“But I’m... I don’t know how to explain it. I’m the same. I’m...alone.”

“You have us.”

Yes. She did. The family she’d crashed.

“I know. I don’t mean that but I... I look at my mom and I see someone so bitter about everything. So stuck in these choices she made, and I don’t want to become that. I don’t want to realize someday that I missed out on something I really wanted.”

You’d be a terrible mother.

Rage kicked in her chest. Rage and a desire to prove her mother wrong.

“I want to be more than I am. More than she thinks I can be. Just... Ryder...” She turned to face him finally, and the look in his brown eyes nearly took her breath away. But she continued on anyway because her mind was made up, and it was too late to turn back now. “I think I want to have a baby.”

CHAPTER TWO

A LOT OF strange things had come out of Sammy’s mouth in the past seventeen years, and Ryder had been audience to many of them. But he had to admit that this one was up there as far as crazy went.

“You...want to have a baby.”

“Yes,” she said. “I want... I want a family. You know that. You know what my home life was like. You’re the only one who does. And you know that I...”

“It’s not a labradoodle, Sammy,” he said. “You don’t just decide to go get one.”

“Why not?” She was worked up, that Sammy energy crackling around her like a glitter fire that he could feel somehow rather than see. “My mom told me I don’t understand her because I don’t have a kid. Can you believe that? Of all the insulting... I don’t need to have a child to know that she didn’t protect me. To know that I’d do better. And I want to. It’s my chance, Ryder. To know what it really means to have a mother-child relationship, because God knows I’m not going to get it with mine.”

“But there are other things you might want to get first.”

“You think I need white picket fences and a soul mate? Why should I sit around waiting to go through some magic chain of steps to have the life that I want? It doesn’t make any sense. That’s how you end up brittle and alone.”

He couldn’t make sense of that. Because as far as he was concerned life could only function by the chain of command that it ran in. And when things went out of order on that chain, life got particularly unpleasant.

Yes, children expected to bury their parents. But not when they were eighteen. Not both parents at the same time. An aunt and uncle, a woman who might as well have been an aunt to him. There was no order to that. To all those little kids that were left behind without parents.

Parents were supposed to sacrifice for their children. And when they didn’t you ended up with a situation like Sammy had.