A Very Special Delivery

didn’t know how much to tell, what to leave out, so finally, he said, “In my family if a guy gets a girl pregnant, he marries her.”
    To her credit, she didn’t pull away, and he understood that she must have long ago guessed this much about Laney’s birth. “Some people call that old-fashioned,” she said.
    “Do you?”
    She gazed down at him with gentle eyes. “I call it honorable.”
    “Twila didn’t.”
    “Did you love her?”
    He stifled a smile. Leave it to Molly to go straight to the important stuff.
    “I hope you won’t think less of me for this, but I doubt if I ever did love her. I never want Laney to know that. She’ll never know that. I want her to feel special and wanted every day of her life.”
    “She will.” Molly glanced at the happily babbling baby. “She already does. But what about Twila? Did she love you?”
    He shook his head and rose, pulling a chair around so that they sat knee to knee, facing one another.
    “Not even close. She was furious when she found out she was pregnant. We had a huge fight.” He rubbed at the scar over his eye, remembering the ugliness. “She screamed and cried, said she wasn’t going to be saddled with a kid.”
    “Sad.” They both looked at the beautiful child playing on the patchwork quilt. “She threw away the best thing that ever happened to her.”
    “Laney? Or me?”
    Molly turned her head, met his eyes. The corner of her mouth tilted. “Both.”
    Liking the sound of that, Ethan allowed a smile but quickly sobered again. The subject was far too serious. “Twila didn’t agree, and if I hadn’t threatened her with every lawsuit known to man—some that don’t even exist—Laney would never have been born.”
    “It must have been a very bad time.”
    “The worst. But good, too. Getting into that predicament, having to fight for nine long, frightening months to save my child, made me examine my own life. I didn’t like what I discovered.”
    “So you turned to God?”
    “Eventually. One of my paramedic co-workers was a Christian. He helped me a lot during those months. I noticed a peace in him that I didn’t have. I wanted that. Needed it.” He propped an elbow on the table and rubbed at his chin. “Boy, did I need it.”
    Molly took up a slice of pizza again, turned it around in her fingers and picked disinterestedly at an olive. “What happened to Twila?”
    Her eyes flickered to his and then back to the pizza. He could tell she wasn’t thinking about food.
    “The day after Laney was born she signed over all parental rights, told me I was the world’s biggest loser, and went back to her life without me or my baby.” He tapped a knuckle against his chin, readied himself for the wave of guilt that was sure to come. “She died in a car wreck five weeks later. Under the influence.”
    Molly’s head snapped up. The pizza thudded to the tabletop. “Ethan!”
    “Yeah. She’d been out with our old party gang. The same crowd I had been running with only a few months before.”
    “You weren’t with her?”
    “No.” He frowned, surprised at the question. Hadn’t he just told her that Twila had walked away from him and Laney without a backward glance? “Why would you think that?”
    “The scar. A car accident. I just thought…”
    He reached up, touched the long white line above his eye.
    “No, not then.” But he could understand why she would think a car accident had caused such a long, ugly scar. “This was her reaction when I went to her apartment with a court order.”
    “She cut you?” Molly’s eyes grew wide with horror. “On purpose?”
    He tried to make a joke of it, though the memory of a knife blade slashing within inches of his eye was anything but funny. “Never make a woman mad when she’s slicing tomatoes.”
    Molly didn’t see the humor. “That’s hideous. How could she do such a thing?”
    “Twila had a lot problems I didn’t know anything about at the time. We hadn’t dated all that long.” Another fact that shamed him. He hadn’t really known her as a person, only as a beautiful face and body. “She wasn’t a terrible person. Just terribly…lost.”
    “You did the best you could, Ethan.”
    “Did I?”
    “Under the circumstances, what else could you have done? You couldn’t let her abort Laney.”
    “No. But I wonder if things would have been different if I had been a Christian then. Maybe I could have been a better influence. Maybe I could have helped her instead of making