Page 39 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “I mean, it’s okay, but not for too long. I’m not supposed to have visitors.”
She turned and walked inside and they followed, exchanging glances as they went.
Inside the house, it was almost overwhelmingly hot thanks to a woodstove in one corner. It smelled of old, fried food. And it looked very much the way Knox expected. If the shacks in Devil’s Gorge had electricity and stained industrial carpets, they’d pretty much be this.
But it was still an upgrade. He hoped it really was. For her sake.
Shoshana went and sat on an exhausted-looking sofa in the middle of the room, curling her knees up beneath her. Knox thought she looked like a baby herself.
“How did you find me?” Shoshana asked. Her movements were a little jerky, but Knox thought that was adrenaline, not more dangerous substances. And that was something. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here. I needed to get away from my family for a while, that’s all, and my friend said I could stay here a while.” She looked from Knox to Ramona, then back again. “I didn’t think you knew who I was.”
“You didn’t just put my name on the birth certificate,” Knox reminded her. “You put yours, too.”
“Oh yeah,” she said, and sighed. “You have to.”
Knox looked over at Ramona, who was back in unreadable mode, but her gaze was fixed on the girl sitting before them. She had also sat down on the couch, and somehow managed to look as if she had never been more at ease in her life. She exuded everything is going to be fine like it was a perfume. No wonder she was already everyone’s favorite doctor.
And his favorite everything else, but that was going to have to wait.
He focused on the matter at hand. “I didn’t know your name until I saw it on the birth certificate,” he told Shoshana. “And I’m going to need you to walk me through how we went from me giving you a ride home from a questionable situation outside the Wolf Den in Marietta to you pretending that I’m the father of your baby on a birth certificate.”
Ramona shifted slightly at that, like she’d wanted those details more than he’d thought she did, but Knox kept looking at Shoshana.
The girl rubbed her palms over her face. “I just…”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Knox wasn’t sure she would. He was standing by the television, and he leaned forward, thinking he would ask the question a different way, maybe. But Ramona shook her head.
Wait, she mouthed.
Knox waited. And when Shoshana took her hands away, there were tears trickling down the side of her face in dark, black rivulets.
“That was a rough situation,” she agreed, her voice choked. But she kept going. “I shouldn’t have… That’s the thing about Johnny. You think he’s changed, but he never really does. Anyway, I shouldn’t have been there.” She focused on Knox, and swiped at the water on her face. “The thing is, you were the first man who was ever kind to me. Without asking for something. You know?”
Knox thought that the way she said that, so matter-of-factly and with such a wealth of hard-won, bitter experience in her voice, might have broken his heart all over again.
“I’m honored,” he told her, and he meant that. “And I don’t know what kind of situation you’re in now, but I’m guessing it isn’t great because you left Hailey with me.”
On a cold porch outside, but he didn’t need to remind either one of that. He figured that if it haunted him, it probably haunted her too.
He took a deep breath and pushed on, because there was something he needed to say to her and he didn’t want to say it. It actually hurt that he had to.
“If you want to keep your baby, Shoshana, I will help you do that,” he told her, and it took everything he had not just to say it, but to keep his voice steady. Even. He was pretty sure that Ramona’s eyes were welling up too. He kept his on Shoshana. “You don’t have to give her up if that’s not really what you want. I don’t know if leaving her was your choice, or someone made you, or—”
“No, no,” the girl said at once, shaking her head. She even held her hands up, as if to ward off the very idea. “I can’t have a baby. I can’t… She deserves better than all this.”
“So do you,” Knox told her gently.
Shoshana’s eyes filled, and she placed her fingers together in her lap. “That’s a very kind thing to say. You’re very kind. I know it’s not fair, what I did. But I kept thinking that she was just this innocent baby. That she was going to come out and end up like this, and I just couldn’t…” She shook her head again, dashing her hands across her eyes. “I want her to have a better life. And I know that you can give her that. Me?” She let out a hollow laugh. “They called me a lost cause in middle school. Maybe they were right, but I figured if I could do one good thing…”
She didn’t finish that. She looked away. And Knox, for the second time in two days, wanted to bodily remove a teenager from her situation—but the same rules applied today as they had yesterday. He couldn’t. Kidnapping was kidnapping no matter who was doing it. No matter what the reasons were.
“You must think I’m a terrible person,” Shoshana said in a broken sort of voice. “I know I would.”
She snuck a look at Ramona, who shook her head. “I don’t think anything of the kind,” she assured the girl. “You don’t seem like a terrible person to me at all. You seem like a mother who’s had to make one of the hardest choices possible.”
“I think you’re incredibly brave,” Knox added. He had no experience with teenagers. Just like he had no experience with babies. So he thought about the things his father had said to him when he was young and filled with too many feelings he couldn’t sort out. “There is no shame in admitting that things are hard and that you can’t do them. That’s not shameful at all. It’s real strength, Shoshana. Asking for help takes courage. You should be proud of yourself.”
Something about that rang in him, maybe a little too hard.
