Chapter 14 #2
I am not ready to give you more information at this time, but you have a daughter.
Her mother was Ivy-Marie Colefield, and she was killed when your daughter was eight.
She doesn’t know I’m sending this message to you, much less that I’ve found you, because I didn’t want to tell her if your reaction is negative.
She’s not looking for anything from you, so don’t think this is an attempt to get money.
But if you want to get to know her, or have questions for me about her, please respond to this message and we’ll go from there.
I will tell you she survived a lot of trauma as a kid.
If you don’t want anything to do with her, please respond and tell me that, and I will never contact you again, or even tell her that I have contacted you. Thank you.
I didn’t sign it, obviously.
I also fought the urge to check the email account every few minutes and had to force myself to stay off my phone.
Late the next day, before I headed home I checked the account and found a reply from Miles.
Not to sound like a jerk, but I don’t want to commit to anything without a DNA test. If she is my daughter, yes, I want to meet her and have as much interaction with her as she’ll allow.
I am married and as you can imagine, this news will come as a shock to everyone.
Meaning I want to be certain before going any further.
Ivy-Marie ran away, or so I was told, after her parents told her she couldn’t see me anymore.
I was supposed to meet her after school the next day, but I was late and she wasn’t there when I arrived.
I never saw her again. I did not know she was pregnant, and when I asked her family for information about her whereabouts, they refused to respond.
She didn’t call me after she left. We moved after I graduated.
I am guessing you are her spouse? I will await your next contact, and I will pay for the testing if you/she cannot afford it.
And he included an email address.
I didn’t want to get into a long back-and-forth with him right then, but I did shoot him an email from the new account telling him I’d be in touch within the next couple of days.
Which would buy me a little thinking space.
I wanted to be angry at Lilah for putting me in this spot except I understood her actions came from a place of love for Emmy.
As I drove home, my plan was to take Emmy out for an evening ride on the horses and broach the subject. Except I no sooner pulled into our driveway when Emmy texted me.
Sorry, Sir. Late night. Emrg ped surg. Will text before leaving. Luv U.
Well, shit. Okay, shelve that plan. I texted her a quick reply and headed inside.
Lilah arrived home two hours after I did and I hadn’t heard from Emmy yet. She walked in scowling and I said, “Emergency surgery.”
Immediately Lilah relaxed, the tension flowing out of her.
Even if I couldn’t stand Lilah—not the case, because this incident not withstanding I adored her—I would have tolerated her for her dedication to Emmy.
Lilah went out with a guy a few weeks ago, but when he’d heard about our living situation, he’d informed her that “no woman of his” would share a house with a guy except him.
It was a good thing I wasn’t there because I likely would’ve decked him. As it was, she told him to go fuck himself and when I came home from my shift a couple of hours later, I arrived bearing two different quarts of her favorite ice creams, thanks to Emmy’s heads-up.
I waited until Lilah had showered and returned to the kitchen in her Scooby PJs to get dinner to bring up the latest development.
She leaned against the counter as I read the man’s response, her face a stony mask.
“Well?” I asked.
She didn’t reply, at first. “Sorry I tossed you into this, Jack. I should’ve asked you first.”
“We’re in agreement,” I said, “but it’s too late for that. Thoughts?”
“I mean, not telling her is an option.”
“Uh, no, it’s not. I swore to her I wouldn’t manage or withhold stuff from her, or lie to her, in nearly any situation. And this isn’t a case of if her cute ass looks fat, or what I got her for her birthday. This is huge. This is life changing.”
She pulled out a chair and sat. “I mean, I can’t exactly fudge an official DNA test. She’ll know something’s up. And he doesn’t sound like he’s going to be a dick about it.”
I made an executive decision. “Well, we need to tell her. And you’re sitting right there with me when I do.”
She sat back. “Me?”
“Uh, yeah, you. She can’t hate both of us.”
“I think you underestimate her,” she snarked.
“I mean teaming up about this. You got us into it—you’re going to help me follow through.”
She sighed. “That’s fair.”
“If she says no, then that’s it,” I added. “And hopefully, she doesn’t hold a grudge against us for it. Anything else you want to tell me now?”
She shook her head. “No. Sorry.”
“We tell her either when she gets home, depending on how she’s doing, or we tell her tomorrow night after work. And if you claim you’ve got a work emergency, I want to see GPS evidence, ‘Officer’.”
She stuck her tongue out at me but grumbled her assent. That’s when my phone buzzed with a text.
“You’re on the clock,” I said to Lilah as I replied to Em’s text. “She’s on her way home now.”
“Terrific.” She stood and started getting leftovers ready for both her and Emmy. “Hope you don’t end up in the guest room.”
“Ooohhh ho ho, no I absolutely will not,” I said. “You’ll be the one in the guest room because that mattress fucking sucks.”
“Motherfucker,” she said.
Emmy
Exhausted, I drove home. At least it was a best worst-case emergency surgery.
A little girl with hydrocephalus secondary to her spina bifida had a shunt failure, but it was only in the top portion, meaning it wasn’t a difficult surgery.
As long as she didn’t contract an infection, she’d likely go home later tomorrow.
When I walked in the door, I smelled food and my stomach rumbled, reminding me I hadn’t eaten since that morning.
Whoops.
Sir and Lilah were both in the kitchen and I pulled up short.
“Uh, whuuuuut’s going on?”
They shared a guilty glance. “First of all, how are you?” Sir asked, walking over to kiss me.
I planted my hand in his chest, stopping him. “You guys are freaking me out. I don’t know what happened, but you’d better tell me right now.”
Another shared guilty glance, and Lilah started.
By the time Sir finished the story, I was sitting at the kitchen table and Lilah had put a beer in front of me.
Stunned, I grabbed it and downed half of it in a few swallows.
They both looked low-key shitting-bricks worried now.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Sir said. “But I swore never to hold stuff back.” He glared at Lilah. “I’ve already had a chat with someone about not looping me in sooner.”
Lilah actually fucking blushed. “Sorry,” she muttered.
I stood, grabbing the beer. “I need a shower,” I said. When Sir started to follow, I held up a hand. “Alone, please.”
With the water as hot as I could stand it, I stood there, numb, wanting to cry, wanting to scream.
Wanting to throw up, although that could’ve been from shot-gunning the rest of the beer on an empty stomach.
Not only did I have a father, my mother had lied on my birth certificate about where she was born. For reasons that would forever remain unknown, she’d erased my entire past.
All the countless times as a kid I wished my biological father would swoop in, scoop me up, and carry me away from the nightmares. Honestly, I think I stopped believing that would happen not long after I met Lilah.
Except… now I had a Daddy. I had a man who loved me, judgment free. Who would die before letting harm come to me.
And Lilah would undoubtedly shoot a bitch if they tried to hurt me.
When anger bubbled to the surface, I grabbed it and held my breath, taking a moment to truly examine it. Most of the latent anger in my life stemmed from the actions of a teenaged unwed mother who, for whatever reason, was forced to have and raise me on her own.
As an adult, I understood she’d done her best within whatever circumstances put her in that position. She’d been a fucking kid, terrified, most likely.
I deal with patients older than she was when she’d had me.
I get why Lilah worried about me, because she tended to fret about my health more than I did, the way I tended to worry about hers over mine.
From the moment she entered my life, Lilah never did anything regarding me that wasn’t rooted in love for me. And likewise.
Jack had won her over and even that morning I’d been pondering asking him to propose so we could set a date.
And he had done as I asked when no one else—including Lilah—would have blamed him for keeping this secret from me no matter what I’d made him promise.
When I returned to the kitchen, the uncomfortable silence nearly bowled me over.
I pointedly walked over to Lilah first, hugging her. “I’m not… angry,” I said. “I wish you’d talked to me first, but I get it.”
Tension flowed from her and she hugged me tighter. “I love you, sis. I’m sorry. I really wasn’t thinking.”
Then I turned to Sir, who stood there leaning against the counter. I let him envelop me in his arms and I gave him the belated kiss hello.
And that’s when my tears flowed. “Thank you for keeping your promise.”
“I’m sorry, baby. I still would’ve told you even if he hadn’t replied like this, but Lilah and I would’ve figured out a way to soften the blow.”
“Can I see the message?”
“Sure.” He pulled out his phone and opened both the social media profile messages and the email account.
I looked at the man’s picture first. He didn’t have much on his profile that was publicly visible. I wasn’t sure if I resembled him or not—I’m a horrible judge of things like that on a good day—and scrolled through his profile for a few minutes.
Then I burst out laughing, which turned into crying.
“What is it, sweetheart?” he asked.
I laughed again, even through my tears, and showed them the phone as Lilah crowded in.
“He’s a fireman too, dumbass.”
He took the phone from me and they stared at it, jaws dropped. It was an older picture someone had tagged him in.
A group photo of several firemen in front of their station.
“Son of a bitch!” Lilah gasped. “What are the odds?”
“Apparently, pretty damned good,” I said.
“I’ll let the ‘dumbass’ slide, babygirl,” he said. “This was… emotional.”
“Ya think?” I kissed him. “Sir,” I added.
He laughed. “You may not be a Little, but sometimes you sure excel at bratting.”
“She’s always been a multitasker,” Lilah joked.