are worse things,” Carl added. “Much worse things. We’ll love them, and we’ll make sure they’re confident enough to make their own path, whatever that may bring.”
I leaned back in my seat. “Them? How many children do you want?”
The guys looked at each other.
“Sorry?” Carl said.
“You said, we’ll love them.”
“Ah.”
“So, how many?” I repeated. “I mean, this isn’t going to stop at one, right? You’ll want more?”
Carl’s eyes widened. “We haven’t really thought that far. We daren’t even hope…” He sighed. “We thought about adoption. Should we be lucky enough to have one of our own, maybe we’d adopt as well. Plenty of kids need a home. Don’t I know it.”
“And biologically?” I prompted. “You’d be happy with just one? How many would you really want?”
Carl took my hand, and he looked at me, looked through me. “However many you’d be willing to give us, Katie. That’s the truth of it.”
I laughed, shook my head. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I can’t believe I’m even talking about having kids. I never wanted kids.”
“No pressure,” Carl said. “Like we said, it’s your call.”
I held out my hands, struggled with drunken thoughts. “It’s like asking someone if they want ice cream when they watched their best friend drown in a vat of the stuff.”
Rick smiled. “Sorry, am I drunk? Does that even actually make sense?”
“It makes a little sense,” Carl said. “And you are drunk, Rick.”
“I mean my mum had it shit,” I said. “I watched her struggle, watched her suffer, listened to her cry at night. And that was my fault. Because she had me. And we had nobody else to turn to, nobody else to make it better.” I sighed. “My grandparents live way up north, and they weren’t that great to my mum, to be honest, I think they’d rather not have had her, either.” I finished my cocktail. “So, the bottom line is that I know kids fuck things up, like I fucked things up for my mum. Not intentionally, just because that’s what kids do, they take your whole life and make it about them, that’s what has to happen.”
“You didn’t fuck things up for your mum,” Rick said. “And it would be different. There’s three of us. Mum, Daddy Rick and Daddy Carl.”
“Stop it with the Daddy Carl thing,” Carl said. “You’re enjoying that too much, Richard, don’t think I can’t fucking hear it in your tone.”
“And what if Mum, Daddy Rick and Daddy Carl didn’t work out? What if Mum ended up stuck with all the kids while the Daddies only popped in at weekends? What about Mum’s riding and Samson and stable dreams?”
“It would work out,” Carl said, and his eyes burned. “We’d make it work out. We’d never walk away from our kids. Never, Katie, not ever. Not in a million years.”
I sighed. “Then you’d be a better dad than I’ve ever seen.”
They didn’t speak, and I knew. Yet again the great David Faverley was bamboozling them with his stupid nice guy act.
It upset me again, the thought of him. That weird unsettled feeling I’d been getting since I’d taken his stupid Harrison Gables bargain.
I stared at the dancefloor, watching the lights change and dance, letting everything slip away apart from the alcohol in my veins and the beat of the track.
Rick interrupted my thoughts. He took one hand, squeezed it tight, and Carl took the other. “Enough of the baby talk,” he said. “I think it’s about time we hit the fucking floor.”
I tried not to think about it too hard, tried not to hope, tried not to make plans that might never happen. We had our beautiful Katie back, in our home, in our arms, in our bed. She’d weathered my fuck-up, stayed the course through the big baby reveal, and we were still going strong. This was as far as we’d ever made it. Our gorgeous, vivacious, infectious girl was still with us, still loving us, and that was enough.
For now, that was enough.
Besides, the topic wasn’t up for discussion. One drunken conversation at the side of a club dancefloor, and Katie closed up about the whole subject.
Babies were very much off the agenda those next few weeks, not so much as a peep about Daddy Rick and Daddy Carl and what the fuck that could mean for the three of us. Babies were off Katie’s radar entirely as far as I could read it, but Verity Faverley was very much on it.