Squeezing my hand, she turned towards me and smiled, which made my heart feel at ease. Like always, that did more for me than she would ever know.
9
Nova
I could see the discomfort in Don’s face as he prepared himself to tell me what had been going on over the last few months. Well, at least I assumed it was just the last few months.
“I guess I should start at the beginning, and by beginning, I mean when I moved to Dallas.”
“Wow, okay,” I said, a little shocked to hear that he’d been staying quiet about anything for that long.
“Now, before you start looking at me sideways, I have a lot of reasons I didn’t share a great deal of this information. For one, it was embarrassing as hell. Two, I know how you are, and I didn’t want you acting crazy.”
Laughing, I pulled a couple of pickles from my burger and tossed them in my mouth. “Damn, now you’ve got me super intrigued. Spill the details. Where’s Kierra?”
“Kierra’s in jail.”
“Wait…what?” My eyes widened. “What the hell happened?”
“Like I said, let me start from the beginning.”
“Please do, and don’t leave anything out.”
“So, you know why I decided to move to Dallas, right?”
“Yeah, Kierra received some new job there and you wanted to be closer to Dakota.”
He nodded. “Right. Well, shortly after moving there, I learned that there was no new job. I mean, she ended up getting a job, but that wasn’t the reason she moved to Dallas.”
“Um…okay,” I replied in confusion. “If she didn’t move there for a job then what did she move there for?”
“Some idiot she was messing around with,” he replied while shaking his head.
“So…you’re saying she packed up all of her shit with a baby and moved to a completely different state because of a man?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Oh, but that’s not even the crazy part. Get this…the man that she was so in love with and chasing after was married.”
My mouth flew open. “I know you’re lying.”
“I wish I was.”
“Okay, wait, you have to be leaving some stuff out. Take me back or something.”
“Yeah, I’m actually leaving out a lot. First off, when Kierra found out she was pregnant, she made it clear to me that she didn’t know if I was the father. Then, she went on to tell me that she hoped that I wasn’t because she had real feelings for the other man involved. Unfortunately, that other man turned out to be the married man, but neither of us knew that at the time.”
“Okay, so when she moved to Dallas, she thought he was single?”
“Right. According to her, they met on a flight before she met me, and they hit it off. Eventually, they started seeing each other, but because he lived in Dallas and he traveled here for business a lot, they would just spend time here. But for whatever reason, after having Dakota, she felt the need to move closer to him. Unfortunately, he had no idea about her plans, and he didn’t take her decision to move to his city well at all.”
“I bet, seeing as his ass had a whole wife that he was pretending didn’t exist. So, what happened? Did she pop up and see them together at his place or something?”
“Nope. For the first few months, he managed to keep his shit a secret and still mess around with her. But things started to get a little sticky when Kierra started feeling some kind of way about never being invited to his place and how he couldn’t stay the night. Kierra and I were cool, so she would tell me a lot of the things that were going on in her life. But this particular situation had her in a lot of pain.”
“She was really in love with this guy, huh?”
“Yeah, and she thought they were going to get married.”
“Wait, so you weren’t mad after you found out that she lied to you about the move?”
