Take the Chance (Top Shelf Romance #9) - Brittainy Cherry Page 0,105

building and handing the baby over to some stranger. It would be so easy. She felt so heavy with the weight of the years that lay ahead, and all I had to do was set her down and walk away.

But already Olivia felt melded to my arms; to myself.

“I can’t.”

My friend’s smile stiffened then crumbled away. “Christ, Sawyer.”

“Molly entrusted her to me, Jax. Olivia’s mine.”

He stood, gaping at me. Then he shook his head, and turned in a circle on the street corner, arms out. “I knew it! Give me a prize, folks, I fucking knew it.”

He stopped and faced me.

“I knew six nights ago. After the party. Everyone was gone and you were sitting on the couch, sitting in a mess of beer cans and Solo cups, feeding her a bottle like there was no one else in the world. So is that what you’re going to do? Raise her? You’re going to raise a baby, Sawyer?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing, Jackson,” I said. “But this feels wrong. Being here feels fucking wrong.”

Jackson pressed his lips together. “So you keep her? How? With what money?”

“My scholarship fund is—”

“Just enough so you can go to school and pay rent,” Jackson finished. “It’s not enough to pay for childcare. And that shit is expensive.”

“I’ll figure it out. I’ll get a job.”

“You’re going to upheave your life. For what?”

“For what? For her,” I snapped, inclining my head at the baby.

“She’s not—”

“Shut up, Jax,” I said harshly. “Molly abandoned her, and in one year from now, the law will say she did too. I looked it up. I can put my name on her birth certificate. Molly should have done it, but a year from now, it won’t matter.”

Jackson stared at me for a long moment.

“You have to graduate, Sawyer, and you have to pass the bar—the first time—or your clerkship with Judge Miller? You can kiss it goodbye. You’ll lose that job and everything you’ve worked for.”

I clenched my jaw. He was right about that too. I’d laid out the stepping-stones of my life so clearly and concretely. Graduate Hastings, pass the bar, earn a clerkship with Judge Miller, then begin my own career in criminal prosecution, maybe a run for district attorney. Who knew where I could go from there? I glanced down at Olivia and realized I wanted those things just as badly as ever.

But I wanted her too.

More than that, my goals would mean exactly shit if I achieved them with the mystery of her life trailing me wherever I went.

Jackson read it all in my eyes. He ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “Sawyer, I love you, man, and I get that you think you’re doing what’s best. But as hard as you think it might be? It’s going to be a million times harder than that.”

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do. My mother had to work three jobs, one for each of me and my two brothers. Three jobs just to keep food on the table for us, and a roof over our heads, and never mind doing something like law school.”

“But she did it, and now her youngest son is finishing law school,” I said. “She’s proud of you. I’d like to think my mom would be proud of me too.”

“She would be, man,” he said quietly. “I know she would be.”

I clenched my teeth against the old pain, locked it down deep. A drunk driver had killed my mother when I was eight years old. If I tallied all of the things I thought she might be proud of me for, my full-boat scholarship to Hastings was pretty much it.

Jackson sighed, shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Olivia’s mine,” I said. “That’s what I know. I have a responsibility to take care of her.”

Jackson’s stiffened expression softened, and the faintest smile tugged the corners of his mouth. “I must be living in bizarro world.”

“I’m right there with you,” I said. I felt a tightness around my heart unclench, and a swamp of unfamiliar, strong emotion nearly drowned me.

My daughter.

“So you going to help or what?” I said, gruffly. “Someone once told me this single-parenting shit is hard.”

“There’s that exceptional memory of yours again.” Jackson grinned, then his face fell. “You’ll have to move out, you know that, right? The other guys aren’t going to do any Three Men and a Baby. Kevin’s already panicked that we’re losing street cred.”

“I’ll find a new place.”

Jackson stared at me a few moments more, then blew air