Page 53 of Hunted By the Guardian
“You’re talking about Noah. About what he said.” Jonathan leaned against his desk.
Violet nodded.
Jonathan picked up the bottle of bourbon, poured a second glass, and held it out to her.
Violet took it and nodded thanks. She didn’t care for bourbon, not really, but there was something about the gesture that appealed to her. Something about being aligned with him, doing something together—even though the thing they were really aligned on was the idea that they couldn’t remain together any longer.
“He wants us to be his parents,” she said, and took a sip of the bourbon. It was thick and bitter, and she tried not to let her distaste for it show on her face.
If Jonathan noticed, he said nothing. He just nodded. “And we can’t do that,” he said. “Be his parents, I mean. We can’t.”
“I know we can’t.”
“What are we going to do?” He looked at her helplessly, and she realized in that moment just how much she had been hoping he would propose a solution. That he would come up with something the two of them could do.
He had nothing to offer, so she was going to have to be the one to solve the problem. She swallowed hard. “Jonathan, I think we have to try to find Noah’s parents.”
Jonathan’s eyebrows shot up. “His parents? You mean his birth parents?”
“Yes. We don’t know who he belonged to before he came to us. He’s never spoken about that.”
“We know they weren’t good people,” Jonathan said darkly. “Don’t you remember the stories he’s told us? You can’t possibly think that reuniting him with the people who abandoned him is the right thing to do.”
“I think we don’t know exactly what happened,” Violet said. Her voice shook a little, but she tried to speak firmly. “We have a child’s reckoning of those events. And he was so young when…”
“When they abandoned him?”
“Whatever happened, he was very young when it did,” she said. “I’m not saying we ought to hand him over to them.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve retained some common sense.”
“But I’m saying we should find out who they are. We should find out what happened. Jonathan, it seems clear that Noah is craving family. He wouldn’t have slipped like that, he wouldn’t have called us his mother and father, if there wasn’t a part of him yearning for a mother and father.”
“That doesn’t mean we should provide him with the worst options available just so those roles will be filled,” he said.
“I’m not suggesting that.” Violet noticed, suddenly, that he hadn’t really looked at her since handing her the glass of bourbon. He was shuffling through papers on his desk, but it was clear by now that he wasn’t really looking for anything. If he were, he would surely have found it.
Being ignored like this bothered her. “Would you stop that?” she asked.
“Stop what?”
“Stop playing with your papers. Sit down and look at me, and let’s have a proper conversation,” she said.
He did look up then, his eyebrows raised. Very slowly, almost exaggeratedly, he sank into his chair.
“Well,” he said. “This is very proper of you, I must say.”
“Proper?”
“Very decorous.”
“It isn’t about that. I’m not trying to be proper. I’m trying to carry on a conversation with you. This is important. This is about Noah’s future. We should be able to talk about it.”
He sighed. “You seem like his parent.”
“But I’m not. That’s the thing, Jonathan. He feels like I’m his mother, and I feel like I’m his mother, and…oh, you know how I’d love to stay with him and take care of him. I would be that to him. But what I can’t offer him is a father. You can be his father, but not if I am to be his mother. With either of us, he won’t have stability. We’ve been selfish to think that just because we want to be in his life, that we should be. We should at least attempt to discover if a more stable option is available. I see that now, and it’s wrong to deprive him just because…just because I wish we could be a family.”
She held her breath. She had meant that she wished she and Noah could be a family, and yet…it hadn’t quite sounded that way. It had sounded like she might be talking about the same thing Noah had been talking about, like she might, conceivably, mean the three of them.
