23. A Real Partnership
A REAL PARTNERSHIP
“Idon’t know that you could tell me anything that would change the way I feel,” he said, his voice low but steady.
Tasha slid off his lap, needing the distance, needing the air. She crossed back to her chair with her heart pounding. She couldn’t tell him about Shane with his hands on her or with his warmth clouding her judgment. She needed to see his face. His eyes.
His judgment. Or… hopefully, the lack of it.
Because if his expression even hinted at seeing her differently, she didn’t want Micah anywhere near that.
She shouldn’t have invited him over tonight if this could blow up in her face. But then again, if she truly believed he’d react badly, she wouldn’t be willing to tell him at all.
“Make this easy,” they’d said.
There was nothing easy about any of it.
Not what he’d shared with her and not what she was about to hand back to him.
He tried to lighten his own confession, but she’d felt the stiffness in his shoulders, heard the strain hiding behind every word. A man who spent his whole life refusing to be like the one who raised him, only to wind up lonely anyway.
She cleared her throat. “You don’t know until you hear it. I told you… I rarely involve my parents in my dating life early. I’ve clearly had terrible taste in men.”
He studied her. “Have you had any long-term relationships?”
“Yes.” She smoothed the hem of her shorts, her nerves twisting tight.
“There was one. A little over a year, maybe less. His name was James. Margo was my roommate then. He was… scholarly. Smart. Predictable. Not a lot of fun. But we got along, and I convinced myself maybe that was enough. That being an adult meant settling for steady instead of exciting.”
“That’s crazy,” he said. “You can enjoy life and still be responsible.”
“Exactly.” She gave a humorless laugh. “But it took me watching Margo and Liam to realize it. And maybe I was jealous, maybe not. But seeing them showed me what a real partnership looked like. And James wasn’t it. I didn’t feel enough. I was too young to settle for safe.”
Her parents had thought she’d lost her mind when she ended it. But that was the moment she’d started keeping her dating life quiet. Closing the doors meant fewer opinions, fewer criticisms, and fewer reminders that she didn’t choose well.
Tonight, all of that was catching up to her.
“That is how I look at things now. I would have been settling for Alexa. She actually did me a favor, but it took me years to realize it.”
She drew in a steadying breath, her fingers lacing together so tightly her knuckles cracked. “But James wasn’t the one who really screwed me up. With him, that was on me. But Micah’s dad. Sorry, just the sperm donor in my mind.”
He didn’t move, didn’t flinch, didn’t shift in his chair. He just watched her patiently and openly, completely focused on her words. It gave her the smallest bit of courage to keep going.
“What was his name?”
“Shane,” she said. “Someone I didn’t tell anyone about. Not my parents, not my friends… barely even myself.”
It all made her feel like such a fool looking back.
That she had wanted something for so long and took what she thought was perfect.
Well, perfect never was because it didn’t exist.
“Why not?”
She forced herself to meet Baker’s eyes.
“For a while, I thought he was everything I’d been missing.
Charming. Attentive. Funny in all the ways James wasn’t.
In all the ways no one was. I thought he was the man I was waiting for even though there were signs I should have seen he wasn’t.
But when we were together, he made me feel as if I was his everything. ”
Her chest tightened. God, she hated thinking about this.
“I learned the hard way that it’s just not possible for that to happen. You end up killing a little of yourself in the process.”
She blew out a breath. “You don’t know the half of it.
” She steadied herself to continue. “When he traveled for work, I couldn’t reach him at night.
When he was home, the calls were rushed.
He’d text me when it was convenient for him, and stupidly…
I accepted it. I thought I was overreacting.
I should mention that he lived in Atlanta.
He worked for his uncle who had a business in Charlotte and stayed at the company apartment two weeks at a time, then returned home and came back again. ”
“That fucker was married, wasn’t he?” he asked.
Her gaze lifted to his furious one. She swallowed the lump in her throat, blinked the tears out of her eyes and nodded her head.
She needed a moment to gather herself. To continue.
To know that Baker wasn’t assuming she was the other woman that she feared many would do if they found out Micah’s dad was married to someone else at the time.
“He was. And the way I found out—it was horrible.”
His hand reached for hers, his strength and comfort exactly what she needed.
“Any way of finding out that news hurts. I’ve seen it with my mother, but I’m positive those women my father was with knew he was married and didn’t care. My mother almost searches for it now. She knows it will happen, it’s just a matter of when.”
“I never expected it and should have. The signs were there when I look back, but I was too lost in it. It’s not like we hid being out together.”
“There’d be no reason for it if no one knew him in the area.”
“Exactly. He never wore a wedding band that I saw. Not even the markings of one. When he was talking to people at work, he left the room. I know it was work related, it’s not like he hid it.
Then one day, we were in the bedroom. Just finished having sex.
I’m thinking to myself, I’m going to tell him I love him.
I’ve never felt like this before and I was already trying to decide if I could make the move to Atlanta to be by him. ”
“I hope you didn’t tell him you loved him.”
“No. His phone rings. He rolls over to get it, leaves the room, then the apartment to take the call. It’s not like I made noise when he was on the phone, but I guess he didn’t want to take that chance.
I get dressed and I hear this vibration in the room and am looking everywhere for it.
In his dresser, there was another phone upside down under clothes. I told myself don’t do it. Don’t look.”
“But you couldn’t not look either.”
She was shaking her head as she’d done that day when it was happening.
It almost felt as if she were in that room again.
“I flipped it over and the picture on the screen was Shane and a woman, two young kids, and the name at the top said ‘wifey’.”
“I hope you confronted him.”
“Oh yeah. I finished getting dressed, had the phone in my hand. My body was shaking, I mean trembling. There was so much anger in me there was no room to cry. He comes back to the room, half talking before he makes it in, saying he was sorry but we would be left alone now. His steps just end right in front of me when he sees what I’m holding. ”
“I hope to hell he didn’t give you a line of shit that they were separated or on the outs?”
His clenched fists and tight jaw told her everything and more on how he felt about this.
Whose side he was on.
“He tried it, but a text popped up at that moment and I could see it on the screen asking that he call her, that she missed and loved him. There were no excuses after that point. I marched out and left. I didn’t want to hear any explanations. But he followed me to my place.”
“Where you kicked his ass to the curb,” he said. “I know you did.”
“Oh, I did. We had it out. I told him I was done. To get lost. I should have seen it all along and felt like such an idiot. I didn’t want excuses.
I wanted nothing from him. I was screaming loud enough that my neighbor came out to see if there was a problem.
I said we were fine and Shane left. He said he’d give me time to cool down. ”
“You don’t cool down from that,” he said.
“Never. I didn’t. I blocked him and that was it. A few weeks later I found out I was pregnant.”
“What did he say when you told him?”
“You see…this is my big messy truth. I never did. He doesn’t know about Micah. And now I’m ready for your judgment.”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees as he weighed her words.
She braced herself for the harsh truth to come out. For her to be told she was selfish. She was wrong.
She was playing with fire.
What was she going to do when Micah was older and wanted to know about his father?
All those things she’d told herself already.
All those things she knew she’d have to deal with when the time came.
“I’m not judging you. It’s not what I’d do. It’s not what I’d want if I fathered a child, but I don’t know this guy.”
“I know. I’m worried that when people find out that Micah’s father was married to someone else, I’m going to be labeled a home wrecker. That people aren’t going to believe I didn’t know. Or worse yet, say how stupid I was to not see the signs.”
“It shouldn’t matter what people think or say. It should only matter what you do and want to do. It’s your life, not theirs.”
“I don’t want Micah labeled. He will be.”
“He might be,” he said. “Just like he’ll start asking questions when he gets older.”
“I know all those things. I never thought I’d still have this secret now. I wanted to get through the pregnancy. I was heartbroken. I was shattered. My pride, my heart, all of it.”
“No one would blame you for feeling that way.”
“I didn’t know if it’d get messy. This guy lied to me. I didn’t want to deal with him. None of it. That’s selfish of me. I get it. My parents would be the first to say it.”
“Who do they think Micah’s father is?”
“They have no clue. In their eyes, whoever it is, that person chose not to be part of Micah’s life. That could still happen.”
“But you won’t know until you tell him. Do you ever plan on doing it?”
“You think I’m a horrible person, don’t you?” The tears couldn’t be stopped. She knew this was going to happen. She’d been expecting it all along.
He reached for her, for her fingers, then her arm, tugging her into his lap. “I don’t think you’re a horrible person. I think you did what you could to get through a terrible time in your life. But the thing about secrets, they don’t stay that way forever.”
“I know. My day will come, and I’ll deal with it when it does. I know that.”
“Do you know anything about Shane’s life now? Have you looked into him?”
“As I got close to my due date, I decided to just look. Just see if I could find anything out on him. I found his wife on Facebook. I saw pictures of them as a happy family on a vacation they’d just returned from.
His life was going on as if I didn’t exist. I thought of his wife.
I thought of how I felt and told myself I couldn’t do that to this woman anymore than I could to those kids. ”
“You put yourself in her shoes, but maybe she already knew what her husband did. I’ve lived that life. My mother wasn’t na?ve. She just turned the other cheek.”
“And that is what I did when I saw those pictures.”