1. Maddox Creed #2
Her eyes met mine, and for a second, neither one of us said anything.
Then she shook her head.
“After that meeting?” The look she gave me told me everything before she even opened her mouth. “They made it real clear that I wasn’t supposed to.”
“How?”
Gia leaned back in the chair and looked toward the ceiling, like she was forcing herself to revisit something she’d spent years trying to forget.
“She didn’t threaten me or anything like that.” That caught my attention immediately, because that wasn’t the answer I expected. “Hell, she didn’t even have to,” she continued. “The lawyers handled that part.”
I stayed quiet…
Listening…
“The way they talked… the way everything was presented…” She shook her head. “They made it sound like contacting you would destroy everything.”
“Destroy what?”
“The future you were building.”
I laughed—hard. One without any humor attached to it, because now I was starting to hear it—starting to picture it.
A twenty-two-year-old woman sitting across from a table full of lawyers, security guards, and people with more money and power than she’d probably ever been around in her life.
Looking at it now, I could see exactly how it happened.
They didn’t have to threaten her. They didn’t have to raise their voices.
All they had to do was convince her she was doing the right thing.
Convince her that staying quiet was noble.
Convince her that disappearing would somehow make everybody’s life easier.
The shit made me sick.
“You believed them?” I asked.
Gia looked down at her hands before letting out a breath.
“I wanted to.”
For some reason, that answer hit like a punch to the guts, because it made sense.
People always talked about lies like they only worked on stupid people. Like everybody who got manipulated was supposed to see it coming. That wasn’t how life worked. The best lies weren’t built on fear. They were built on hope. They gave people something they desperately wanted to believe.
At twenty-two years old, pregnant, scared, and trying to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do next, maybe believing them felt easier than fighting. Maybe believing them felt safer than spending years wondering if she made the wrong decision.
“I kept telling myself it was temporary,” she admitted. “I kept thinking eventually somebody would tell you. Then one year passed. Then another one. Then another.”
Her voice wasn’t breaking down completely, but I caught it. Just enough strain slipped through for me to hear the weight behind it.
“And eventually?” I asked.
Gia let out a soft laughed.
“Eventually it felt too late.”
I looked away and dragged my hand across my beard.
Damn.
What the hell was I supposed to do with that?
Nine years…
My daughter had gone from a newborn to a whole person while I walked around completely unaware she existed. Nine years of birthdays. Nine years of firsts. Nine years of memories that belonged to everybody except me.
Without meaning to, my mind drifted back to Atlanta when I saw her for the first time in person.
The way she smiled when she talked. The way she looked at me like she had already decided she liked me. The way she’d grabbed my hand without hesitation and started dragging me around like she’d known me her entire life.
The memory twisted something deep in my chest, because I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I’d missed.
Not just the big moments either.
Everybody always focused on the big moments, but i was thinking about the little shit.
The random conversations on the way to school. Helping with homework. Sitting through dance recitals. Watching cartoons I didn’t want to watch. Doctor appointments. Bedtime stories. The everyday moments fathers complained about because they assumed there would always be more of them.
I would’ve given anything for those moments.
The house was quiet as we both got lost in our thoughts, but it wasn’t the kind of silence that felt awkward.
It felt final. The paperwork was still sitting on the counter.
Nylah was still in her room waiting for me to come back there so she can talk my ears off.
Somewhere between those two things sat the truth, and no matter how hard I tried to look at it from another angle, it always led back to the same place.
For several minutes neither one of us said anything.
I stood there staring at those papers while my mind worked through years of memories that suddenly didn’t fit together the way they used to.
Every answer Gia gave me seemed to create another question, but none of those questions mattered more than the one waiting for me back home.
Eventually, I picked up the envelope and slid the paperwork back inside.
“Maddox…”
Gia’s voice stopped me before I could turn away completely.
I looked at her, and for the first time since this conversation started, I saw something that hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t guilt. It was relief. The kind that came from finally putting down something you’d been carrying for too long.
There wasn’t anything left for her to explain.
Not tonight…
Not right now…
Nothing she said was going to give me back nine years. Nothing she said was going to change what those documents said. Nothing she said was going to make me feel any better about what I had just learned.
“I need to go home,” I told her, my voice so low it was damn near a whisper.
Her eyes dropped immediately, almost like she already knew what that meant.
I grabbed my keys from the counter and headed toward the door.
The flight home felt like one long blur. People talked around me. Flight attendants moved up and down the aisle. At one point somebody sat beside me and spent half the flight watching a movie. I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. Hell, I couldn’t even tell you what the person looked like.
The only thing I remember was staring out the window while my mind replayed every conversation I’d ever had with Luciana.
Every late-night talk…
Every argument…
Every vacation…
Every promise…
Every time she told me she loved me…
Every time she talked about family…
Every time she looked me in my face and never said a word about the daughter I didn’t know existed…
By the time the plane landed, I felt exhausted in a way sleep couldn’t fix.
The drive home wasn’t much better.
Traffic moved around me while my hands stayed locked on the steering wheel.
More than once, I caught myself staring straight ahead without realizing I’d missed an entire stretch of road.
The paperwork sat on the passenger seat beside me like a reminder that none of this was some misunderstanding I could explain away.
It was real. Every bit of it.
When I finally pulled into my driveway, I cut the engine off and just sat here. Everything looked normal, but the problem was; nothing felt normal anymore.
For years, this house represented everything I worked for. My family. My marriage. My future. Sitting here now, all I could think about was how many times I’d walked through those doors believing I knew the woman waiting on the other side.
My eyes drifted toward the front window just as a shadow moved inside. It was Luciana. I knew because it was too tall and curvy to be one of the boys and my phone hadn’t gone off with any notification that someone was at the house.
My jaw automatically tightened.
I still couldn’t make the shit make sense.
I wanted Gia to be wrong so fucking bad. Wanted there to be some explanation sitting out there that would magically make everything fit back together, but every road led right back to the same place.
Eventually, I opened the door and climbed out.
The walk to the house felt longer than it should’ve. Every step seemed heavier than the one before it. By the time I reached the front door, my hand lingered on the handle for a second longer than necessary.
Then I walked inside.
Luciana appeared from the living room almost immediately, and for a brief moment, she smiled when she saw me. I’m talking a real smile—the same smile I’d been coming home to for years.
Then her eyes landed on my face and the smile disappeared. I didn’t kiss her. Didn’t ask how her day was. None of that bullshit I usually did. I just stood here looking at her while the silence filled between us.
The longer I stared, the more I noticed the little things. The way her shoulders stiffened. The way her hand instinctively moved toward her stomach. The way confusion slowly gave way too much away, like some part of her already knew.
My throat felt tight, but I forced the words out anyway.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”