Father On The Brink

She looked more exhausted than she had the last time he’d seen her. More fragile. More frantic. And Cooper could scarcely believe his good fortune that she had come back to him.

For one long moment, he could only stand stock-still staring at her. Then a baby’s soft cooing punctured the silence, and Cooper dropped his gaze to the infant she clutched in her arms. Where Katie seemed to have deteriorated into almost nothing, Andrew was fat and pink and thriving. It was as if the baby had taken his vitality from Katie, as if she had literally given of herself to keep him hale. He gazed up at Cooper with a bland expression in his blue-gray eyes, then turned his attention back to his mother. Cooper didn’t know much about babies, but he could have sworn Andrew looked worried about his mom.

“Help me.”

They were the first words Katie had spoken to Cooper so long ago, on a cold, snowy night when her child’s welfare had so clearly superseded her own. Now it was springtime, a bright, balmy evening full of promise, and she repeated the words again with exactly the same intonation. She was asking for help for herself, but she was obviously demanding it for her son.