CHAPTER 33: Nurses And Sleuths

Logan had to stay in the hospital for just under a week before the doctor signed off on his discharge.

After what had felt like the longest week of his life, Logan couldn't wait for the comfort of his own home, sans pesky nurses, dreadful hospital food and what he's sure was the most uncomfortable bed in the world.

As per her offer, Rory and Logan had arranged for her to be his carer upon his return home.

Although he didn't need an enormous amount of assistance, there were just a few odd things he still needed someone else for; things like preparing his meals, fetching things from the second storey of his home, helping him change shirts and pick things up that he drops. After all, his most inconvenient injury are his broken ribs that have limited his mobility.

Seeing as Rory would be spending all day everyday along with the evenings at Logan's, looking after him, he had offered her to have his room for convenience. Sure, her house was barely ten minutes away, but it would help her to have a base and some space for herself rather than having to continually go back and forth for as long as she looks after him. Plus, Elle already had her room set up at Logan's so she was already sorted in terms of staying at her dad's.

Initially Rory had declined his offer, feeling like sharing a roof was too much, too soon and that people might start to get suspicious. However, by the second day, Rory had unintentionally started using his place as more of a base, settling into his Logan's room upstairs for when she needed to do some work for the paper and by the third day, she didn't even bother going home after making the room hers while he's using the downstairs guest bedroom, unable to get up stairs to his own.

After taking Elleigh to school that morning, Rory returned home just in time for the daily sound effects of Logan painfully trying to get out of bed.

"Morning you... Do you want a hand?" she asks standing in the doorway of the guest bedroom, Luke's coffee cup in her hand.

Since his accident, Logan has been the typical male patient; as equally stubborn as he is dramatic.

"I'm fine" Logan winces through gritted teeth as he slowly and painfully tries to get himself upright and out of bed.

As much as she doesn't like just standing back and watching Logan in pain, after the last few days with him she knows from experience that he really doesn't want her help. He prefers to do it for himself, hobble out of bed on his own and then be bathed in her sympathy.

"Did Elle get off to school alright?" Logan asks when he finally has himself upright as he hobbles over to her, still wincing.

"Yeah, she was fine. Bit grumpy... She asked to stay home with us, but other than that she was alright."

Logan nods in acknowledgement, slowly walking out into the living area as Rory follows behind him as she continues to speak.

"I thought you'd be up soon so I made you some toast. That and a coffee from Luke's are out on the table for you."

The two make their way over to the dining table, Logan several steps behind Rory. In a role reversal, she gets his chair to make it easier for him before she takes her own seat.

As Logan has his breakfast, Rory checks her emails at his dining table before he speaks up and grabs her attention.

"Tell me about your pregnancy. I'm curious what it was like for you being pregnant with Elle."

Over the last few days, since Rory and Logan have been spending all day, every day with each other, all sorts of obscure topics such as this have come up and been spoken about in-depth, talking over details from their lives in the last ten years.

"My pregnancy...? Ooh, wow, that was a while ago" Rory says, referring to her now nine-year-old daughter.

She's stalling as she tries to think about what she could mention to the father of her child to answer his question.

"Well, during my pregnancy, I thought Elle was going to be a boy. I was convinced."

Smiling at what she's just told him, Logan waits to finish his mouthful of toast before he responds to her comment. "Really?"

"Yeah... I never found out her gender before she was born, but I felt convinced that I was having a boy. So, it turns out my maternal instincts were way off the mark. But, I was so relieved when they handed me our little girl. I was panicking that I wouldn't know what to do with a boy."

Logan nods at her recount as he eats his breakfast, looking at her intently and wanting her to continue reminiscing about the pregnancy that he had missed.

"If she was a boy, I was going to call her Elias Richard –Eli- instead of Elleigh."

From across the dining room table, the two of them share a smile, knowingly, making the connection that it's Logan's middle name.

Then, before he raises his next question, Logan takes a big, deep breath of air to ask the question that feels unthinkable.

"After you found out you were pregnant, did you ever consider not having her?"

Even though he's only known of his daughter's existence for a few short months so far, the thought of not having his nine-year-old and the thought of her never even having existed just about feels unthinkable.

"Only for about a fraction of a second... It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea and to feel okay with having her, but no amount of pro or con lists would have changed my decision to have her. For my mom to have had me in her circumstances, then there's no way I could have lived with the alternative decision for a child of mine."

"I'm glad..." Logan says quietly, in a sombre tone, knowing if she had made a different decision, their daughter wouldn't be at school as she is today.

As they settle into a silence, Logan eventually breaks it by posing another question to the mother of his child. "So what else can you tell me about your pregnancy?"

"Mm... Let's see... I only had light nausea and morning sickness during the first trimester, light enough to not think anything of it. But, the morning sickness struck violently in the third trimester just before she was born. I didn't really have any unusual cravings, apart from having an even stronger desire for coffee than normal, which was just about torture."

Logan nods in acknowledgement to her answers. He just wishes he could have been there. No matter how much he tries to forgive her and forget, that sting of knowing how much he's missed just doesn't seem to go away.

"How did everyone react when you started telling people?"

"My mom got pretty excited, pretty quickly... Just as soon as she thought up some ways to make sure that she was a young, cool grandmother."

Logan just chuckles, expecting nothing less from his daughter's maternal grandmother.

"My dad was pretty shocked when I told him and similarly to my mom, he set out to prove that he was still young and cool. In fact, I think telling him induced a bit of a midlife crisis. Initially, my grandparents were unimpressed by the fact that it was out of wedlock, but as soon as they met Elle, they were completely smitten. And then there's Luke..."

As Rory pauses from her explanation, taking a moment to release a pent-up sigh, Logan waits patiently and wordlessly, interested to see what she has to say next.

Luke had spoken about the matter to him briefly before. Logan sensed that he did not agree with what Rory did and the decisions she made to keep him out of their daughter's life. But, as much as he did not agree with what she did, Logan also sensed that he felt like his hands were tied. As much as he was a better father to her than her own, Luke did not have the authority of a parent over Rory and he didn't have any rights to push her into telling Logan.

Instead, he could only maintain his disapproval in her actions by occasionally trying to bring the point up, trying to help her seeing from Logan's view, Luke himself knowing all too well what being kept out of your child's life feels like.

"Luke never approved of my decisions. I could tell that he felt very strongly about the fact that you didn't know. But, I don't think that he felt at liberty to push the issue with me. He brought it up several times and incorporated it where he could, but, seeing as I'm an adult and he's only my step-father, I think he felt like it wasn't his place to say too much. But, I could always tell that he never agreed with it."

From across the other side of the table, Logan swallows painfully, wincing as he does so. A part of him is flattered and quite frankly amazed by the fact that his girlfriend's stepfather and the man his daughter knows to be her grandpa has such sympathy for him and that he has done so for so long.

All those years ago, Logan never really thought that Luke liked him. Rather, he thought that he felt like he was never, ever good enough for his beloved Rory. However, upon hearing how the gruff diner owner had gone in to bat for him against Rory and her decisions was really quite something. Even just the fact that Luke felt like Logan's situation and the idea of being kept from Elle just as he had been from April was something that he appreciated.

Then, all of a sudden, Logan's focus turns back toward the woman on the other end of the table to him.

"Do you regret it? Not listening to him?"

"Of course I do. I felt hurt and I felt rejected at one of the hardest points in my life when I was faced with some of the biggest decisions and crossroads. But, for the rest of my life I think I will live to regret the fact that I didn't get out of my own head for long enough to think about you and to think about Elle. I should have known what a fantastic father you would have been to her and for her. I am so truly sorry to both of you."

Logan simply nods as he picks up his piece of toast that she'd left on the table for him, taking a few bites while he averts his gaze from her guiltily. Then, when he finally returns to looking across to the woman at the other end of the table, he can see the pain in her own eyes that mirrors his.

So, with a deep breath, Logan speaks up with just a few simple words.

"Come here, Ace."

When her striking blue eyes look up and in his direction with a little bewilderment, he gives her a nod, confirming what he'd just said as he gestures for her to join him on the other side of his lavish table.

Getting up and following his direction, Logan originally gives her a wicked little grin as he ignores his healing ailments, gesturing for her to take a seat on his lap, to which she just rolls her eyes and squats beside his chair.

Then, as he takes her hand into his, his chocolately brown eyes look deeply into her vivid blues, massaging small circles into the top of her hand with his thumb.

"We can't change the past, Ace. As much as I wish we could and as much as I wish things had happened differently to the way that they did, we can't change any of it. We can't change what happened and we can't change the way things transpired with Elle. I made stupid decisions, you made stupid decisions and apparently I'm still making them..."

As Logan begins speaking, he looks down to his injuries from his car accident that had happened as a result of failing to see his limitations and pushing himself too much for too long. Then, the moment of realisation came from behind the wheel of a car when weary brown eyes closed shut for a split second too long.

"... But we can only change what happens from now. Despite the decisions you made previously, now I know about Elleigh and I know that I'm a father so I can only try to do my best for her from here on out. Meanwhile, I'm going to have to learn that I'm not invincible, I'm not Superman."

Rory nods somberly and despite the comfort of the circles that he's massaging into her hand, she still can't quite bear to look him in the eye from her guilt.

"We're over this... I'm over it. We're past it, Ace" Logan reassures with another squeeze of his hand, sensing her lingering guilt.

"It's forward from here; for me, for you and for our girl."

After their more somber conversation over breakfast, Rory and Logan managed to put it behind them and move on with the rest of their day, making the most of their time together before their daughter returned home from school.

Then, after Rory picked Elleigh up from school just after three, the two girls once again returned home bearing goods from Luke's for the man at home.

Waltzing in through the front door of her father's home, Elle immediately raced to his side, asking him all about how his day was and how he was feeling with great concern. Then, after he heard all about how her day was and which with VanGerbig twin was in her good books or her bad books today, he began helping her with her homework and her science assignment while Rory prepared dinner.

Over the past week, the three of them have slowly been becoming the picture of domesticity...

Sitting there at dinner that night, Logan tells dad jokes that make his girlfriend roll her eyes and their daughter giggles before she tells them her own stories with great passion and animation while Rory passes the plates and tells Elle to take more greens.

The three of them make quite the little family there, looking and sounding the part.

Between talking to her and when they finally steal their gaze away from the nine-year-old they share, Rory and Logan's eyes are quick to find each other's sharing little glances and glimmers in secrecy and silence which they expect to fly straight over their daughter's head.

After all, just that afternoon while Elleigh was at school, the two of them had discussed their recently rekindled relationship and the impact that it would have on their daughter.

The two of them had unanimously decided that it would be best for Elle if they wait some time and ensure that they're sure before they sit down and explain the fact that they're back together to their daughter. They want to be sure of their relationship and the fact that they're going to be able to make it before sharing that with Elle.

Consequently, despite Logan and Rory's decision to try and keep their news from their nine-year-old, given the fact that she is far more perceptive than what they'd give her credit for, Elle had noticed almost all of the glances and glimmers that they thought they'd done so well to conceal from their child's eyes.

However, she had seen it and she had noticed it after watching a few too many rom-coms with both her mother and grandmother...

Consequently, the perceptive young girl was absolutely convinced that she'd hidden her own grin upon seeing 'the spark' between her parents and uncovering what she felt like she had that evening.

So, later on that night while her mother is loading the dishwasher and her father is checking his emails on his laptop, a little nine-year-old sleuth swiftly grabs her father's phone, pocketing it, before swiping it open from the privacy of her own room as she quickly finds one nunber among her father's list of contacts.

After a few simple buttons, the number picks up almost instantly to a voice that it hadn't been expecting to hear on the other side of the line.

"Uncle Finn, it's Elle... You know how you said that I can come to you with any favours? I think I might have one... You see, I think my mom and dad still like each other but I don't think that they know that yet... I just want them to be happy so I think I'm going to need some help..."

I am so sorry for the horrendous wait. I thought that this would be up many months sooner than this. However, it's been a bit of a rough year so far. Just says after my last update, I lost someone very close to me very suddenly and unexpectedly so my year started off with a funeral and coming to terms with that. Then, my work situation became quite up in the air and uncertain after some bad news from my employers. Since then, I've also just started a new job which has kept me busy and on my toes. So yes, that's where I've been. I'm sorry that this story had suffered as a result of all of that.

I'm not even sure if there's anyone still out there and anyone still interested but I promise the next chapter will be up sooner. Apologies again!