"You have ten minutes," she said when he answered. "Then I have to feed him."
Daniel's voice sounded scraped. "Where are you?"
"Somewhere you don't get an address for yet."
"Fair." A pause. Traffic noise behind him — he was outside, maybe walking the riverfront where tourists took photographs of a city that marketed itself as romantic. "Ava. What I did to you was cowardice. What I did to Madison was cruelty dressed up as timing. What I did to Eli was... I don't have a pretty word for it."
"Try abandonment with financial transfers," Ava said. "It fits in most legal summaries."
"I want to be in his life. Properly. Not as a secret check. As a father."
Ava looked at the bassinet. Eli's dark tuft of hair, the fist curled near his cheek, the rise and fall of a chest that had never asked to be anyone's plot twist. "Then you start by telling the truth to everyone you lied to, including your parents, including any lawyer Madison hires, including yourself at three in the morning when you try to rewrite what happened in that church. And you do not get to use Eli as a bridge back to Madison. He is not a prop for your redemption arc."
"I know."