was to say that of course he wanted to have it, but he decided he needed to actually think about her question. Not having it was an option after all.
It occurred to him that bringing a baby into his life, into their lives, would be a much bigger disruption to Jill’s than it would be to his. He’d have a ton of help. He’d spent his entire life in Autre and already had a house and a business. Everything he was doing now was essentially what he would be doing a year, five years, ten years from now. If he had a child to take care of, it would be a huge change, but it would not significantly derail anything about his life.
Jill was in a different position. She had just moved to Autre and didn’t even have a completely finished house. Of course, he could take care of that rather easily and quickly. But she was just starting a new phase of her career and he knew things weren’t going exactly the way she would like them to.
“I will help you however you want me to help you,” he finally said. “I have a huge support system. With you living right next door, we can easily share custody.”
She blinked at him a few times without speaking.
“What?” Zeke finally asked after several seconds had ticked by.
“You mean that, don’t you? Just like that? We have a baby together and keep doing…all of this.” She swept her hand around. “Seeing each other here and there and just…what? Passing it back and forth?”
Zeke lifted a shoulder. “Isn’t that what shared custody is? Or, you can move in here if you think that would be easier. Or, I mean, hell…if you want the baby to live here and you come and go, that’s fine. Like I said, I have a ton of people who will help.”
Jill stared at him. As in wide-eyed, open-mouth stared.
“You would actually take this baby and raise it and let me just visit…what? On the weekends? You’d have your family help out with babysitting and cooking and laundry and it would just be like your life is now, but with a little person living with you?”
Zeke frowned. It sounded like a good thing, but there was something about the way she said it that made it sound bad. But, with about three minutes to adjust to the news and think this through, yeah, that was all that was going through his mind.
“Yeah, I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
Jill pushed up from her chair and paced across his dining room, then turned back. “You realize that you and I are the last people who should be in charge of keeping another human alive, right?”
“Well…”
“Neither of us cooks. We barely shop for groceries. We barely keep our clothes clean. Neither of us keeps any kind of regular schedule. And we like that,” she added, holding up a hand when he started to protest. “For me, I keep everything else in my life simple so I can focus on the one thing that I actually care about. You roll with everything because you know that you have this huge safety net behind you. You can literally jump from one piece of scaffolding to another and not worry about falling because if you do, you know you have people who will put you back together.”
“I’m not understanding what the problem is. We would have that safety net with the baby too.”
“But that’s pathetic, Zeke. People shouldn’t bring children into the world if they’re not ready and able to take care of them. You and I barely take care of ourselves and now we’re going to have a child reliant on us?”
“You keep penguins alive. You worry about them all the time. You feed them and shelter them and take care of their medical needs.”
“They’re penguins.”
“They’re endangered. If they die, that impacts the entire population worldwide.”
For just a moment, she paused, seeming surprised and a bit mollified by the fact that he’d absorbed how important the penguins were, and that he was championing what she was doing. But she shook her head a moment later. “But I can leave the penguins alone. If I’m late to feed the penguins by a half hour, they’re fine. I mean, they get a little pissy, but they’re mostly fine. Or if one of them is sick, I take care of it, but then I go home. You can’t do that with a kid. You have to be