I’d like to say that I followed her up those stairs. That I chased her the way she chased me, never giving her one single moment to doubt my feelings for her.

Or her feelings for me.

But I didn’t.

I sat on that bench for a long time. The wind picked up the edge of the stack of napkins she’d been using to insulate her hand against the heat of her Styrofoam cup and blew them off the bench, and I lurched to my feet and grabbed them before they could be carried down the street.

And somehow that was enough, that movement once started, propelled me around the building and up those rickety stairs, so much like the stairs at the Moonlight that it was eerie.

The door wasn’t locked and it opened soundlessly under my hand, and I walked into her apartment. The galley kitchen with the double sink and the window looking over the alley. There was a coffee maker and a hot pot and that was about all.

The kitchen opened up into an empty living room with a TV and a couch and a pregnant woman crying on it.

She got up on her feet as soon as she saw me, wiping her tears away angrily, and I could see by the set of her face that she’d started to believe I wasn’t coming.

That I would reward her bravery by running away like a coward.

“I don’t think I could love you,” I said and she flinched back, her mouth slack on a sob. I stepped closer. “I already love you. I didn’t leave that voicemail just because I was scared. I left that voicemail because I couldn’t die without telling you that.”

It was my truth as real as I had, but I wasn’t done.

“I loved you from the second you walked over and asked me what I was reading. From the moment you surprised yourself talking about that book, talking about your own intelligence that you’ve always underestimated. But my love…my love has little value,” I told her. “I don’t know what I bring to you but the blood on my hands.”

“I think,” she whispered, “that you have always underestimated your love. And if you love me, let me tell you as an authority.” Tears spilled from her eyes and I felt my own welling up in turn. “Your love has tremendous value. Your love might be the most valuable thing I have.”

“I have spent so long pushing aside everything I would reach for…”

“I’m right here, Jack,” she said, smiling through those tears. “It’s not that hard.”

Oh, I loved that she called me out. That there was room in all this worry and grief for joy too. I wasn’t all tragedy.

The thought was a thunderbolt in my head and I grabbed this woman of joy and glitter and sunshine and I pulled her against me. Held her to me.

And she held me just as hard, showing me with her strength and her intelligence and her beauty just how much value I had.

“What’s next?” I asked.

“Sex,” she said.

“Yeah?”

She stepped back, leading me from the apartment’s living room to the bedroom. The clouds had covered the sun and outside there was a crack of thunder, and it felt like a gift. A rainy day in bed with my woman. I pulled off her shirt, and there, pressed against mine, was the small mound of our baby.

“Our baby,” I said. The words sinking in, in a way I’d never let them before. Before, the baby was something I could not have, so I did not think of it.

“Oh my god, our baby!” I gasped again, looking up at Abby with wide eyes. “Jesus. Fuck. What are we going to do?”

She tipped her head back, all that beautiful hair falling down her back, and she laughed and laughed.

“We’re going to love this baby, Jack,” she said. “It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Not right now.”

I liked that answer. I liked it a lot.

I walked her backward a few more steps until her legs hit the bed, and she sat down on the edge, and I fell to my knees in front of her, eye level with her stomach.

“Can I?” I asked, lifting my hand to touch her.

She nodded, eyes full again, and I put my hands to her stomach.

“It’s hard,” I said with a giddy sense of wonder. My hands felt huge against this small miracle, and I put my hands over the width of it, covering it from her hip bone to her hip bone, from the top of the mound to the downward slope of it under the elastic waistband of her pants.

I was, in a way, holding our baby.

Beneath the heel of my left hand I felt a bubble. A flutter. A here-and-then-gone sensation that I thought I might have imagined, except that Abby shrieked and put her hand over mine.

“Did you feel that?” she breathed.

I nodded, incapable of words.

“That was the baby.” We stared at each other until I couldn’t stand it anymore and I had to hold her in my arms. I stood and got into that bed with her, fully dressed. I kicked off my shoes and pulled her into my arms and I planned on never letting her go.