He leans back on the sectional, his gaze on the ceiling, like we used to do as kids when he wanted to tell me something but wasn’t sure how. Sometimes we would sit on his parents’ deck and stare at the stars for what felt like hours before he found the words he was looking for.
I sniff and lean back too, resting my head on the couch, and ease out a bracing breath. It does nothing to relax me.
“I came home yesterday after my run with Kellan. There was a woman sitting on my front stoop. With a toddler.”
I ready myself for what’s coming next but don’t say anything. I have no idea where this conversation is headed.
“The woman—Athena—is the one who told me Kenda is dead.”
The finality of the word sets off a new round of tears pricking my eyes. I close my eyelids against the picture in my head.
“The toddler…she’s Kenda’s daughter,” Garrett explains, the heartache in his voice softening slightly. I open my eyes but keep them directed on the ceiling.
The poor little girl. I can’t even imagine…
His last words sink in deeper, kick-starting the brain cells that must have shorted with the first part of his news.Daughter?“Kenda doesn’t have a daughter. She would’ve told me if she was pregnant. She would’ve told me if she’d met someone.” Sure, we hadn’t been as close as we were in college, but we talked from time to time. And maybe I hadn’t heard from her in more than two years, but she certainly would have told me if she was pregnant.
Wouldn’t she have?
I continue staring at the ceiling as if the answer is scrawled across it. And if I look long enough I’m bound to find it.
“She definitely had a daughter.” The pain in Garrett’s voice intensifies, laced with another emotion.
“And the father?” Is that what the pain in his voice is about? She had a baby with another man? “Where does he fit into all of this?” If she never told me about him, maybe he’s no longer in the picture.Lord, did he die too?
A cavernous silence settles over us. The weighted silence prior to the drop of a bomb. It takes a moment for my brain to move the pieces of the puzzle around, slot them into position. Then with the final piece falling into place…boom.
The hard truth stares me in the face and my heart stalls and my lungs collapse, like an imploding building, the air all sucked out.
No, no, no.It can’t be true. Please tell me I’ve got it wrong.
“The little girl is mine,” Garrett says, confirming exactly what I feared. “She’s my daughter.”
The last two words are whispered, but the outcome is no less staggering.
My world shatters into a thousand pieces, each one raining on me. Cutting into my flesh.
Kenda and Garrett had a baby. A daughter. Together.
I jerk up and turn to face him, wincing at the sharp stab in the lower curve of my spine. “How? I didn’t know you and Kenda…” Hooked up? Got back together and forgot to mention that to me?
“Kenda and I bumped into each other in New York City. When I was there to meet my editor and agent. And, well…”
“You hooked up? When did this happen?” The casual, unconcerned tone of my voice sounds genuine, even to my ears. But in my head…in my head it’s a disbelieving, high-pitched wail.
A daughter. They had a daughter together.
One more thing that binds Garrett and Kenda, that makes me the outsider once more as I try to keep the broken pieces of my heart taped together. One more reminder Garrett is hers…even in death. They had a daughter to forever cement that bond. I can’t compete with that.
Not that I would’ve been able to, even without the little girl in his life. Garrett has never seen me the same way he saw Kenda, his once-upon-a-time girlfriend.
“Just over two years ago,” Garrett replies.
Sure, it would have hurt even if his daughter was the result of a one-night stand who he had barely known at the time, but nowhere near as much as when the one-night stand was Kenda.
“And you never told me about her?” I slip a teasing quality into my tone, the further breaking of my heart only loud enough formyears. Sure, I’d always thought those two would eventually find each other again and have a second chance at their happily ever after, like Simone and Lucas.
But believing and finding out it had happened aren’t even…I can’t wrap my head around it.
