“I’ll step up for Jack, we don’t have any games to play until the season starts up again and I’ll tell coach I need a leave of absence from training. Lyndsey can look after the shop. She has keys and has been there for as long as Jack has been alive – the place isn’t going to up and run away.” The more I talk, the more sense it makes, it sounds like a practised argument even if I am just spitballing.

“So, what? You’ll sleep on my couch and take over as head parent while I do nothing all day?” She thinks I’m being over the top but she is underestimating the lengths I will go to for the people I love.

“No—” I start, but she interrupts.

“Exactly.”

“You and Jack will move into my place, there’s no way I’m sleeping on a couch when I’m six foot four,” I say. Before she has a chance to shoot that down, I tell her the rest of my master plan that I am making up on the spot: “You can both have your own rooms if you aren’t ready to be in mine, there are plenty of them. Edge lives two minutes away if we need him, but I know we won’t because I am going to be the best nurse you could ask for.”

“Th-that… actually sounds like a good idea?” she says with some disbelief in her voice. Hell, yeah it does, I think. It will take time, but I have four more months of pregnancy and hopefully the rest of our lives where I am going to be by her side, being her support because there is nowhere else in the world I would rather be.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ellis

I’m not an ungrateful person. When someone holds a door open for me, I always thank them and I never take simple things for granted. But I keep thinking something super ungrateful: I hate being in Liam’s house.

Don’t get me wrong, the guest bedroom is beautiful and full of light and he is waiting on me hand and foot – but that’s part of the problem.

My flat isn’t a big posh mansion, but it is mine. I have my own room here at Liam’s, even have an en suite bathroom. But it feels more like a hotel room than a home. I am just a visitor passing through until another guest fills the room.

I feel so out of my depth being the centre of attention. Liam checks on me every hour to see if I am comfortable or if I need anything and it should be a dream. For the first day and a half it was, but now I’ve been bedbound for three weeks and nobody lets me move.