Chapter 104

• Maddy giggled and I grimaced. “We’ll have to stop doing that soon,” I said. “Otherwise, Maddy’s first words will be, ‘Ew, Caleb, yuck!’, probably right in front of him!”
• Clare smiled at Maddy, opened a cloth picture book for her and began to turn the pages. “I guess it’s different for you because you’ve already got the Madster,” she said. “There’s not that same sense of time pressure because you’ve got a beautiful daughter already. And you’re younger than me. I don’t want to hit thirty without a relationship, because I want to have kids by thirty-five.”
• “It’s hard,” was all I could say. My mind was whirring. “I hadn’t thought beyond having Maddy and bringing her up through the early years by myself,” I told Clare. “I hadn’t even wondered what things would look like beyond that. Heck, I didn’t think I’d even sleep with anyone until after she was at school. But now…”