Man, I just bet. Her whole life for the last few months had been one surprise after another, and not always in the best way. “It's a good surprise, I promise. Not like ‘here, this is your baby brother. You have to care for him now’ kind of a surprise.”

She let out a mirthless laugh. “I’d hope not. I’m not sure I could deal with another accidental half-brother.”

I slid my eyes to her quickly, then back to the road. She never said anything, but she gripped the door handle, or the steering wheel, a little too tightly whenever she drove. She hadn’t been in her parents’ accident, but there was still some kind of PTSD there. It was understandable. Hopefully, she was working through it with her therapist. I didn’t think we were at quite the stage of a relationship where we pointed out each other's trauma.

But I did have a question. “Did you ever consider not taking him?”

She didn’t shut me straight down, so that was a good sign for us, right? “It was a shock. And maybe for thirty seconds, I thought maybe he’d be better off with a loving family and not a twenty-four year old who has no idea. But then they said he had a heart condition, and all I could think was, what if he ended up with a family who couldn’t afford to give him proper care? What if they didn’t love him how I could? How my parents had loved me? I didn’t know you guys existed then. The rest of my reasons were selfish,” she said, flushing even in the darkness. “I just didn’t want to be alone anymore. I wanted one last connection to my dad.”

She turned her face away, but I reached over and squeezed her thigh reassuringly. “It’s okay. Our reasons were selfish too. But things worked out for the best.”

I got the baby and the girl, and if that wasn’t fucking perfect, what was?

We made small talk on the drive, the place we were going well away from the city lights. I found out her favorite foods, color, her first kiss, all that shit you talk about on a first date. We might be doing shit backward, but I still wanted to know Nova inside out.

Thirty minutes later, we made it to where we were going. Our headlights were the only things in the darkness of the country roads west of Ann Arbor. I drove through the gate and into a darkened field.

“Are you going to murder me and bury my body? Because you probably should have done that before the press took pictures of us together. Totally incriminating.”