Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 130

Chapter 130

Jaxon

Eventually, the room quiets of all the chaos that ensues after a delivery. The doctor leaves to return to his bed, most likely. The nurses come and go quietly as they bustle about cleaning up the aftermath. And Skye sleeps.

Nicolai steps out-gives me time, which is its own kind of grace I didn’t expect from him and probably don’t deserve. But I notice it. File it away with everything else I’m learning about who this man actually is.

But more importantly, I sit with my son.

We have the kind of conversation you can only have when the other party can’t talk back yet. When there’s no risk of being misunderstood or contradicted or asked to follow through on something specific.

“I’m going to be better.”

He doesn’t react. Just breathes, small and steady, against my chest.

“That’s not a promise I’m making to get something from your mother. I know it doesn’t work that way anymore. I know I don’t get credit for intentions.” I look at his perfect, sleeping face. “You’re not going to grow up watching me fail her the way I did. Whatever else happens. Whatever shape this all becomes-“I think about Nicolai’s hand finding Skye’s shoulder without either of them noticing. “You’re going to see me be the father you deserve. Even if I can’t be anything else to her.”

I press my lips to the impossibly small crown of his head, breathing in his sweet baby smell. A little bit of me, a little of Skye, and something that’s uniquely his.

“And that’s going to have to be enough,” I say. “For both of us.”

Nicolai returns a few moments later and takes the chair on Skye’s other side. The three of us just exist for a moment in this new configuration-parents, all of us, in different ways that none of us fully understand yet but that all of us, somehow, in this room, are choosing.

My phone buzzes. I know who it is before I look.

Noah: Well?

I type back: He’s here. He’s perfect.

I snap a photo and send it off to him. Then I look at the room. At Skye sleeping. At Nicolai, who has Benji’s tiny finger wrapped around his with an expression that should be mine and isn’t, that I gave away through three years of choices I can’t take back.

I understand now, I type. What I threw away. In a way I don’t think I’d have ever been capable until I held him for the first time. And I think I’m going to have to learn to live with that.

I send it before I can reconsider.

I leave that evening when Skye needs to sleep and Benji is settled and the unofficial visiting hours of this unprecedented arrangement reach their end. An end no one announced but I read clearly in Nicolai’s expression.

He walks me to the door, the first time we’ve been alone since the last time we stood on these same front steps. Since stop showing up with apologies and start being someone she can trust.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. “She wanted you here.”

“Yeah,” I say finally. “Okay.”

It’s not surrender, exactly. It’s something closer to acknowledgment. And maybe the first honest thing I think I’ve said to him.

What I don’t say is that while I understand that’s the way things are now, it doesn’t mean I’ll ever completely give up hope that she can love me again. That she might let me love her the way she deserves, the way I should have from the moment we met.

None of us can say what that will look like if that day ever comes. It’s a topic for another time. Or maybe never, but one can dream.

I get in my car but don’t start it immediately, realizing I have no idea where I’m going to spend the night. My Alpha won’t let me go too far, not when our newborn son needs me. It’s not something I thought about before I left home with nothing but my wallet and keys and a bone-deep need to be by Skye’s side.

So I just sit in the dark, in the driveway of the man who is going to raise my son alongside me, and let myself feel the entire shape of what today has been. Grief and joy occupying the same space in my head. The same impossible, complicated, undeserved gift of a son I get to know even though I lost everything else.

Eventually I start the engine and drive to the nearest hotel. I text Nicolai where I’ll be in case I’m needed in the night. Then I stand in the bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror.

The man staring back at me looks as though nothing has changed.

Except everything has.

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