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lived off campus in a spacious studio apartment, which occupied the entire third floor of a three-story house on the south side of the city. Nikki was six months old then, chubby and dimpled everywhere, with a happy disposition that had instantly sucked him into her tiny universe. If he had occasionally caught himself staring into eyes that he found eerily familiar and kissing little lips that curved just as his mother’s did when she was being coy, he never dwelled on it. He told himself that he was drawn to the child by the sheer force of his genuine affection for children.
    Chad never pressed Paris for the details of Nikki’s birth, thinking that it wasn’t his place to ask, but naturally he was curious about the child’s father. He wondered how she managed to support herself and an infant on the stipend she received as part of her scholarship from the university. Her apartment was comfortably furnished, and she was never without money the way most struggling college students were. He was curious to know how she made ends meet, but he never pried.
    He was given his first peek into Paris’s private life when she revealed to him that Pam helped her with household expenses. That in itself didn’t strike Chad as odd, since he assumed that though Pam had moved away, they were still as close as they’d ever been. At the time, Pam was just starting to make a name for herself in the music industry. He’d caught a few of her songs on the radio, and Paris had mentioned that Pam also supplemented her income by singing commercial jingles. Until then he hadn’t realized that it was Pam’s voice he was hearing in his head as he picked one can of soup or box of cereal over another, though he shouldn’t have been surprised to find that he was still under her spell.
    Chad didn’t really question the fact that Paris had given birth to a child and was no longer with the man who’d made her pregnant. But, he did question the arguments he sometimes overheard between Paris and Pam during their frequent phone calls back and forth. Paris would leave the room to take a call and come back pretending she hadn’t been screaming and crying, just minutes before. Yet his own feelings where Pam was concerned were ambivalent enough that he was content to let Paris keep her secrets and to mind his own business. He pretended he hadn’t heard anything, reminded Paris what page they’d left off on, and kept studying.
    Paris was never much of a drinker, though, and she tended to ramble after she drank more than two glasses of anything stronger than beer. The night Chad finally learned the truth, she was well and truly drunk. It was Nikki’s second birthday and Paris had given her a birthday party and invited several of the single parents she knew from school. The party was a success, but Paris was a wreck. No sooner had she seen the last of her guests out of the apartment than she was gulping wine like it was water and crying into her glass. He did what he could to comfort her, but theirs wasn’t an intimate relationship. He had never even kissed her or held her hand in a romantic way, so he patted her back awkwardly and said all the things men usually said to crying women when they wanted them to stop.
    She was drunk and it was difficult to follow everything she said, but he got the gist of it fairly quickly. She was angry with Pam because she hadn’t come to Nikki’s birthday party. She said Pam was letting Nikki grow up without taking the time to witness any of the significant events in the child’s life. They had talked about things like this, important things, and made a pact. Pam had promised she would be a part of everything, not just send money and silly gifts. Paris told him the money Pam sent was more than enough and that she didn’t mind doing anything she did, really she didn’t, but it was so unfair to Nikki. Then she had apologized to Chad for losing