14. Taylor
14
TAYLOR
“You have a good day, babygirl,” I told Martha, dropping down on my haunches before her and pulling her into a hug. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me tight, and I scooped her off the floor and spun her around. She giggled, clinging on to me for dear life, the same as she did every morning in this little ritual we’d had going since she first started school.
“You can’t drive me there?” she asked me, raising her eyebrows hopefully. I sighed and ruffled her hair.
“You know I would love to, Marths,” I replied. “But Karen is going to take you, okay? I’ll see you this evening.”
She pulled a face, but turned to follow my nanny outside to the car. I stood in the doorway and waved them both off, before I made my way into the house to get ready for my own pickup in an hour or so’s time.
No matter how many times I did this little routine, I found myself wishing I could be the one to take her to school, like every other parent. Hardly anyone at Sunnyvale Elementary even knew that I was her father, and I knew that was for the best—I wanted her to have as normal a life as she could, and that wasn’t going to happen if people knew who I was. I was still getting used to it, the reality of having this level of stardom. Even if I couldn’t wrap my head around it, the rest of the world had, and I’d do well to catch the hell up.
I headed upstairs for a shower, putting some music on the speakers to fill the house with some noise. Ever since everything that had happened with Emily, I’d hated the quiet in here—it was like it was heavy with the reminders of everything she’d done, with the silence that had existed between us when things started falling apart. I could remember way too many tense, quiet mornings when she had been out with her friends and failed to make it home, waiting in the living room, waiting for her to come back and lie to me about what she had been doing and who she had been with.
As I stepped into the shower, I tipped my head back and let the water rush over my body. I tried not to think about her, when I could avoid it. Not like she was part of my life, or Martha’s for that matter, and I intended to keep it that way. No, she had made her decision, running off with her other man across the state to start a new life with him, and I wasn’t going to go chasing her. She’d chosen to leave her daughter, and I wouldn’t force a relationship on her if she didn’t want it. Martha was a smart kid, and I knew she’d be able to tell if her mom didn’t want to spend time with her. I never wanted her to feel that same kind of rejection that I had, and as far as I knew, I had protected her from that as much as was possible.
And Martha seemed to be thriving as she worked her way through elementary and toward middle school. I couldn’t believe how big she had gotten, how smart and how bright—she was part of the soccer team, and she played the piano, and she had a bunch of friends who she was always telling me about. They didn’t visit the house, of course, but she was always out at sleepovers and birthday parties, and she’d give me the rundown like she was a newspaper reporter the next day. I loved hearing about it.
I had never imagined that I’d be a single dad—nobody does, when they choose to have a baby with someone. When Emily got pregnant, I should have known, even then, that she wasn’t entirely convinced that she wanted this life for herself. If it wasn’t for how enthusiastic I had been, I doubted Martha would have been born at all.
And Emily had played at the dutiful girlfriend and mother for a while, at least while my career had really been getting off the ground. I’d taken on most of the childcare where I could, but when I was called away to work in another city, she had to step up—and that was where the problems started.
She didn’t really want to be a mom, she wanted to have fun with her friends, not to be tied down to anyone in particular. But the problem was, she loathed the thought of someone seeing her as anything less than perfect. So she put up the front of being this loving, dedicated parent, even as she handed Martha off to staff or foisted her on me instead of looking after her when she had free time. She’d post all these pictures on social media, talking about how much she adored her daughter, while she was out drinking and flirting with random guys she met at bars. It drove me crazy, the gap between what she let people believe she was and the person she really happened to be.
And of course, eventually it snapped, and she couldn’t keep up the act any longer. She took off with hardly a second word to me, with some real estate agent who I’d never heard about before, moving to a new town to start her life over, and telling me not to contact her ever again. Probably because she couldn’t stand the thought of me knowing who she really was—a cheat, a liar, an asshole all-round. I was better off without her, though it was hard for me to believe that in the first year or so after she left.
But that had been nearly half a decade ago now, and she had shown no signs of trying to come sloping back into our world, so I’d built a life for Martha and me that I was proud of. She was thriving, and that was all that mattered to me. My career was doing well enough that I’d be able to secure pretty much any future she wanted, along with any help or staff I needed to keep things ticking over here.
Today, I would be relying on Karen to take care of things around the house, as I was traveling out of the city for the day to shoot with Lee and Devon. I tried to avoid putting distance between myself and my home as much as I could, but sometimes it was unavoidable. And shit, it would probably do me some good to get a change of pace, especially since we were going to be shooting action, my favorite by far.
Soon enough, the truck that was taking us out of the city pulled up outside of my apartment block, and I headed out to meet everyone. Lee and Devon were crammed into the back, along with various pieces of equipment. Lee flashed me a grin as soon as he saw me, raising his eyebrows.
“Can you believe they’ve got us stuck in this thing?” he remarked, slapping the top of the truck cheerfully. “Something about cutting down on emissions, I don’t know. I miss the days when we got driven around in limos…”
“Yeah, I’m all good,” I replied, ducking to squeeze in alongside them.
“Makes sense, given where you live,” Lee teased, nodding up to the building I’d just come out of.
Devon dug an elbow into his side. “Hey, don’t be an asshole.”
“It’s fine,” I assured him. Devon sometimes felt like he had to act as peacemaker between the two of us, given Lee’s sharp tongue and inability to keep his mouth shut, but it didn’t bother me. He was young, he was cocky, and I didn’t have a problem with him running his mouth. He could say what he wanted. I didn’t let it get to me.
And besides, this time I actually had something I could throw back at him.
“Anyway, you should be more worried about keeping your own house in order,” I shot back at him. He raised his eyebrows at me as the truck rumbled toward our destination.
“Oh yeah? What does that mean?”
“Means that Maya was wearing your jeans at work earlier this week.”
Devon stiffened beside me. Lee let out a bark of laughter.
“Shit, I had no idea,” he chuckled. “Makes sense. She left my place in kind of a hurry, and what she was wearing the night before…yeah, it wasn’t exactly good for work.”
“So you slept with her?” I asked, leaning forward with interest. I knew it was none of my damn business really, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t enjoy some gossip when it was offered up on a platter to me. And besides—Maya was hot, no doubt about it. I might have been a gentleman when she had been confronted about where she’d gotten those jeans from in the makeup trailer, but I couldn’t help but wonder what she might look like under them.
Lee grinned. “Hell yeah, I did. We fooled around a little before, but I wanted more. Invited her round to my place, made her dinner…and she stayed the night.”
“I thought we weren’t meant to get with anyone who worked on set,” I remarked, and he rolled his eyes skyward.
“Oh, come on, like those rules actually mean anything.”
“They do to some of us.”
“Yeah, and look at all the fun you’re having as a result!” he countered, waving his hand in my direction. “We were just relaxing. It’s been stressful, working on this movie, and she’s hot—why wouldn’t I want to blow off some steam with her?”
“Steam sounds like the least of the?—”
“Don’t even say it,” Devon cut in, his voice suddenly cold. I had always known Devon to be a playful guy, but there was something about the tone of his voice that told me he didn’t want this to go on for another second. Both Lee and I turned to him, surprised by the sudden shift in his attitude.
“What’s your problem?” Lee demanded pointedly.
“Nothing.”
Devon shifted slightly in his seat. It was clear he didn’t really want to get into it, but he couldn’t just jump into the middle of this conversation and then pretend that he had nothing to say about it.
“It’s something,” Lee replied, leaning forward. “What, you jealous? You wanted Maya for yourself?”
“It’s not that,” he shot back, clearly irritated. “It’s—fuck it, it doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
“No, come on, I want to know now,” Lee pushed him. When Lee got it into his head that he was going to get to the bottom of something, it was damn near impossible to convince him to drop it. He was like a dog that way, pursuing his endgame until he landed it. Probably why he’d made it so far in this business, to be honest.
Devon glanced up, looking between the two of us. I could tell he was measuring whether or not he wanted to come clean about what was going on inside his head. But then, finally, sensing that Lee wasn’t going to let it go any time soon, he shrugged.
“I was with Maya. Before.”
“Before?” Lee demanded, sounding pissed—he probably thought that he had been the first to nail the gorgeous makeup artist, but now it turned out he’d been beaten to the punch.
“Yeah, before,” Devon replied. “Years ago. When both of us were first starting out. We had this…thing when we were working on a set together, just a fling really, but it was…it felt like something…”
He trailed off. It was obvious that he had never really talked about this with anyone. He didn’t know how to put it into words, whatever had happened between them. The weight of it still hung heavy over his head, and it made sense, now I thought about it. He had seemed to avoid Maya as much as he could, and if she was some kind of ex of his, it made sense why.
“I don’t know. Whatever. I thought we might pick it up again when we saw each other again, when we worked together, but it just never happened. She left the industry?—”
“To look after her kid, right?” Lee remarked. “That’s what she said to me.”
“Yeah,” Devon replied, his voice hollow. “When she had the kid. After she was with me.”
The words hung in the air for a beat as all of us tried to make sense of them. And then, it clicked.
“Shit!” Lee exclaimed. “You don’t think—you’re not that kid’s father, are you?”
Devon shrugged. My hands tightened into fists at my sides. What in the holy fuck was going on…?
“I don’t know,” Devon admitted. “I tried to ask her about it, but she just shut me down, first chance she got. Told me that since I’d left, I didn’t deserve an answer, some shit like that.”
“And you just let her?” I exclaimed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Everything I’d come to know about Maya—and granted, it wasn’t a lot—she seemed really sweet, smart, decent. A good mom, a good person in general. But a good person would never have tried to hide the truth of a child’s parentage from a guy who deserved to know. If the timeline lined up for when Devon had been with her, he had a damn good reason to want to find out if he’d been the dad to that kid all along without knowing about it.
Devon’s head snapped around to me. “No, I didn’t just fucking let her,” he replied, angry. “But how the hell am I meant to get an answer out of her if she won’t tell me? Not like I can just swipe a DNA test of that kid and run it against mine. And even if it turned out that I was the father, she clearly doesn’t want me to have a thing to do with either of them.”
He shook his head, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. I suddenly noticed dark rings under his eyes, like he had been tossing and turning night after night as he tried to piece it together.
As a father myself, I could imagine some of the hell he was putting himself through. When it came to kids, to the children you had brought into the world, you deserved to know about it, even if there was some kind of tension between you and the person you were raising them with. I didn’t know how everything had gone down with him and Maya when they were together, but I knew one thing for damn sure—he deserved to know whether or not her son was his.
I leaned back in the truck, the words spinning around my head—I matched them with what she had told me about her relationship with the father, about how complicated it was. Shit, if this was anything to go by, then it was more than complicated, it was a stone-cold fucking mess.
But it was one that Devon needed to clear his head on, one way or another. It was one that she needed to be honest with him about, even if it was difficult to admit what she had done and what she had chosen.
One way or another, I was going to get to the bottom of it. I was going to get her to come clean. I didn’t stand for people who lied, especially not to friends of mine like Devon.
And especially not when it came to kids.