"Hey Ethan?"

He turned away from his laptop to look at Hailey as she lay propped up on the bed across the room. "Yeah?"

She stared at him. Her big, dark, beautiful eyes were full of fear. Ethan's instinct was to rush to her side and take her in his arms and promise her that everything was gonna be okay. He wanted to erase every fear she had. But that wasn't really for him to try and do anymore.

When Hailey didn't say anything, Ethan closed his laptop and spun the desk chair all the way around to focus solely on her. "What's up?" he asked, hoping his prompting would get the ball rolling. As it was, that expression on her face was making him anxious.

"We haven't talked about it," she said quietly, her voice barely over a whisper.

His heart sunk into his stomach. "Talked about what?" he asked. But his voice shook. He knew what she meant. He just didn't want to.

"Us," Hailey answered simply. "Like…when I have the baby, it's…"

Ethan felt time freeze. He wanted more than anything for her to say that it's going to be different, we're going to have a baby, we're going to be parents, we're going to have to figure this out. He desperately hoped that she would change her mind and want to be a mother to their baby.

But Ethan knew better. Ethan knew that things were not going to get better when they had a baby. That never really worked for people. And as much as he wanted Hailey to want this baby and to be a family with him, he knew she hadn't changed her mind. He knew this wasn't what she wanted. And if she didn't want to be in the baby's life when Ethan raised their daughter, that meant Hailey wouldn't be in his life either. Ethan had made his choice. The choice between Hailey and the baby. He chose the baby. Hailey didn't.

Trying to swallow back the lump in his throat, Ethan tried to speak. "You're gonna go home to Houston, right?"

"Yeah," she answered. "But I don't know when the baby will actually come or if I'll have to be in the hospital for a day or more or whatever, so I can't like get a plane ticket."

"It's gonna be expensive if you wait too long though, right? Like maybe we get you a ticket on a day like a week after the due date? And if the baby isn't here yet, you can cancel?" Ethan suggested.

Hailey shook her head. "I don't wanna stay here after the baby is born. I don't wanna be here with it."

The way she called the baby 'it' made Ethan's stomach turn. But he tried to push past it. "So what do you want?" He tried to be kind about it, but the words came out kind of accusingly. Shit.

And of course, Hailey frowned. "I want to leave as soon as I get this baby out of me, and honestly Ethan? I don't ever want to see you again after that."

Something welled up inside him, and he didn't know if he was going to scream or throw up or cry or throw something. Before he knew it, Ethan was standing up and walking out of the bedroom without a word or even a glance back at Hailey. It wasn't like she could get up and follow him. She was thirty-nine weeks pregnant.

Ethan ran up the stairs, as far away as he could from the guest room downstairs where he and Hailey had been living the last six months. Most of his things were already moved to the other bedroom upstairs on the far end from the master where Mom and Alan were. The office and the nursery were in between, along with a bathroom that would become Ethan's when he officially started living up here. That might be today, actually.

"Woah, where's the fire?"

He stopped just before entering his new room, turning around at the sound of Alan's voice. "Hailey doesn't want to see me," Ethan growled

"What happened?" Alan asked, walking towards Ethan.

Ethan shrugged. "She said we had to talk about us, and she went on about how she wants to go home to Texas as soon as they let her out of the hospital and how as soon as the baby is born, she never wants to see me ever again." As the words came out of his mouth, he got angrier and angrier until he just couldn't stand it anymore and he kicked the wall as hard as he could. The pain shot through his foot, making him gasp.

"Well that was stupid," Alan remarked. "But I get it." He sighed and shook his head. "Let's have a seat in your room. I've got a story that might help. It won't make you feel better right now, but it might help."

Alan gestured to the bedroom and walked that direction. Ethan went in, limping slightly, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Alan took the chair in the corner.

"Is your foot okay? Do you want me to get you some ice?"

"It's fine," Ethan grumbled.

"When it stops hurting, you're gonna have to clean that scuff off the wall before your mom sees it."

Ethan did feel a little bit guilty about that. He nodded.

"Alright," Alan said with a nod, "so do you know the story of how I broke your mother's heart?"

That wasn't something Ethan had ever heard before. His eyes went wide.

"That's what I thought. I don't think she's tell it like this, but it's what happened. It was about four months after Jurassic Park."

When Ethan was a kid, Mom didn't talk much about Jurassic Park. When there were things about dinosaurs in the news, she would just change the subject. When Jurassic World opened and Ethan and Charlie desperately wanted to go, Mom would just say no. It took a while before she told them what they'd actually not read on the internet, though it would have been easy to find: she was at the original Jurassic Park. People had died. She hadn't. But barely. And Alan the Dinosaur Man had been there, too. Eventually she told them that she and Alan had been seeing each other at the time, but that they ended things and then she met Dad and the rest was history. The way Mom told it, she and Alan wanted different things and weren't right for each other and things just didn't work out. She always made it sound amicable. She never spoke about Alan like he'd broken her heart.

But Alan told his side of the story. "She wanted to have kids. I always knew that about her. She'd dropped some hints that she wanted to have kids with me. And I never liked kids. You might not remember, you were so little, but I was always weird around you and Charlie. I tired, and I liked you guys, I just didn't know what to do with you. I still don't know what to do around kids."

Ethan couldn't help but smirk. He did remember Alan coming around when they were kids and how he always seemed a little panicked. Charlie had climbed all over him and ignored any discomfort Alan had, but that was just Charlie. Ethan had always been quieter than his older brother. Always paid more attention to things.

Alan continued, "And then everything with Jurassic Park. I got to know Tim and Lex, Hammond's grandkids. They're all grown up now, and we still keep in touch sometimes. But thanks to them, I kinda saw that maybe kids weren't so bad. Except thanks to Jurassic Park, we were all so messed up, I hardly knew which way was up."

This wasn't really how Ethan knew the story. Mom always said that Alan hadn't wanted a family, but she never actually talked about how Jurassic Park affected her. Or that Alan maybe had a change of heart about having a family.

"I don't think your mom or I slept through the night for a month. One or both of us would wake up from nightmares. And back then, they didn't really understand trauma the way we do now. So maybe it was the trauma or maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I just shut down. Every bit of care and kindness I'd ever possessed, every bit of love I had for Ellie, it all just evaporated. I was a shell. I went through life on autopilot. I didn't talk about anything, I barely ate, I barely slept. And your mom reacted exactly opposite. She wanted to feel safe and secure and sure of the future, so she clung on. I just didn't know what to do. And when I didn't respond how she wanted or how she needed, she just up and told me one day that it wasn't going to work. And I…I just let her go. I didn't want to. I thought I was miserable before, I didn't know what misery was until Ellie left."

"So why didn't you go after her?" Ethan asked.

"Because she told me not to."

Now that was something Ethan had never heard. "What?"

"I knew where she was working, and I got her office number. She picked up and when she heard my voice, she told me that when she'd really needed me, I had abandoned her. And there was no making up for the way I'd broken her heart. She said I was hard and cold and bitter, and I was free to carry on like that, but she couldn't live that way. And she told me not to try and come after her."

Ethan didn't know what to make of that. "But you were friends when I was little," he pointed out.

Alan nodded. "After she and your dad got together, she eventually reached out to me. I'd written an article, and she wrote me a letter with her thoughts on it and said she missed me and asked me to call. And she enclosed a picture of her and your dad and Charlie when he was a newborn. She'd gotten everything she ever wanted, and part of me was sad that I hadn't been the one to give her what she wanted, but I was happy she was happy. I knew I'd hurt her, and I was just glad to see that she'd come out of it all for the best."

"Because you were still in love with her," Ethan said knowingly.

A small smile played on Alan's lips. "I fell in love with her on our first date more than thirty years ago, and I have been in love with her every single day since. I'm just lucky I got another chance to make her happy."

Ethan sighed, "So is this story supposed to give me hope that Hailey and I might get a second chance?"

"No," Alan answered bluntly. "It's supposed to help remind you that when you love someone, you want them to be happy. Even if it hurts you in the process. You gotta focus on what's best for her. And if never seeing you or this baby is gonna be what's best for her, you have to support that. And I'm not saying you won't ever get a second chance, but you can't count on that. You just have to be happy that she gets to have the life that she wants."

Alan was right. That story didn't make him feel better. Not at all. But it did help.