So it's been two years since I've last updated this thing, and there are probably only about ten of you who will bother to read it after all this time, since Degrassi fandom had already pretty much died by Clare's graduation and the Netflix seasons mean the few who remain only think about Degrassi for about six days a year. I started writing this story nearly 5 years ago, when my daughter was still an infant. She's headed to Kindergarten this fall and my son is already two.

This is the last official chapter, but there will be an epilogue, which I will write, and hopefully soon - I've been thinking about it for so long that I kind of can't wait. It will tie up all of the loose ends from this story.

To all of my readers, especially those who had long given up but will come back to Eclare-land for me, I thank you so much. To Sara, Chelsea and Mallory, thanks so much for your input and friendship!

Chapter 24

"You said that I was naive, and I thought that I was strong. I thought, "Hey, I can leave, I can leave," but now I know that I was wrong, 'cause I missed you." – Stay by Lisa Loeb

It felt like I'd been lying in bed for the last two weeks but that couldn't have been entirely true.

There were trips to the door to buzz in takeout delivery men: Chinese, Italian, Thai and Indian, all on a rotating pattern with enough food to last at least a day and a half – and make me feel bloated and saggy. I'd made it down to the basement a few times, dragging a laundry bag full of spit-up covered baby pajamas and equally gross shirts of my own behind me while cradling Grace in one arm. She was scheduled for her two month old doctor visit the next morning and I was already worried about whether I had any clothes left that looked presentable in public and if I had any concealer that could cover the bags, if not the sorrow, on my face.

The struggle of the last two weeks was really taking its toll on me. One day rolled into the next, diapers and feedings and squirmy baby baths. It was weighing on me that this was what I had signed up for when I'd decided to have the baby: a lifetime of single motherhood. And now that I'd had a taste of what things could have been like – raising Grace alongside her father – losing all of that help and support made this even more torturous.

Grace had even stretched out her night sleeping, going at least four and usually six hours without a feeding every night, but it still felt like I hadn't slept even a second. When I rolled over to look at my alarm clock I discovered it was only 6:30. It was too early to resort to my now frequent distraction of turning on the TV to whatever mindless show I could stand. About a week ago, I'd realized that Eli had ordered cable while he was here. "At least he did one thing right," I muttered.

My phone buzzed and I reached for it on my nightstand. My mom had been texting me every morning before she left for work to check on Grace. I'd mostly been responding with pictures of Grace, ignoring all actual phone calls and only answering direct questions in texts from her and Meghan. It was almost amusing how they'd ooh and ahh over pictures that essentially looked exactly the same; Grace on the bed or in the pack and play or in the car seat, wearing similar outfits and making similar faces. I'd never understood how women could obsess over babies so much until I'd had my own. And even though I'd had the experience of just watching her essentially do nothing for hours at a time and loving it, I still thought that it would be more fun once she was older and able to do more than just be cute.

I switched over to my work email and scanned the messages in my inbox. It was still early so not much new had come in, just a few stragglers I hadn't noticed last night. The volume of messages had decreased significantly, though some people were clearly tagging me in every departmental email out of either habit or address book messaging lists. In theory I was trying to keep up with all the new developments, but my brain hadn't returned to its pre-pregnancy peak yet. I was hoping that would come soon as my physical wounds had all basically healed, but I'd read that might take another two years. I knew sleep would help tremendously but I was starting to feel like I'd never sleep soundly again. I put down the phone and rubbed my eyes, wondering if I looked as badly as I felt.

I heard Grace stir in her pack and play and held my breath. I didn't feel ready to attempt to put on a happy face for her, to hold back the ever present tears. She didn't immediately cry out for my attention, so I took a few more minutes to lie in maudlin silence before climbing out of bed and walking over to her. She was making a gurgly sound and when I stood over her and whispered, "Good morning, Gracie girl," she smiled at me for the very first time.

Eli had claimed that she'd smiled at him before, and I'd kept arguing that he'd been wrong, that it had just been gas, that babies didn't smile at less than a month old, especially since she'd never managed to replicate the smile with both of us looking at her. And now that I knew what a beautiful, intentional smile looked like stretched over her tiny face, I knew for certain I'd been right.

"Eli," I called out, before it hit me again that he wasn't there, that I couldn't prove him wrong – that I couldn't share this very special moment with him.

It took all of my strength to mirror Grace's smile as I scooped her out of her pack and play and held her to me, my chest heaving with choked back sobs. I stroked the whispy blonde hair on the back of her head and rocked her back and forth as I tried to process what I was feeling. In that moment, all I knew was that I wished that Eli was there – with Grace and with me. I had no clue how to manage that in the long-term or if Eli would even want that after our fight – he hadn't even called once to check up on Grace – but I knew that sitting around feeling sorry for myself wasn't getting me anywhere.

Of course, before I could do anything about the Eli situation, I had to nurse Grace, then set her in the bouncy seat on the bathroom floor while I sang Twinkle Twinkle and the Wheels on the Bus in the shower to entertain her, since I couldn't even remember how long it had been since my last shower. Getting dressed in an outfit without stains or wrinkles took another twenty minutes, and by the time I'd packed up the diaper bag and hooked Grace into her car seat, I realized that we'd left the stroller in the car. I usually brought it upstairs since carrying Grace in the car seat was still pretty difficult for me post C-section, but Eli always threw it in the trunk to avoid having yet another large baby item taking up room in my apartment.

I managed to trudge the car seat down to the elevator and then out to the car with a lot of difficulty. I snapped her seat into the base and prayed she wouldn't start crying. Car rides so far had been about a 50/50 shot of torture. She let out a quick squeal and kicked her feet a little but she seemed to stay calm so I headed over to Eli's.

I hadn't been to his apartment since we hashed out our ridiculous custody agreement – back when we assumed we could pass Grace back and forth much like a football without making both her and the two of us crazy. As tough as parenting her alone had been for the past two weeks, I couldn't imagine the pain of being apart from her. And as much as I knew that must have been tough on Eli, I couldn't help but bristle at the fact that he'd managed to stay away for so long – without even a text message to check up on her.

Whatever certainty I felt earlier that morning was rapidly draining away the closer I drove to Eli's apartment. But I knew that no matter what, this was something I couldn't ignore any longer.

The last time I'd been to Eli's apartment I'd found parking right outside. This time I wasn't so lucky. Four blocks away, I just managed to parallel park into a space that I hoped wasn't too close to a fire hydrant. I popped the trunk to discover that the stroller I'd assumed would be there must have ended up in Eli's car. "Fuck," I said audibly, glad I hadn't taken Grace out of the car yet. It was the middle of July and blisteringly hot, and I knew there was no way I was getting that car seat all the way to Eli's door. As I unhooked the car seat latches, I took a long look at Grace for reassurance before I slung the giant diaper back over one shoulder and cradled her against the other. I spread a light Anais and Aden blanket over her head and back to block out the sun and took off.

By the time we arrived at Eli's building, I was drenched with sweat and my hair probably looked like a Halloween wig. Grace was squirming against me and my arms strained to hold her up. At her last appointment she was just under four and a half kilograms, though I imagined she'd gained since then since I'd had to switch her from newborn clothes to the 3 month size. I got the two of us and the huge diaper tote through the revolving door and glanced at the front desk. The doorman was having a loud argument with an older woman who was yelling that a package she had ordered had been misplaced. Rather than wait for that situation to resolve, I slunk closer to the elevators and when one opened, I snuck inside and pressed the button for Eli's floor.

I closed my eyes and let out a breath I must have been holding far too long. I jiggled Grace a little, hoping to see her face light up again and give me the confidence I needed. I muttered, "What do you want, Clare? What do you want?" over and over until the elevator chimed and the door opened.

As soon as I knocked on Eli's door, Grace let out a shrieking cry. I patted her back and attempted to soothe her to no avail. Eli opened the door a crack, then fully, looking panicked. "Clare?" he asked, scooping the screaming baby out of my arms. "Is Gracie okay? What's wrong?"

"She's fine," I said, attempting to reassure him. He scanned her face, red and shriveled from her infant cries, and looked at me skeptically. "She's just hot from the walk up here. She smiled at me. I swear. She smiled." My voice cracked on the last sentence and I burst into tears that I hadn't even felt coming on. "I'm the one who's a mess," I said, and Eli looked torn between trying to comfort me or the baby.

I reached out for her hand, and she wrapped her fingers around me, pausing her sobs for just a second. I attempted to smile at her through my tears, but just a second later, her cries continued. I caught a glimpse of my watch and realized that in all of my effort to get us here, it had been about three hours since I'd last started nursing her.

"I think she's hungry." Eli looked reluctant to let go of Grace. "I didn't bring a bottle; I'm sorry," I began, but he cut me off.

"It's fine, Clare." His voice was low and gravely serious as he handed Grace back over and gestured toward his couch. "Have a seat." He immediately went over the fridge to get me some water and I assumed, give me some privacy. I got Grace into position and she eagerly latched on. Once I was certain things were going well, I looked around to assess the situation.

Eli's apartment was a far cry from the last time I had seen it. It had been relatively neat then, but now there were signs of things that were a little more troubling. I could see a stack of dishes and glasses in the sink, and there was a Chinese takeout box right on front of me on the coffee table that was nearly full and smelled as if it had been sitting there for a while. Eli replaced the carton with a glass of water for me and whisked it off to the trash. Then he removed a heap of newspapers, books, random papers, an empty beer can and an old, stained sweatshirt from the other end of the couch, and dumped them on the floor beside it so that he could sit down. I knew from the care he had taken in my apartment that these weren't just lazy bachelor habits creeping in, but a sign that he was struggling.

He rubbed his hands together, a nervous twitch I remembered well from when we dated in high school. His eyes looked haunted and I was willing to bet that even without having a baby to take care of for the past two weeks, he hadn't gotten much more sleep than I had.

I waited for him to say something, but after a few minutes, the silence grew unbearable.

"You can say something," I encouraged.

He shook his head. "Every time I open my mouth, I mess this up."

We'd had so many arguments over the years that it was hard to disagree with his logic. But I knew that wasn't the biggest problem we had. "It's usually the things you don't say that are the problem."

Even that wasn't enough to elicit a response. "The last two weeks have been really hard." I gave him another moment to interject without any response. "I don't want to do this alone, Eli," I said, more gently.

My words seemed to snap Eli out of whatever daze he had been in because he responded quickly. "I know. I'm sorry."

My heart panged. Eli had always had trouble apologizing. In high school when we'd fight, I'd be more likely to be on the receiving end of a grand gesture – rather than the two words I really wanted to hear. For him to lead off with that…that was a good sign.

He turned toward me slightly and met my gaze. "I thought about calling so many times…It killed me not to be there."

"Why didn't you?"

He laughed wryly. "I wasn't sure Gracie should see me like this. I haven't felt this bad in years." He sighed. "I also wasn't sure if you were serious…with the lawyer thing."

For the first time, I felt awful about my role in our fight, even if what he had done deserved it.

"I shouldn't have said that," I admitted. "I was so mad."

"You had every right to be." He rubbed his eyes then folded his hands in front of his mouth. "Look, Clare. I'll do whatever you want….I'll pick up Grace on Tuesdays and Fridays if you want or I can come by every afternoon and take her off your hands for a few hours so you can shower or run errands or we can throw out the custody agreement and come up with a new one…but I need to have Grace in my life. I'm not going to let you do this alone. I just want to spend as much time with her as humanly possible, and I want to make you happy. That's all I want."

I realized that he had misunderstood what I'd been saying. "No, Eli, that's not what I want." His face fell and I rushed to reassure him. "I want to do this with you. I don't just want you to be Grace's Dad. I want more than that."

His wide-eyed expression told me that he hadn't even considered that a possibility. "You want to be with me?"

But I knew it couldn't be that simple. "I want to…it's just…I don't know how to trust you. How am I supposed to get over that?"

"Right," he said, deflating once again.

I took a deep breath and tried to explain. "I'm not even that mad about what you did." He raised an eyebrow and I clarified. "Okay, I am mad that you lied. I can't deny that. But that's not even the problem."

"Then what is?"

"I'm glad you didn't cheat on me," I said, relieved that I had an excuse to look down at Grace while she nursed so that I didn't have to meet Eli's eyes. "It never really made sense to me that you had done that. You weren't someone I thought was capable of doing something like that. And I can even see now, how lying about it…it was a dumb way out of a bad situation like you said. As much as I want to believe that we could have been honest with each other and worked it out, we were young and stupid and in two different countries and maybe there wasn't a better option."

"But…?"

"But every time I think about letting you back in or trusting you or getting back together, it terrifies me. Because every time we've had a problem in our relationship, you've run away."

"I've run away?" Eli repeated, sounding doubtful.

I put up my fingers to count out a tally. "You broke up with me rather than deal with our problems. You stayed away for over a month after we had that fight in the middle of the pregnancy, and called a lawyer rather than talking to me. And the past two weeks, you haven't even texted me to see how the baby is doing. This time you didn't just leave me; you left Grace, too. How can I trust someone who is capable of leaving his daughter for two weeks without even a phone call?"

"You've got to me kidding me." I could see Eli's body tense up in anger. "Look, I messed up in university and I'll own that. But Clare, both times I've left because you've pushed me away. I haven't left because I wanted to. I left because you made me. That's on you."

"That's not fair," I said.

"The only problem we've ever had in our relationship is a lack of communication. And while I'm sure you could list about a million different scenarios from our past where that was my fault, the only problem we have right now is that you won't even let me talk."

My jaw clenched as I tried to keep myself calm so I wouldn't disturb Gracie. "You did plenty of talking two weeks ago, and most of it with your foot in your mouth."

"You're right," he said evenly. "And I'm sorry. I've been replaying that conversation over and over in my head for the past two weeks and I was a total asshole to you. But the truth is, we should have had that argument months ago. I tried to tell you I hadn't cheated. I wanted to tell you the truth the night we made Grace. You wouldn't let me. You get angry and shut down the conversation every time I bring up our past. And until we deal with that, we'll never have a future. You won't let us."

I hated to admit it, but he was right. I'd been holding on to these ancient grudges without giving him a chance to make up for them. He had made an effort to at least talk things out, and every time I had rejected his attempts. "I hate thinking about our past," I admitted. "It was so painful. It still is."

Eli inched ever so slightly closer to me on the couch. "It was for me too, Clare."

"But how can that be? How could you have sat there across the kitchen table from me after all we've been through and act like what you did was no big deal and that I should just forget it and move on? That's what I don't understand."

Eli sighed. "Clare, I know. I keep thinking that because things have been so good between us now that it shouldn't matter what happened in the past. And I know that's completely unfair to you. I've had almost seven years between our breakup and seeing you again to process what happened and to let go of you and to forgive myself for losing the best thing that ever happened to me. You've had seven years of hating me. I can't expect you to be okay with our past just because I am."

"I don't understand how you can ever be okay with lying to me and leaving me," I said softly.

He shook his head. "I wasn't then and I'm not now. It killed me. I spent months lying in bed, wishing I was with you. Wishing I could fix things. It took me over a year to move on and a whole lot longer than that to forgive myself."

I reached out my hand and Eli pressed the cool glass of water into it. I took a few gulps to steady myself before handing it back. "If you really wanted to fix things, why didn't you tell me the truth back then? I never heard from you again."

"I wanted to," he insisted. "I had a whole plan."

"Then what happened?" I asked softly.

I glanced over at him as he closed his eyes, clearly haunted by his memory. "After we broke up, I was a mess. I may have thought I was breaking up with you to have more time to explore the city or work on projects but I spent most of it hiding under the covers in my room or getting shitfaced at parties that my floormates dragged me to. I barely scraped by in most of my classes and one I failed outright. My parents flipped out and gave me one semester to get my act together or they were making me come home."

"Sounds familiar," I said. "Minus the drinking." I hated to admit it but it was almost a relief to learn that Eli had been as messed up over our breakup as I had been. I remembered picturing him kissing or worse with hot, sophisticated New York women, not lying in bed on a depressed swing worse than anything I'd seen before.

"Yeah, that was rough," he said. "I got my ass in gear second semester, and I raised my GPA enough to get that Grundy Scholarship, and I was able to retake the class I failed during the first summer term. And the only way I could get through it all was the plan that the day I went home I was going to show up on your doorstep, explain everything, get you back and head back to New York with you to spend the rest of our lives together."

"But I wasn't going to Columbia. I never even applied," I reminded him.

"I had no idea," he said. "I didn't know until years later when I read your bio on one of your articles. You blocked me on social media, remember?"

"Yeah, but you were still in touch with Adam."

Eli flinched, as if it pained him to hear his former best friend's name. "After we broke up, he told me that if I wanted to stay friends with him, I couldn't ask him about you. He said it was bad enough being the go-between the first time we dated. And he was pissed at me for breaking your heart anyway, so I was just lucky he was talking to me."

"You didn't tell him the truth?"

"No. I knew he would say I was an idiot and tell you what really happened so I pretended I had cheated and just refused to tell him any details." Eli laughed wryly, "And apparently he hadn't really been telling me the truth either, so I guess I got what I deserved."

My head was starting to spin and I couldn't follow Eli's logic. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"At the end of my summer session I was packing up my dorm because I was flying home the next day. And my phone rang and it was Adam."

"He called you?" I laughed shortly, remembering how Adam would never pick up his phone but would immediately text you back after you called him. But Eli's grave expression made my smile drop.

"Honestly, I thought he must be calling me to tell me someone had died – his grandmother or Drew or something. And then he hemmed and hawed for so long, I thought he was going to tell me it was Cece or Bullfrog." Eli sighed and covered his face with his hands before continuing. "But in fact, he had good news to tell me. Because the night before, he had gone to the prom with the most beautiful girl in Toronto and he was completely in love with her."

Eli's words knocked the wind out of me and I gasped for air as I rushed to respond. "That's not true," I insisted. "We went to the prom together as friends. He dragged me. He was not in love with me."

"Clare, he told me what happened between you."

If I hadn't been nursing Grace, I would have shot off of the couch and been pacing the room in frantic frustration. I didn't understand how Eli could have misinterpreted this situation so badly. "God, we got tipsy and made out for an hour. That's not love; that's two dumb teenagers who haven't gotten any in months scratching an itch with someone they feel comfortable around. It didn't mean anything."

Eli shook his head. "It didn't mean anything to you."

I had spent so many years trying to block out the memories of my Grade 12 year that going through them, image by image, was making me feel nauseous. "We were friends," I repeated, the self-confidence I'd had moments ago just starting to deflate. "If he had feelings for me, he would have told me."

"Or maybe he knew you were still hung up on your evil ex-boyfriend and was afraid you'd reject him."

I didn't want to believe that scenario, even though I knew I had done enough whining about Eli even months after we'd broken up that it was theoretically plausible. "And the hook up was so awkward. I mean, it was nice and everything but it wasn't anything mind-blowing. No offense to Adam, but it felt like I was kissing my brother." I felt my cheeks redden a bit as I recalled how it things had progressed from awkward gropes and grazes to more confident caresses as we'd moved from tentative kissing to his fingers sliding into my underwear, my prom dress long discarded. Maybe it had been kind of nice for a while.

Eli couldn't fight back his smirk. "Well, there's a joke to be made there, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say what you thought was awkward, Adam thought was amazing. You're gorgeous and sexy and talented and he definitely didn't think of you as a sister. And it's not like he'd done pretty much anything before."

"He had girlfriends."

"Fiona, for about ten minutes? Second base is a sin, Becky Baker?"

I opened my mouth to respond but closed it when there was no real response I could give. "It was so awkward afterward…he had to have felt that."

"The first time I took your shirt off you barely looked me in the eye for three days, Clare. Are you going to tell me you just wanted to be friends?"

"It just doesn't make sense," I insisted. But even as I protested, I knew there must be some truth to what Eli was saying. Adam had spent months taking care of me, trying to drag me back to the land of the living, helping me move on. I just hadn't noticed that he'd hoped I'd move on to him.

"Clare, you have to believe me: this wasn't a misunderstanding. Adam told me in no uncertain terms that he was in love with you. And he implied that you felt the same way."

Another tear slipped out of my eye. "I didn't," I whispered.

"I had no way of knowing," Eli said.

I thought back to the day of Darcy's funeral and recalled what Eli had told me then. "That's why you stopped being friends with him."

Eli nodded. "He was my best friend and I wanted him to be happy. But I couldn't watch him be happy with you."

"God, Eli," I breathed. "One stupid night and it made me lose both of you."

Eli shrugged. "I'm not so sure you would have forgiven me even back then. It was a pipe dream from the beginning."

I knew he was wrong. Even after all those months, I'd still been holding out hope for a reunion, despite the cheating and the lying and the heartbreak. I would have taken him back in a heartbeat.

But even if we had gotten back together then, it wouldn't have changed anything. We would have still been in two different countries, hours apart, and we wouldn't have had any better means of dealing with our problems. Eli had still been a guy who thought the way to fix things was to show up on my doorstep nine months after a breakup in a grand gesture, rather than simply telling the truth and apologizing. And I was still the girl who hadn't developed the self-esteem and character to put what was best for me ahead of what I'd wanted.

But maybe it was time to admit to myself that Eli wasn't the guy who'd broken my heart all those years ago anymore. It was easy to focus on the times he hadn't been there, but what about all the times he had been? As soon as I'd told him I was pregnant, he'd been there for me. He'd broken up with his girlfriend despite the fact that I hadn't wanted to be in a relationship with him. He'd gone to the prenatal classes and brought me ice cream and put together baby furniture for me. And though he'd certainly ended up moving in because he wanted to spend as much time with Grace as possible, he'd been taking care of me almost as much as he'd been caring for her. I'd been so afraid of him leaving that I hadn't seen how much he'd been there.

I met his gaze. "Maybe it was meant to be how it happened. Maybe we needed to be older and have more life experience under our belt. Maybe we needed the heartbreak and the exes and the struggle. Maybe we needed to find a reason to make things work between us."

Eli's sigh undercut my impassioned speech. "We've got Grace now and we're still doing an awfully shitty job of it."

We were both silent for a few moments. I heard Eli sniffle and glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. He had tears streaming from both eyes and the sight softened the tightness in my chest.

"I want to start over with you," I said softly, barely believing I had said the words once they left my mouth, but for the first time, realizing I meant them.

"I'm not sure I believe you can."

"You've been nothing but supportive of me since the day of Darcy's funeral. With the pregnancy and coming home…I don't know how I could have done this without you." I realized I had never told Eli any of this before, how much I appreciated him now. "You've made mistakes but so have I, and that's not going to stop, but maybe we can start to deal with the problems we have now rather than dwelling on the ones we made in the past."

Eli turned and looked me straight in the eyes. "So you want to be with me? You want to make this work."

I nodded. "I want to….I'm scared, but…I want to be with you, Eli."

"God, I've missed you. Both of you." Eli moved closer to me on the couch, sitting gingerly to avoid jostling Grace, who had stopped suckling and had fallen back against my arm, contentedly asleep He reached out and stroked her hair. I moved to hook my nursing tank back up. "Is that what her smile looked like?" he asked softly.

I studied her milk drunk expression. "No. Trust me. You'll know it when you see it." Eli was looking at her longingly. "Do you want to hold her?"

"I don't want to wake her up," he said wistfully. "But I'll take her as soon as she does."

Eli's eyes were locked on Grace but mine were focused on him. His eyes were brighter than they were when he'd answered the door but he still looked terrible. "Are you okay?" I asked, genuinely concerned.

"I hope so," he said. "The fog feels like it might be lifting a little bit, now that you're here."

"These two weeks have been hard for you too."

He nodded, though I'd said it more as a statement than question. "You can't tell a guy he's lost the two people he loves most in the world and expect that he'll be okay."

"That makes sense," I said softly, feeling terrible once again.

"I'm just so glad you're here." He tucked his head into my shoulder and I leaned into him.

"Me too." I squirmed a little to get some feeling back into my arm from holding Grace for so long.

Eli sat up. "Why don't you put her down in the crib? It seems like she'll be out for a while."

"Good idea," I said. "Her morning naps are always her best ones."

I stood and managed to cradle Grace without waking her up. I tiptoed toward the hallway and poked my head into the room Eli had used as an office. I blinked curiously when I found his desk and computer, but no crib. I continued down the hall and saw Eli's bedroom door was open, but his room also didn't contain a crib. The last door was closed tight and the last time I'd opened it, it had been crammed full of stuff.

This time, it was the most beautiful nursery I'd ever seen.

There was a crib and changing table and dresser, and there was a monkey mobile hanging off the wall and a comfortable looking glider with a table next to it. The walls were a pale blue, but there were pops of pink everywhere, from a baby blanket folded at the foot of the glider to a cuddly teddy bear leaning against a bookshelf.

But the thing that set the room apart from a generic Pottery Barn Kids catalog spread was the huge mural painted on the wall above the crib. After I laid Grace down carefully and she stretched before closing her eyes again, I stepped back to admire it. It was an ABC mural, not uncommon in baby's rooms. But what made this one special was that each letter featured a children's picture book character. And while plenty of the letters were represented by iconic characters that everyone would know, like Olivia or Babar, a few were from more obscure works. A was for Ada Twist, Scientist, and C was for Crankenstein.

I glanced back to find Eli standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking pleased. He gestured for me to follow him out and closed the door enough that our voices wouldn't wake Grace. "How did you…?" I asked, unable to believe both the amazing mural and the room's transformation from hoarder's dumping ground to well-designed nursery.

"Don't get mad," he said, as I arched an eyebrow at him. "It was Lauren."

"Lauren," I said, my heart sinking. I couldn't believe I had thought for a minute that Eli and I could work things out and he was already back with his ex-girlfriend.

But Eli took my hand and squeezed. "Clare, listen. Don't jump to conclusions before I've even had time to explain."

I nodded, allowing him to continue, though my jaw was still clenched tightly. "After we ended things, I didn't hear from her for about five months. And one day, out of the blue, she called and invited me out to dinner." I cringed and he took my other hand into his as well and squeezed. "She thanked me for getting you pregnant and breaking up with her because it made her think about where she was in life and where she wanted to be and she realized she wasn't happy. And over those months, she had met a guy that she thought she might actually want to spend the rest of her life with and she quit her job so she wouldn't have to spend so much time traveling and she was going to freelance and try to break into illustration since that's her passion, unlike the corporate branding stuff she's been doing."

"Oookay," I said, not really sure how to respond to this long tale.

"So since she had some time off, she offered to paint the mural, and I had already started cleaning out the room. She came over while I was at work to paint, and it was nice to see her, but Clare, believe me, nothing happened and nothing is going to happen. I don't want to be with her." He laughed. "In fact, she really wants to meet you."

"Why?" I asked, knowing full well that meeting the woman who'd been banging Eli for several years was the last thing I'd ever want to do.

"She wasn't sure what characters to put in the mural, and I don't know anything about picture books, so she went to the library and they showed her how to pull up your old columns on some newspaper database and she read through a bunch of your picture book round ups and then checked out the ones with iconic characters. She said it really inspired her and she's thinking of doing some illustration work."

"That's an awful lot of dedication to a project for someone you're not still in love with," I said wryly. But at the same time, I was thinking of how dedicated Eli was to Grace, to clear out all of that stuff and put together such a lovely room for her. He was all in as a Dad; maybe that showed he really could be all in for me as well.

Eli pulled me closer to him. "She was never in love with me. And I was never in love with her. Not then, and not now."

"You promise?" I whispered, feeling more vulnerable than I ever had before.

He nodded, moving his hands to circle my waist.

"I'm in love with you," I admitted. "I was then and I am now."

He crushed his lips to mine and swept me off my feet, leaving me to squeal as he picked me up and carried me to his bed. After a minute of kisses so intense they left me breathless, he moved to my neck to trace a path with his lips and tongue. It felt amazing but at the same time, I let out a huge yawn, causing Eli to pull back and both of us to burst out into laughter.

"This is amazing," I said. "But maybe we could nap first and continue this later tonight?"

I rearranged myself against the pillow, while Eli let out a joking groan. "I get it; I get it. Sleep when the baby sleeps."

"Mmmm," I said, closing my eyes as I linked my fingers in his. "Hey, Eli," I mumbled.

"Yes, Clare," he said, his tone still teasing.

"What happened to all the stuff that was in Grace's room?"

"I got rid of a lot of it," he said defensively, though not entirely convincingly. I opened one eye to look at him. "I'm paying $300 a month to store most of it," he admitted, and I couldn't help but laugh lovingly. "You may have to help me go through it again."

I smiled. "Yeah, especially since we're going to have to make room for my stuff. I've only got three more weeks in my apartment. And there are not enough bookcases here."

Eli laughed. "I guess we'll have to schedule an Ikea trip. But this time I'm going to put the shelves together."

"Mmm hmm," I mumbled, too tired to argue as I drifted off to sleep, my fingers entwined in Eli's.