letting a baby choose your wife?”
Jamie MacDowell chose not to answer that question. Instead, he contemplated the campfire as he let his brother’s outraged tone roll off his back. Braden, his oldest brother, cared. That was the real emotion behind the outrage. Jamie had gotten much better at recognizing emotions in the past two years.
“Hire a nanny for the baby. You don’t have to marry anyone.” His other brother, Quinn, sounded less outraged—but more condescending.
The sounds of the Texas twilight settling over their parents’ land filled the silence as Jamie stretched his legs out. He flicked a glance around the fire. It figured: he’d taken the identical pose as his brothers. Braden, Quinn and now Jamie sat with jean-clad legs stretched out fully, each man with his right cowboy boot crossed over his left. It was funny, really, the subconscious mannerisms families shared.
Two years ago, Jamie would have probably uncrossed his ankles, just to be different. But that was before Afghanistan. Before more than a year spent sewing up soldiers in an army hospital.
Before he’d brought his son, Sam, to the United States.
“A nanny can do the job perfectly well,” Quinn continued. “You don’t need a wife to take care of a baby.”
“To take care of my son,” Jamie corrected him. It was going to take his brothers some time to get used to the news that he was a father. He hadn’t communicated much while he was deployed. Returning to Texas with a nine-month-old had shocked them all. “Not ‘a baby.’ My son.”
“Right. He can be well cared for by a good nanny.”
Jamie uncrossed his ankles. Neither of his brothers were parents. They didn’t understand the impact, the complete sea change, of having a child. When he held Sam, Jamie knew that he was holding the most important thing in the world. It was a powerful emotion, one that ultimately made his life utterly simple. What his son needed, Jamie would provide.
His son needed a mother.
Not a nanny.
“I’m working in the E.R.,” Jamie said. “You know the hours. What nanny is going to be available nights, days, whole twenty-four-hour periods without notice?”
“Get a live-in nanny.” Naturally, Quinn had an immediate answer. He was a cardiologist. That particular species of doctor tended to be very math-oriented. Their world was physics. Pressure, diameter, beats per minute. Black and white.
In contrast, as an emergency physician, Jamie often had to wing it. Thinking on the fly, he came up with theories, tested and discarded them, until he’d diagnosed and stabilized whatever emergency had brought the patient to the hospital.
In Afghanistan, there’d been only one kind of emergency: injury. Some injuries were catastrophic, caused by explosives that destroyed so much of the body, Jamie raced the clock to stop the bleeding and keep the heart beating. Some were minor, a finger sliced open when a rifle was cleaned carelessly. All of them—all of them—required stitches. Sewing. Surgery. Jamie had performed more surgery as an emergency physician in the United States Army than many surgeons did in civilian life.
“What if I get deployed again?” Jamie asked both brothers. “Will the nanny guarantee her services for the length of my deployment? Will she write to me about Sam? Send me photos?”
Braden abruptly sat up from his lounging position. “I thought you were back to reserve duty, the one-weekend-a-month thing until your commitment was up. Did you sign a new contract?”
Jamie wanted to smile at the predictability of Braden’s response. Like Quinn and himself, Braden was also an M.D., but he ran the research side of a massive corporation. He thought in terms of contracts and legalities, of facts on paper. Like Quinn, Braden saw everything as black and white.
The way their father had seen the world.
Jamie stopped lounging, too. With a firm thunk, he set his half-finished bottle of beer on the dry Texas ground by his chair. He wasn’t like his father. Sam would have a better man to raise him.
“I’m in the reserves for another six months. I could be recalled to active duty tonight.”
Now Quinn sat up abruptly. Jamie felt their tension as both men looked at him intently.
“It’s okay,” Jamie said quietly. “It’s highly unlikely the army will send me back in the next six months.”
Braden dropped his gaze to the crackling fire. “It’s not that we aren’t proud of you.”
“I know. I’m proud to have served, too. There are times I’ve considered volunteering to go back. There’s so much work left to be done there.” Work that he’d seen one brave woman undertake. Work to promote literacy in the population. Work to provide health care to the poorest of the poor. Work to end the slavelike conditions in which so many Afghani girls were raised.
Work that had ultimately killed that one brave woman, leaving Jamie to raise Sam alone.
“A nanny’s not good enough. I want a wife. If something should happen to me, Sam will still have a legal guardian. An American legal guardian.”
“He’s your son, Jamie. Do you think we’d let the state put him in an orphanage?”
“No.” Jamie was touched. Braden had said your son. He, at least, was getting used to the idea of Sam being a MacDowell, not just a baby brought home from a war-torn country. “But Mom’s getting a little old to start over again with an infant, and look at you. Both of you. A couple of bachelor doctors with insane working hours. Sam needs a full-time parent.”
“Then hire a lawyer and make the nanny his legal guardian.” Quinn was still seeing in black and white, apparently, but Jamie had already come up with that theory and ruled it out.
“It’s easier to get married. A wife’s custody is rarely questioned.”
There had been no way to legally marry Sam’s mother, not on the American base, nor in any Afghani court or mosque. In the end, after her death, that had meant no locals would claim Sam as their own, either. Jamie had been able to get Sam out of the country by mixing State Department regulations and medical necessity, but if the paperwork ever got scrutinized...
If. He wouldn’t worry about that now. And if If happened, Sam belonging to an American husband and wife would be beneficial, compared to Sam being the child of a bachelor soldier.
Yes, Sam needed a mother. An American mother. Simple.
“I’m fine with a marriage based on practicality,” he told his brothers. “I never planned on getting married for any other reason.”
“You’re sure about that?” Quinn asked.
Jamie sat back in his camp chair and picked up his beer. He brushed the sandy dirt off the bottom of the bottle. When he’d been in Afghanistan, he’d told himself the dry soil wasn’t so different from Texas. He’d even been able to squint at the landscape and imagine himself home, if home had a lot of barbed wire and sandbag bomb shelters.
“I’m sure,” Jamie said. “Doctors make lousy husbands—look at Dad. He had no time for Mom. No time for any of us. Without Mom, we wouldn’t have had a parent
