I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them novel · Chapter 30 of 32
Chapter 30: Names
I looked at the clipboard.
Then I looked at him.
"What do you want it to be?" I said.
"Not my call."
"I'm asking."
"Alice." He set the pen down on the tray table, very carefully, like it might go off. "I'm not going to ask you to put my name on another man's son. I'd never ask that."
"I know you wouldn't."
"So don't do it because I looked at a form too long."
The baby was asleep in the plastic hospital crib between us.
He had one fist up by his face, the way he'd held it on the screen in June.
I thought about Ian's name on the door of a building that was being sold for parts.
I thought about the charter in its cheap black frame.
By blood or by marriage.
"Ashbaugh-Merrin," I said.
Matt didn't move.
"With a hyphen," I said. "Both. Mine, because he's mine. And yours, because you cut the cord and you said hi and told him you make bottles.
"Because he's going to grow up in that building. Because someday he might want a share of it, and the charter says he can have one."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of I Married a Stranger to Ruin Them are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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