What he’d said to her then had been true.

People didn’t not love you because of something wrong with you. It was always something with them.

And there was something with him.

That was the thing.

What he felt for Sammy was some kind of sickness. An intensity that made it so he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think clearly. Not like the sweetness shared by his parents. Damn it all, he worried. He worried what it would be like, over the course of years, for anyone to be in a house with them.

He looked at her and it felt like bleeding.

He felt love for his family. Though it wasn’t an easy thing. More like a bonding that couldn’t be undone. Forged in the kind of fire that you would never walk through on purpose. He didn’t have it in him to love, not the way that he watched his parents do it.

Theirs had been something wonderful, had brightened up the whole house. Easy and companionable and the kind of emotion he didn’t think he had the ability to feel.

For him, connections to people would always be double-edged, because the more you care, the more you feared losing them.

And yeah, having this baby was a miracle, but it was a burden, too. Because there was a burden to caring. To having something that small and vulnerable be your responsibility. Yeah, it was something.

But he was handling things the way that he knew to do it. Taking control. Taking ownership.

It was what he did.

It was how he made it better. How he made it work.

“We’re happy for you,” Colt said. “But are you happy for yourself? Because Sammy deserves someone who thinks this is happy.”

“She’s got me,” Ryder said. And somehow, he felt like that was a metaphor for everyone’s life that was here.

They had deserved something else. They had gotten him. Maybe he was supposed to have something else, but he’d gotten them.

Not that it was... Not that he resented it. Especially not Sammy.

Because God knew there was nothing else.

No one else but her.

But it was just that... Well, maybe they’d all deserve to feel a whole lot differently. To love a whole lot more differently. To live a whole lot more differently. But they’d gotten the parents they’d gotten; they’d lost them when they had.

And in the end they’d been left with the things they’d been left with. Sammy had come to him because he was next door. Not because she had an endless array of saviors to choose from. But because he was the only savior on hand. It was all well and good, but it wasn’t the same as...people who went through life with the support group you were meant to have. The parents that you were meant to have. Parents who lived. Parents who loved you.

Not parents who would hit you for asking where that love was.

His blood burned.

Now that he knew. Now that he knew what Sammy had done. Dared to ask for what should have been hers by birth.