Chapter 28
Nick didn’t manage to track down Paige until the day after he returned from New York. When he’d gotten home, she’d been sleeping
at Maria’s again, so he’d bit back his self-recriminations and spent the night working on his truck, even though he’d remedied
the heater problem in twenty minutes with a simple addition of coolant.
Whatever. The truck now ran better than ever, and he’d successfully dodged Tansy’s questions.
On Monday evening, Nick dropped into his usual chair at the dinner table, his hair still wet from his post-work, post-gym
shower. Tansy nodded a welcome. Paige smiled, though not with her usual enthusiasm.
He studied her covertly. Dark shadows clung beneath her eyes. “Hey, Peanut.”
“Hey, Daddy.”
“I’ve barely seen you all week. You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” She doodled her fork through her food, then darted a glance at Tansy, who was studiously separating her
quinoa from her broccoli—for some reason, she’d never been able to tolerate her food touching.
Not that it mattered right now. Nick got the message. Paige wanted to talk in private.
So he muddled through the meal, trying to keep his mood light. At least . . . as light as it ever got.
Thankfully, Tansy didn’t seem to notice the muted atmosphere. When she finished eating, she said, “I’m meeting Betty Klein,
over at the salon. She can only do her appointments in the evenings.”
“Great.” Nick tried to sound casual.
Tansy went to her bedroom to retrieve her work bag. The cords from her many curling irons and straighteners and god-knew-what-else
spilled over the sides. She left looking like she was carrying a giant spider under her arm.
The moment the door closed, Nick turned. “Look, if this is about the other day, when your mom and I were talking, I—”
“It’s not.” Paige’s blue eyes flared. “It’s really not, Daddy. I mean, that caught me off guard, yeah. But . . . that’s not
why I’ve been avoiding you.”
He blinked. The sentiment sliced into his gut. “You’ve been avoiding me?”
“Well . . .” She chewed at her lip.
He sat back. Shit. He’d gotten so knotted up over Aubrey he hadn’t even realized. “Aw, hell, kiddo. I’m sorry. I’ve been a
complete asshole.”
Paige breathed out something too thin to be called a laugh. “No, you haven’t. You really haven’t. And you have nothing to
apologize for.”
“Then why’re you avoiding me?”
“I just haven’t been ready to talk.”
“About?”
Crimson spots appeared on her cheeks. She picked at her food. “A couple things. But, ah . . . if you really wanna know, I
found Aubrey’s letter. That’s one.”
Every bone in his body snapped into rigid alignment. “You what?”
“The letter Aubrey wrote. In the shoebox under your nightstand. I found it.”
He forgot how to breathe. His pulse fired through his veins with the intensity of a machine gun. “Jesus. You should not have
looked at that.”
“I know.” Her expression crumpled. She tossed her silverware down with a clatter and raised empty hands. “And I wasn’t trying
to snoop, I swear. At least not for that. I was looking for something else and found the letter completely by accident. But then I saw who it was from, and . . .”
His throat went dry. “Okay. But she wrote that a long time ago. A really long time ago.” Shit, why did he sound like he’d crawled across a thousand-mile desert without any water?
“Yeah,” Paige said. “But it’s obvious that whatever you two had going on back then, it was pretty intense.”
Well. He wasn’t about to touch that with a fucking hundred-foot pole. He plowed off in the first direction he could think
of. “Why were you even in my room? What were you looking for?”
Her jaw worked. She held his eyes for an eternity. “My birth certificate.”
Static buzzed inside his head. “What? Why?”
“Do you really not know? You have no idea why I’d be looking for my birth certificate? None at all?”
The silence turned to stone as he cast about for some sensible meaning in her question. “I don’t know? Do you need it for
that internship you’re doing?”
She stared, then her shoulders lowered and she looked away. “Yeah. For my internship. Except then I found Aubrey’s letter.
And I know I shouldn’t have read it, but it just . . . happened.”
He tried to smooth his violent breathing. “It’s . . . okay. I mean, it’s fine. It’s done. And I’m sorry if I raised my voice. I’m not mad. I just wish you hadn’t seen that. Like I said, it was a long time ago. Before you were even born.”
“Right.” She looked up through her lashes. “But you saved it, all this time.”
He flinched. “Okay. Yes.”
“You were in love with her, weren’t you? Like, really in love.”
Jesus fucking Christ. He wished he hadn’t walked into this one so blind. He tried desperately to remember why he made a point
of never lying to his daughter. He should just deny it all. Get up, go get the letter, tear it to shreds, tell Paige he didn’t
care anymore.
Except he didn’t move a muscle.
“Not,” Paige continued softly, “that it’s a problem. I mean, I realize you and Mom aren’t together anymore. And that you had
girlfriends before her. It would be weird if you hadn’t.”
A trickle of air made it into his lungs. “It upsets you, though. Knowing.”
Paige picked at a fingernail. “That’s not the right word. It just . . . It caught me off guard, like I said. There was a lot
going on that day.”
He stewed over that. “Was that when you mouthed off to Juan?”
She peeked up. “Juan?”
“Mr. Gallegos.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Mr. Gallegos? He talked to you?”
“Yeah. He called to say you hadn’t turned in your genetics assignment. And that you were pretty rude to him, even after he
gave you an extension.”
She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, god. I was hoping you wouldn’t find out about that. I don’t even know why I said that
to him. I was just . . . Like I said, there’s been a lot going on.”
He pushed words out through a rusted throat. “More than just you finding Aubrey’s letter?”
“Yes,” she said, her emphasis so heavy that he wondered if they were talking at cross-purposes. She seemed to expect him to derive
some meaning from that answer that he absolutely did not.
“Are you okay, at least? You’re not . . .” Fear gripped him, old and pure. “. . . pregnant, are you?”
She stared for an overlong moment, then released a burst of trembling laughter. “Oh, god, what? Pregnant? Really? No, not
even close. You have nothing to worry about on that front.”
His jaw unlocked. Not that he would’ve raked her over the coals, considering he’d become a father at eighteen. But he wanted
more for her. “Okay. So you talked shit to Juan because . . . ?”
Paige said nothing.
“If you won’t tell me what’s going on,” he said, “how am I supposed to fix it?”
“Oh, Daddy.” Her eyes softened. “I’m not asking you to fix it.”
“But that’s my job. I mean, what do you want me to do, here? Punch someone?”
A flicker of a smile graced her mouth. “I don’t think that would help, in this case.”
“But I’d do it. You know I would. Or do you want me to swear I’m not going anywhere? That I wouldn’t leave you even if the
world was ending, even if your mom and I fight sometimes?”
Her eyebrows crooked. “No. Not that. I already know that.”
“Well, what, then?”
“Just . . .” She reached over the table for his hands, then squeezed so hard his bones creaked. “Promise you’ll always be
my dad. And I don’t just mean if you find someone new. I mean . . . in general.”
He missed a beat, then another. “That’s a given. That goes without saying.”
His reassurance didn’t seem to relax her. Tense lines appeared around the corners of her eyes. “So you promise?”
Jesus, she sounded so vulnerable. Like her whole existence hinged on his answer. “Of course I promise. I’ll write it in blood,
if you want me to. But I’d sooner jump off a building than stop being your dad. So it’s a moot point.”
Her grip loosened. Finally, he’d said something right. But goddamn, he had no idea what this conversation was actually about.
From what he could tell, Aubrey’s letter merely lurked at the fringes of Paige’s disquiet. Something else had shaken her to
her roots.
“Okay,” she said, steadier. “I’m okay.”
“Are you?”
She reclaimed her hands and smoothed out her T-shirt. “Yeah. I think so. Or I will be. And I promise I’ll tell you everything.
Once I sort through some stuff.”
He shook his head, which someone had stuffed full of cotton. “You’re not in danger, though?”
She smiled faintly. “No.”
“Okay, good. And . . . you’ll turn in your biology assignment?”
She tucked her lip under her teeth and dropped her eyes. “I’d rather not.”
His breath shortened. That damned assignment. Did that lead back to what had freaked her out so badly? “Juan said you’ll be
lucky to pull a C-minus without it, so I think you kind of have to.”
“Right.” A cheerless laugh. “Okay, then. If you really, really want me to.”
He studied her, hard, as if he might stare his way through the conversational fog. “I do.”
“Okay.” She heaved a sigh, got up, and kissed his cheek. She carried her plate toward the kitchen, then turned in the doorway. “And Daddy? This thing with you and Aubrey, it doesn’t bother me. Not now that I’ve gotten over the shock. I mean, she’s amazing, so I can see why you . . .”
He stiffened, and she trailed off, her cheeks flaring all over again. “Anyway, sorry to be so weird. I’m just gonna go lie
down, okay?”
“You’re sure you’re not pregnant? Because you could tell me, if so. You wouldn’t be in trouble.”
She sighed, but a current of amusement undercut the sound. “That’d be impossible. So yeah, I’m sure.”
“Yeah. Okay.” His response came out on autopilot.
Paige drifted from the room, but Nick didn’t move. He sat at the table, staring past his cold food, unseeing.
The conversation replayed in his mind, over and over. He tugged on a different thread each time, examining where each led,
until a picture came together in his head.
That fucking genetics assignment. And a hunt for her birth certificate. Was that why Paige had gone quiet after breakfast the other day? Because he hadn’t been able to do the tongue-curl thing? At the time,
he’d assumed she’d approached him before Tansy, but what if Paige had gotten Tansy’s answer, first? And his hadn’t been what
she was expecting?
Something black and oily coiled his guts. Oh, god. Oh, Jesus fuck.
Was he going to puke? Maybe. His stomach rioted, threatening to turn itself inside out, even as a deep certainty assailed
him.
He didn’t want to know what had upset Paige so much. Not now, not ever. Because whatever it was, he didn’t trust it not to
kill him.