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James? Papa must watch his language or fear for his immortal soul,” she frowned at him once more as she passed him in the hall on her way to the kitchen crooning sing-song nonsense into his son’s ears.
    His son.
    Ian slid down the wall, covering his eyes, ignoring the piles of half-packed boxes and general chaos that ruled his world. The room reeked of shit and sour milk. In the six weeks since he’d walked into that hospital a single man and walked out a single dad, he’d operated on less sleep and more stress than he’d ever experienced in his entire existence. But a renewed sense of purpose kept propelling him forward; a bizarre, almost counter-intuitive feeling of empowerment from the moment the small boy had been handed over to him, along with a mind-boggling hospital bill, kept him buoyant and focused. For that, he would be eternally grateful.
    The whole newborn baby thing—this was a nightmare of the highest order. The second he realized that the doctor who’d called him that morning was actually not kidding, that he was not being punked by a fellow beer slinger from the pub, he’d experienced two simultaneous emotions: terror and elation. As he held his son for the first time, all awkward elbows and hands and fear, and looked into the child’s deep blue eyes a calm had settled over his nerves. Until he got the kid home of course, and the crying started and did not cease until Ian’s mother raced to their rescue after Gavin told her the news.
    “Ian,” his mother called out over the baby sounds of bottle consumption.
    He looked up from an apparent nap right on the floor into her eyes. She smiled. “Go on son, get a few more hours sleep. I’ve got our little man here. We’ll be just fine, won’t we, my fine boy?”
    To her credit, Moira Donovan had asked no questions when presented with her third grandson. She was already missing the twins since Gavin’s ex had decamped to California with the two of them. Ian’s mother had walked in the door of his miniscule apartment, put down her suitcase and held out her arms for the baby. While he packed up in preparation for the trip back to Michigan with his son, Ian let her take over. He had to—he had absolutely no knowledge of what to do and had bungled making bottles (too hot) and changing diapers (too wet) to the point that the kid was red at both ends and had cried so much he was hoarse by the time of the ‘Grandma rescue’.
    As he drifted off, letting his fevered brain calm for a few more moments, he replayed the doctor’s words the second he walked into the neo natal intensive care unit. “Mr. Donovan, meet your son,” the man had said, without a single shred of irony. “He needs a name, and I need to know who will be responsible for this bill.” The nurses were a bit more sympathetic and let Ian hold the baby—too small to come home for at least a couple of weeks, but by all expensive testing accounts, healthy. 
    “Jamie,” Ian had whispered, still in shock, that day.  “James Gavin Donovan,” he’d recited to the woman writing it all down and making it official. Allen had taken one look at the baby, hooked up to all the monitors, laying in the middle of a huge plastic tent and had bolted, not that Ian blamed him. He’d stood and stared down at the boy for what felt like hours when one of the nurses had gowned and gloved him and handed his son into his arms.
    Once he’d figured out exactly what this all meant his first call was to Gavin.
    “Hey, uh, I need your help.”
    “Really,” Gavin had said. “Funny, I keep asking you to come home and help me with this brewery, and you keep saying no. Why would I be inclined to….”
    “Shut up a minute, Gavin, and listen. Carrie…I…we…shit.”
    “I thought she was long gone. What happened?”
    Ian recalled the very real sensation of needing to sit down and have a good cry at that precise moment. “There is…a baby.”
    “Holy shit brother. Is she, I mean…fuck.”
    “Yeah. And,