Page 60 of Baby Daddy Billionaire SEAL

There was a directory posted beside them, and one line readNeonatal Ward.

The next thing I knew, I was in the elevator pushing the button for the fourth floor. I was whisked upward, away from Olivia, but there was no escape from my thoughts.

The door opened on a hallway with softer lighting than the industrial hall I had left downstairs. The quietness hung heavy in the air. I took a step outside, noting some robed women in wheelchairs with males standing next to them and some men standing alone.

I approached the wide window on one side of the hall and gazed in, knowing already what I would see. Rows and rows of bassinets, nurses moving among them. I could see the infants lying inside.

I felt no particular pull toward any of them. It wasn’t the idea of a baby that was making me feel as if my insides had been turned inside out. It was something else.

“Which one is yours?”

I looked down. A young woman in a wheelchair had pulled up alongside me. “Oh,” I said. “None of them. I mean, I don’t have one.”

“Oh.” She frowned.

I realized I looked a little creepy. “I came up here because I just found out my… my girlfriend is pregnant.” She wasn’t my girlfriend—did I want her to be? I wasn’t sure. Even though it wasn’t accurate, I only knew that girlfriend was the simplest way to categorize what she was to me.

“Oh,” the woman said. I thought she might congratulate me, but she gave me a measured look as if she fully understood that this was complicated news. “Are congratulations in order?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted.

“It’s big news.”

“You’re a new mother. Aren’t you?” I would have expected that she would expectmeto be overjoyed about the news of an impending baby.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s why I know how complicated it can be to get this news when you weren’t expecting it. I wasn’t expecting my baby. He was a surprise to me. And I’m overjoyed to have him now, but there were some complicated days in the beginning. And I know my boyfriend felt the same way.”

Maybe she could help me. “What did your boyfriend do when he found out?”

“He freaked,” she said, smiling fondly as if having your boyfriend freak out at your pregnancy was something to feel nostalgic about. “He wasn’t ready at all. Well, neither was I, to be honest with you.”

“But he told you he’d stand by your side and support you and the baby?” I guessed.

“Actually, we almost split up over it.”

“Why?” I was surprised to hear it—surprised and a little worried. She seemed like the picture of happiness now. If someone so tranquil could almost end her relationship over a surprise pregnancy, it was a lot to hope that Olivia and I—who had never been tranquil—could make it work.

“We weren’t sure we wanted the same things,” she explained. “He wanted to get married and settle down, and I’ve never wanted that. I like to travel. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to that side of my life. I told him he was putting too much pressure on me and that I didn’t want to keep the baby, and he told me I was being selfish—it was one of the worst arguments we’ve ever had.”

“But you seem fine now.”

“Well, sometimes you say things you don’t really mean in stressful situations,” she said. “And I didn’t mean the things I said, and neither did he. Once we’d calmed down a little, we were able to come to a compromise. We agreed to keep the baby but decided not to get married and that instead of settling down, we’d keep living our nomadic life.”

I nodded slowly. “I wouldn’t have even thought something like that would be possible with a baby.”

“Neither did my boyfriend,” she said with a little laugh. “But I convinced him in the end.”

“Which one is yours?”

She pointed. “On the end of the row there. Isn’t he beautiful?”

He probably was. I didn’t know enough about babies to have an opinion on the matter. They all looked the same to me.

I wondered if I would feel that way when it was my own baby.

My own baby. I was already thinking about the kid as if it existed. I had already made this decision in my heart.

The woman in the chair was watching me. Maybe she’d seen it on my face. “You need to tell her,” she murmured. “It’s that simple.”

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