcher some Byron pretty bad if you want.”

“Your British is really terrible.”

“Well, I never claimed to be good at this, baby.”

She shook her head, the jovial moment evaporating as soon as I dropped that word. I frowned, knowing I’d screwed up.

“I told you, after Evan, it’s difficult.” She chewed on her lip. “I can’t think about this at six in the morning, Jo-Jo!”

My heart leapt when she called me by my nickname. She hadn’t used that since high school. Somehow, it gave me hope. “I don’t mean right this second,” I added, trying to save face. “After our baby comes, at the end of the year maybe. I’m not asking you to give up everything. I’m just asking you to let me take care of Zoey and our little one.” So much for avoiding the dramatic proposal, ya pussy, I thought as soon as I’d said it.

“I’ll think about it, okay?” She smiled as she said it. I knew the ‘yes’ was there, but I understood after Evan why she was hesitant.

“I’ll keep asking,” I whispered.

“I’ll keep saying no, er, maybe,” she chuckled softly. “Now shut up before you wake the baby.”

“Yes, dear.”

“I do rather like the sound of that,” she muttered as she turned away. “I rather do.”