Not a baby. Not...her. In whatever capacity he was imagining he might have her.

He’d offered to marry her.

And he’d never wanted any of that.

Because he hadn’t wanted to do any of that all over again.

“I just don’t want this to ruin us.”

“I already told you,” he said, the words coming out gruff. “Nothing’s going to ruin us.”

“You said that,” she said. “And I believed you. Until... I didn’t know, Ryder. I didn’t know it would feel like that.”

He felt like she’d just set a ton of bricks on his chest. He did his best to shove them off. “Of course you didn’t. You’ve never had decent sex.”

“It’s more than that,” she said.

“What’s the point of it being more than that?”

She sighed heavily and then disappeared back into the kitchen, returning a few moments later with a platter of bacon and eggs.

She retreated one last time and came back with mugs of coffee. Then she sat across from him and started to fill her plate. He just sat there looking at the sugar cube.

“I don’t know what the point is at all,” she whispered. “But I’m not going to go out and have a baby with somebody random.”

“You aren’t?”

She shook her head. “No. I need to figure out what my problem is. Because it’s something to do with me. It’s something to do with being unhappy with where my life is, and I don’t know what that is. I mean, I’m happy with my business. It’s going pretty well. Is it as simple as being jealous that Pansy found a way to be normal?”

He didn’t quite know what to say to that. “I don’t know. Is Pansy normal?”

“She’s getting married. She fell in love. I told myself that I didn’t ever want to be normal anyway. But the problem is I kind of suspect that I just can’t be. Because nobody ever attached to me, and I had to force my way into this...quilt.”

“We were always happy to have you,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “But you can’t erase the early memory stuff.”

“You can’t?”

“I talked to Logan last night.”

He curled his hands into fists, a strange sensation raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Jealousy? Was he genuinely jealous of Logan because she talked to him?

Well, yeah. Because she talked to him after she left his bed. And what the hell was that?

“I ran into him on my way out. So he may have figured out that something is going on between us.” She sighed. “He’s like me. I mean, we’re not really family, are we? And we both want to be. We both... We both have parents that are out there. They don’t want us. He got me thinking. About how much you all mean to me. And about the things that I try to avoid. Namely that however much I might want to be, I’m not part of you guys. Not in any way other than this kind of enforced way. And sometimes... Sometimes that hurts me. The reminder of it hurts me. And...”