“Are you comparing us to your parents?”

“It’s just... Look, I know how bad it can get.”

“Are you scared of me?” he asked.

She looked horrified by the very thought. “No,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you. But I’m afraid of what that forever stuff does to people. I’m afraid of the misery that you’ll expect because you signed a piece of paper. Because you stood up and made vows in front of everybody and said that you would. And we are happy. We’re happy like we are.”

“We are not going to stay like we are. There’s going to be a baby. And that changes things. It changes things a hell of a lot, Samantha. We can’t undo it. We can’t undo what is.”

“But why not?” She blinked furiously, the terror rolling off her and turning into something else inside him. It was one thing when she was afraid of something and it wasn’t him. He wanted to fight that battle for her. He wanted to fight every battle for her. But he didn’t know what the hell to do when he seemed to be the battle. When she was looking at him and acting like his proposal of marriage was the worst thing that could possibly happen. “Why can’t we make a new reality? That’s what you did here. And all right, maybe you don’t consider me part of the family, but I’ve always considered myself part of it. I wanted to be here. So badly. Because I lived in that life that was supposed to be right. A mother and a father who were married. And I was miserable. Every day I had to apologize for being. And when I left there, when I came to you, I promised I wouldn’t do that anymore. And I haven’t. I got to grow up in the most amazing place in all the world because of you. Because you rescued me. And because you were all brave enough to make a family out of something else. To sew it together using leftover pieces, and I’ve always felt lucky enough to be one of those pieces.”

“But we are not left over,” he said, his voice rough. “You and me, we’re something real. We get to make a choice, Sammy. What we are, what we’re going to be. What we want to be. For our baby. Our baby.”

He had feared this moment. All of his life.

That he would get to this stage where he was finally free, and then he wouldn’t be. But the reality was if he didn’t have Sammy with him, he wasn’t all that free. If this child was out there in the world and he didn’t have access to him, he wasn’t all that free.

It was a new version of freedom, that was for sure.

But then, he never felt more himself than when he was in bed with Sammy, so being with her could never be a prison.

“I’m scared,” she said.