Chapter Ten: No Matter Whose It Is

Mia's pov 

Jordan asked to meet at the Blue Plate, which felt like its own kind of statement before he'd even said a word, because the three of us used to pile into that back booth after every home game, Eli stealing my fries, Jordan arguing with the waitress about extra gravy, all of us laughing about nothing in that specific way you only laugh when you're seventeen and think you have all the time in the world.

I got there first and took the same booth out of habit, and when Jordan walked in ten minutes later he stopped for a second in the doorway looking at it too, like he'd noticed the same thing I had.

"Been a while since we sat here," he said, sliding in across from me.

"Yeah."

"Feels weird without Eli stealing your fries."

"Everything feels weird these days." I wrapped both hands around a water glass I hadn't touched yet, just for something to do with them. "How's your mom?"

"Sore. Tired. Still cracking jokes, which I think is somehow worse than if she wasn't, because it means she's trying really hard to make the rest of us feel okay about something that isn't okay at all." He rubbed a hand over his face, and up close I could see how thin the last week had worn him, dark circles, a nick on his jaw from shaving too fast. "First chemo starts Thursday."

"That's soon."

"Doctor says we don't have time to wait around. Given the staging." He said it flat, matter of fact, the way you say things you've had to repeat so many times they've stopped feeling like your own words anymore.

The waitress came by and Jordan ordered coffee he probably wasn't going to drink, out of habit more than thirst, and once she'd gone he sat there turning the mug slowly on the table without picking it up, the same way he'd turned his tea mug at my kitchen table days ago.

"I wanted to talk to you about something," he said. "Not really talk. More like, I don't know, tell you, so you hear it from me instead of finding out some other way."

"Okay."

"My mom told me something at the hospital. Before Eli even got there." He glanced up at me, and something in his face had gone careful, deliberate, like he'd rehearsed this part in the car. "She said she wants to meet her grandchild. Before anything happens. Doesn't matter how the treatment goes, doesn't matter how much time she ends up with, that's the one thing she keeps coming back to every single conversation we have."

My stomach dropped somewhere I couldn't fully name.

"She told me the same thing," I said quietly. "At the hospital. When I visited her."

"You went to see her?" Something warm flickered across his face, gone as fast as it came. "That's really good of you, Mia. She lit up talking about you, you know. Told me you came by."

I didn't know what to do with that warmth, so I let it sit there unanswered and pushed forward instead. "What did you tell her? When she said that."

"I told her I'd make it happen." He said it simply, like there was nothing complicated buried underneath it at all. "I don't know how yet. I don't know what that even looks like practically, given everything, given how things are with you and Eli right now, given all of it. But I made her a promise, and I intend to keep it, whatever it takes."

"Jordan."

"I mean it. I don't care how messy the situation is. I don't care what the timeline with the treatment ends up being, whether we get four months or four years, I'm going to make sure she gets to hold that baby, your baby, before anything else happens. That's not up for negotiation, not for me." He finally looked up and met my eyes fully, steady, certain, the exhaustion in his face somehow making the certainty land even harder. "No matter whose it turns out to be."

The words hit me somewhere underneath my ribs, somewhere I didn't have a name for, because he said it so plainly, so completely without weight, like it was the easiest, most obvious thing in the world to promise a dying woman access to a grandchild that might not even share a single strand of his own blood. He had absolutely no idea. That was the part that hurt the most, sitting there watching him say something so selfless it nearly broke me, while a truth he couldn't even imagine sat directly across the table from him, three feet away, close enough to touch.

"That's a lot to promise," I said, my voice thinner than I wanted it to be.

"Maybe. But she's my mom. And you're, I don't know, you're still someone I care about, whatever's broken between us. This isn't complicated to me the way it probably is to everyone else." He finally picked up the coffee and took a sip, grimaced slightly at how it had gone lukewarm while we talked, and set it back down. "I just wanted you to hear it from me. That's all. In case any of this gets harder before it gets easier, I wanted you to already know where I stand."

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, some version of thank you or I don't deserve that or you have no idea what you're actually promising, and none of it came out. I sat there across from him in the same booth where the three of us used to laugh about nothing, watching a boy who had no idea he might already be tied to the exact thing he was promising to protect, and every word I could have said felt like it would either break something open too soon or bury it deeper than I already had it buried.

"She just wants to meet her grandchild before it's too late," Jordan said again, quieter this time, filling the silence I couldn't. "I already told her I'd make that happen, whatever it takes, whoever's baby it turns out to be."

I said nothing.

I sat there with my hands wrapped around a water glass gone warm from my own grip, watching him wait for some kind of response, and the only thing I could think, the only thought loud enough to drown out everything else in that booth, was how much that sentence was going to cost him the day he finally understood exactly what he'd said.