“Lauren, please don’t keep him from his father!” Nick argued.
Lauren sighed again, annoyed. “I didn’t say you couldn’t see him. I just said that I don’t want to get back together.”
“Fine. Can we be friends, then?” Nick asked.
“Not until you prove to me that I can trust you,” Lauren replied. “If it weren’t for Danny, I wouldn’t even be talking to you right now.”
“My son’s name is Danny?” Nick said softly.
“Yeah. Do you want to meet him?”
“Of course!”
Lauren opened the door and led Nick into her small, messy apartment. Jessica and Danny were seated on the floor, watching TV. When Jessica looked up, her eyes widened. She didn’t expect to see Nick after the day in the hospital.
“Danny, honey, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Lauren said uneasily. When her son looked away from the TV, she gulped. “Uh, this is your daddy.”
“My daddy?” Danny asked. “You mean the man in the picture?”
Lauren smiled. Shortly before she had Danny, she had found a picture of Nick in a magazine, and all through his short life, Danny had been told that the man in the picture was his daddy. “Yes, baby. It’s the man in the picture.”
Immediately, Danny jumped up and ran to Nick’s open arms as tears gathered in Lauren’s eyes. This was a bad idea. Nick couldn’t just step into their lives. How was Danny going to react to suddenly having a father?
Jessica read her mind. “He’ll be just fine,” she whispered as she squeezed her sister’s shoulder.
Meanwhile, similar thoughts were floating through Nick’s head. He had missed out on two years of his son’s life. Getting to know Danny was going to be really difficult. Why hadn’t he listened to his heart and gone searching for her right away? Instead, he had listened to his mind and let her go. Her mother probably ripped her apart for being pregnant. Speaking of, where was her mother? The thought flew from Nick’s mind as his son made eye contact with him. All that could wait until later. Right now, he had a son to bond with.