Heather wasn't anymore ready for this than Sam was. She didn't have the same issues with it as he did, not so specifically anyway, but she had her own that had been weighing on her mind ever since the possibility had presented itself.
What kind of mother could she ever be with the kind of things she'd gone through in the past? Things she was still working on getting over. How was she supposed to explain why Mommy's all scarred up? Above all else, that was probably what bothered her the most. She could shrug off the nightmares and everything, the memories that still plagued her from that place, but the scars would never go away, and they weren't easy to hide sometimes. And then there would be questions, and then everything would come out. She was hardly mother material right now, that was for sure. She'd been doing better, but what if something happened and she slipped up? It happened, right? Relapses and all?
Stopping that train of thought was easy, as Sam's bitter-sounding voice cut through and snapped her out of it. Not like it was the lesser of two evils, though. Maybe she would have preferred to be lost in her own mind with thinking like that. It didn't hurt quite so much.
And then he was reaching out to her. She blinked a few times in surprise, thinking maybe he would need space or time to think everything over, to process it. But no. He wanted to hold her, and that was something Heather wasn't going to take for granted just then.
Moving closer, she wrapped her arms around his middle and clung to him, the side of her face pressed against his chest so that his heartbeat thumped against her ear. It was something that helped relax her, and she slowly closed her eyes and let it do just that.
After a few moments, she found her voice again. "I'm really scared, you know. Petrified." She knew he was, too, maybe even more than her, she didn't know exactly. But he wasn't the only one, by far.