Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 94687 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94687 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 379(@250wpm)___ 316(@300wpm)
When they finished, they looked up at me. “Wow,” breathed Meg. “That’s . . . a lot to take in.”
“God, April. You must be just—I don’t even know what you must feel.” Chloe shook her head. “He’s been right here. For months. At our old school. Playing for Tyler’s old team.”
“And Tyler has been working with him one-on-one,” I told them.
Meg sucked in her breath. “Jesus. Does he know yet?”
I nodded, plucking a tissue from the box on the table. “Yes. This is the part where I might have screwed up. I opened the letter right before going to work. I was already kind of upset because of that stupid news story. Not so much for me, but for Tyler, and because Cloverleigh and our family had been dragged into it. But learning about Chip was a whole other level of holy shit, what is my life?”
“I bet,” Chloe said.
“I sort of gave myself the day to figure out how to tell him,” I went on. “I knew he was going to freak out—he’d already made it clear he was not into meeting his biological son, although he was supportive of me wanting to establish contact. He understood why it was important to me.”
“Chloe said he’d made the decision to move back?” Meg asked.
“Yeah. It’s been so crazy I haven’t really had time to update you guys. But yes—he was planning to move back.” I felt the tears coming again. “Until last night.”
“What happened?” Chloe sat up taller in her seat.
“I’d given him a key to my place so he could come over while I was at work. I knew I’d be late, and I didn’t want him to have to wait up if he was tired. I’d taken the letter with me to work, but apparently the photograph fell out, and he saw it on the kitchen floor when he got here. On the back is Chip’s full name—he figured it out.”
“Wow,” Meg said again. “That had to be a shock.”
“What did he do?” Chloe asked.
“Exactly what I feared. Freaked out. Went back to his hotel and packed his bags. Booked a flight back to California.”
“He left without even saying goodbye?” Meg looked shocked.
“No, he was here when I got home. He said goodbye.” The memory of it had my tears spilling over, and I blew my nose. “He said a lot of things.”
Chloe reached across the table and rubbed my arm. “Like what?”
“He’s scared. He thinks if he doesn’t leave, people will put it together—if I don’t hide the fact that I’m Chip’s birth mother, he says people will do the math and figure out he’s the father. We’re all over the news together.”
“In all honesty, he’s probably right,” Meg said gently, picking up the photograph again. “The resemblance is really strong. It’s a small town. And everyone knows you guys were close back then.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said, reaching for another tissue. “And he just isn’t ready for that. He doesn’t want Chip to know. He says he’ll just mess up Chip’s life. He thinks he ruins everything he touches.”
“And what do you think?” Chloe asked.
“I think he’s using that fear as an excuse.”
“How so?” Meg tilted her head.
I blew my nose again before going on. “Deep down, he’s so scarred from the way his career ended, he thinks he’s a failure as a man. As a human being. He thinks he can never live up to anyone’s expectations of him, so he’s refusing to even try. He thinks I don’t see the real him. But I do, you guys,” I wept. “I do see the real him. And he saw the real me. I thought he felt the way I did. I thought we had something worth fighting for. How could I have been so wrong?” I folded my arms on the table, dropped my head onto them, and cried.
Chloe rubbed my arm. “I’m sorry, honey. Relationships are so hard.”
“You know, Noah and I went through this,” Meg said softly. “When I first mentioned moving back from D.C., he freaked out. He tried to pretend it was because he didn’t want to be in a serious relationship, but really, it was just fear.”
“That’s right,” said Chloe. “Wasn’t he worried about his brother?”
“Yes. He’d always felt guilty because Asher had cerebral palsy, and he didn’t. They were twins, and he knew Asher’s CP was likely caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain during birth. So anything that Asher struggled with that came easy to Noah—from walking to talking to girls—he felt guilty about. From a young age, he had it in his head that he didn’t deserve things like becoming a husband and father. As if denying himself the things he wanted deep down was the right punishment for being born without CP.”
“God, that’s so sad,” I said, picking up my head and grabbing another tissue.