Had to be wrong.
She’d tried to call him months ago. And when she’d been unable to reach him, she had been frantic enough to try to track him through the band.
And then Carmela had sought him out at the club.
What friend looked up a guy a year later after he’d supposedly duped her friend, saying he had to go see her?
The woman had had an almost desperate urgency about her in the bar the other night.
Every nerve tight to the point of pain, Nolan stood there on the doorstep, watching as Lizzie moved out of sight, going farther into the living room, which he knew from his previous occupancy of the apartment.
The crying stopped almost immediately.
“It’s okay, baby girl, I’m right here.” He heard her voice, a tone he didn’t recognize and yet reacted to fiercely with a melting inside that he couldn’t prevent.
And then she was back, his Lizzie, holding a tiny little body with flailing arms and the biggest, roundest wide-open brown eyes that were staring right at him.
Through him.
The pink one-piece thing had hearts all over it. Varying sizes, some white, some yellow, some a darker pink. He couldn’t stop staring at those hearts.
Pink. A girl?
He wanted to ask what Carmela had named her baby, how long Lizzie would be babysitting, but the truth wasn’t letting him breathe, let alone talk.
“Her name’s Stella,” Lizzie said, cradling the little thing who seemed perfectly content now that she was being held.
A girl. A baby girl.
Nolan wasn’t sure how long he stood there, staring at the hearts. Too long, for sure.
Finally he turned to go, then turned back, intending to say a ton, came up empty and turned away again. He made it to the edge of the parking lot. Turned back and double-timed it to the door.
Lizzie still stood there, holding that baby. He looked her in the eye. Brown eyes, like the baby’s. And like his, too.
“She’s yours,” he said.
Her nod confirmed what he already knew.
“And mine.” The last word stuck in his throat.
Lizzie neither confirmed nor denied his assertion. Nolan was fixated on the round chubby cheeks, the big brown eyes that seemed to know him as well as he knew himself, a little bird mouth that he imagined had a lot to say.
“There are no tears on her cheeks,” he said inanely. She’d been crying so hard.
“She was just mad because she woke up in the swing and couldn’t see anyone. That was her mad cry.”
She had a mad cry. Lizzie recognized it when she heard it.
He couldn’t look at Lizzie. At the mother of that baby who hadn’t said that the child was his.
“I have a daughter.” The words were so unreal they didn’t seem to have any effect on him at all.
This time she replied. “Yes.”
Starting to shake from the inside out, he looked up at Lizzie. He saw a wealth of love—not for him—and fear—because of him?—and said the only thing he could. “May I come in?”
* * *