Released (Caged #3)(88)

She was going to grow out of being a baby long before I was going to grow tired of her being one.

I dozed for a while, waking only when Baby Katie began to squirm a little. I sat up, wrapped the blanket around her a little tighter, and rocked her a little in my arms until she settled back down. It never took very long.

During my previous session with Erin, she said I had come a long way from the first time I walked into her office. I had only shrugged at her, but I knew she was right. No one was going to refer to me as perfect, but I had made some progress in certain areas.

I hadn’t hit the mullet-dude at work who kept commenting on my heritage—not even once.

I wanted to, no doubt, but I hadn’t done it. That was the main thing. Erin said it was okay for me to think about it as long as I never took those kinds of thoughts and turned them into actions. I was okay with that.

She was actually starting to hint that maybe I didn’t need to see her every week anymore, which made me wonder how long it was going to be until I didn’t need to see her at all. I didn’t mind going. I had even gotten to the point where I sometimes liked talking to her, but as soon as Tria went back to school, someone else was going to have to watch Baby Katie. Mom and Chelsea had volunteered, of course, but they had their own jobs and lives and shit. They wouldn’t always be able to drop everything.

I thought more and more about what I needed to do with my life…my career.

Was I going to just keep making rings? Did I want to be in a pissant shop with mullet-boy on second shift, or did I want to be more than that?

I wasn’t sure.

There was no doubt that I thought a lot about what Baby Katie needed and what she might want in the future. I knew I didn’t want her to have to struggle to go to school like Tria had. I knew I didn’t want her living in a piece of shit apartment with a shit landlord and guns going off in the night. I remembered how scared Tria had been in the apartment alone, and the thought pissed me off.

There was no way—no way would I ever allow my daughter to be in that position.

My grip on Baby Katie tightened at the thought, and I sniffed her head again. I tried not to think about how Tria’s father had died long before his daughter was thinking about school, and wondered what he might have done differently if he had known.

“All of a sudden, everything that you thought was important takes a back seat, huh?”

My father walked into the den and tilted his head to get a better look at Baby Katie.

“She does look like you,” he said.

“She looks like Tria,” I corrected, then felt like an ass for being snippy. “At least, I think so.”

“I can see you both in there.”

I shrugged but looked closely at her face, trying to see how much her cheekbones looked like mine. Her chin was definitely Tria’s, as was her nose. I held her up a bit more as I leaned over to kiss the top of her head.

It was almost reflexive.

“They really do change everything,” Dad said. He settled down in the chair across from me and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I mean, you know they are going to change your life, but it’s really so much more than that. Your perspective on things changes, too.”

“She’s everything,” I said simply. “She’s Tria, but she’s me, too. I can’t explain it.”

“You don’t have to,” Dad murmured. “I know exactly what you mean.”

A small smile crossed his face.

“You used to sleep on me like that, you know.”

“I did?”

“All the time. It was the only way you would go to sleep unless your mother was singing to you.”

I didn’t think of myself as much of a singer, but I wondered if Baby Katie would like to hear someone sing songs for her. Then I thought my voice might be bad enough that she’d end up in therapy for it later, and I started wondering about what other ways I might screw her up.

I swallowed past a lump in my throat and furrowed my brow as I looked at her.

“It’s a gamble,” Dad said softly. “Doing what you think is best but not knowing how it’s going to turn out in the future. You always want to do the right thing, but you’re human—you screw it up.”

I looked at him, and he looked back down to the floor.

“Sometimes you want what you think is best for them so badly, you don’t realize that what you are doing isn’t what they need,” he continued. “You want to do the right thing, but you don’t. Not because you don’t want to, but because you try too hard.”

Baby Katie’s lower lip started jumping around like she was nursing in her sleep. I wondered if there was anything I wouldn’t do for her and decided there was not.

“I didn’t trust you,” he said. “I didn’t trust you to know what you were saying or what you were doing. I could only think about how much harder it was going to be on you if you had to try to be a father when you weren’t even out of high school yet. I would have said or done anything just to protect you from that, but instead…instead I just f*cked it all up.”

“Don’t swear in front of the baby,” I said quietly.

Douglass smiled.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had a really foul mouth before you were born. Julianne would scold me constantly when you were a baby. I told her you couldn’t understand what I was saying, but she was right—it took so long to get me out of the habit of swearing, you were practically talking then. I guess I’ll have to learn that lesson again.”