“Can I ask you something?” Ethan said.
Madison shifted Noah higher.
“You can ask.”
“That day I called.”
She knew which day.
“When you said you were doing what I told you, what did you mean?”
Madison looked at the man she had once begged to choose her.
She did not feel the old ache anymore.
Only a clean sadness.
“You told me I was on my own,” she said.
Ethan swallowed.
“So I stopped waiting for you.”
Noah reached for Ethan then, as babies do, innocent of adult wreckage.
Ethan took him carefully.
“I chose who supported me,” Madison said. “I chose who protected me. I chose who heard our son’s first cry.”
Ethan looked down at Noah’s hand around his finger.
“And I chose what kind of future he would grow up inside.”
For a long moment, the parking lot noise faded around them.
Then Ethan nodded.
