Page 30 of Stealing Home

The confirmation had arrived two days after the swab, in an email from Harborline Genetics that Dom refused to open for almost an hour. Matt had warned him it was coming. Evan had offered to read it for him. CJ had offered to hold the phone while Dom read it himself. In the end, he’d opened it by himself in the kitchen, with Lucia asleep on his chest, one hand spread across her back so he’d feel it if she stirred.

Most of the report was tables and codes and a chain-of-custody statement that made the whole thing sound like the result of a crime. Near the bottom, in a box someone had bolded for people who skipped to the end, it read, Probability of paternity: 99.99%.

He’d waited for something to hit him. Relief, maybe, or terror, or the floor tipping sideways. What he got was a quiet, clarifying nothing because the answer hadn’t changed anything. She’d been his at nine in the evening on the first night, when he’d held her like a live grenade and she’d still fallen asleep on him like he was furniture. The test just put everything he knew in writing.

The next morning, he’d sat in the family attorney’s office and signed the Voluntary Declaration of Parentage form in front of a notary, under a line Talia had already signed. His hand had shaken so badly that the notary asked whether he needed a minute.

“No,” he’d said. “I’ve had a minute. I’m good.”

He’d called his mother from the parking lot because she would have killed him if she’d heard it from anyone else. She cried so hard his father had to take the phone.

“We know, Dominic,” Frank had said gruffly. “We knew the moment we saw her. Your mother’s been planning the first birthday party ever since.”

After that, Dom had stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop and spent every moment learning the person who’d landed in his arms. He’d learned that her hungry cry was sharp and insistent, while her tired cry sounded like she was asking for a manager. She hated the left side of the crib and loved the hum of the dryer, and if he walked a slow loop around the room at three in the morning, she’d eventually give up and fall asleep against his collarbone. She liked being carried facing outward now so she could see everything around her. She made a particular little humming sound whenever he sang to her, as though she were trying to join in. She hated cold wipes and loved falling asleep on his chest after a bottle, her tiny fingers curling around the fabric of his T-shirt.

And she recognized him now. Her eyes immediately found him whenever he leaned over the crib, and she settled faster in his arms than anyone else’s. She had this little smile she’d started giving him that probably wasn’t really a smile yet, if every parenting article on the internet was to be believed. He didn’t care. It felt real, and that was enough for him.

He reached into the crib and lifted her, carefully placing her against his shoulder. “You hungry?” Lucia answered by rooting determinedly against his shoulder. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Three weeks ago, making a bottle had required reading the directions twice and triple-checking the water temperature. Now, he could do it while balancing eleven pounds of sleepy baby against one shoulder. It wasn’t graceful, but it got the job done.

He placed the bottle in the warmer, then brought her to the changing table. He cleaned her up and got her dressed, and when he lifted her and turned to go back to the kitchen, he caught sight of his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the door. The dark circles were probably permanent now, and he hadn’t gotten a haircut in more than a month. But he looked happy, and that caught him off guard. His life had become an endless cycle of practices, meetings, recovery sessions, feedings, diaper changes, bottles, laundry, and grabbing sleep whenever Lucia decided it was acceptable. It should have felt impossible, but sometime in the last five weeks, he’d stopped wondering whether he could do this and simply started doing it.

Dom settled into the armchair by the window, Lucia cradled in one arm as she drank her bottle with the fierce concentration his mother insisted she inherited from him. Outside, the Happy Valley Motor Lodge was still quiet. The sun had barely started to rise, the sky shaking off the last traces of night, washing the coral-and-teal buildings in a blue-gray light. Beyond the glass, the pool sat perfectly still beneath the Arizona sky.

Two doors down, Evan and CJ were probably still asleep. Or CJ was asleep and Evan was already out running because apparently people voluntarily exercised before sunrise. Dom rested his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes.

He’d been skeptical when Evan suggested Happy Valley instead of the hotel most of the team used closer to the stadium, but he understood the appeal now. It was quiet, clean, and far enough out of town that nobody from the team was pounding on his door at midnight. It also didn’t hurt that the motel owner had taken one look at Lucky when they checked in and immediately appointed herself Aunt Eleanor. Dom had barely gotten through introductions before she’d come around the desk.

“Oh, look at her.”

Lucky, who had been asleep in her carrier and had contributed nothing to the interaction, had apparently found herself an admirer.

“She’s perfect,” Eleanor whispered.

“She just had a massive diaper blowout twenty minutes ago.”

“Perfect babies poop,” Eleanor said with a smile.

“She also screamed for two solid hours last night.” Dom had watched with amusement as Eleanor waved that away.

“She has strong lungs.”

By the time Dom got his keycard, Eleanor had informed him she was available to babysit if he wanted to go out or just needed a break, and to call the front desk if he needed anything at all. The last part had been delivered while staring adoringly at Lucky.

Dom was pretty sure he could rob the place blind as long as he let Eleanor hold his daughter afterward.

Lucia finished her bottle with a contented sigh, dragging him back to the present. Her eyelids were already dropping, the furious determination she’d brought to breakfast disappearing as quickly as it had arrived.

“That good, huh?”

He placed the bottle on the floor and eased her upright against his shoulder, gently rubbing circles across her back the way CJ had shown him during those first overwhelming days.

He’d laughed when CJ had insisted there was a technique to burping a baby. There was. Everything had a technique. How to fold the stroller so it didn’t pinch your fingers. How to buckle the car seat tight enough without making yourself question every life choice, even after reading the instruction manual four separate times. How to change a diaper in the back of an SUV because there wasn’t another option. How to tell the difference between a cry that meant I’m hungry and one that meant I’m tired. Every day Lucia taught him something new, so the list kept growing.

A burp larger than should be normal for a body that small escaped her, followed immediately by a sleepy little sigh.

“There it is.” He chuckled, pressing a kiss to her impossibly soft head. “Good job.” She rewarded him by spitting up directly onto his shoulder. Dom looked down at the growing wet spot on his Barracudas T-shirt and nodded in resignation. “Yep, I walked right into that one.”