27 - Haley
27
Haley
It was a short drive from the courthouse to the office park area where I was meeting Lucas for lunch. I was early, so I went ahead and grabbed a table for the two of us and spent some time catching up on emails.
A lot had changed in the past two weeks. At the time, that sinful night had been so easy to agree to because I didn’t take the three guys seriously. I knew I didn’t have any sort of future with Lucas or Jordan, and Shay looked sexy—but harmless—in his hoodie. It was easy to treat the evening as something that was only physical. Everything was simple that way.
But none of that was true, now. Jordan was in residency to become a pediatrician. Shay was an attorney, one who seemed important enough to have people working for him. Even Lucas Freaking Hollister had grown up and had a real office job with a dress code and everything.
It was like my world had been turned upside-down.
I still wasn’t sure what was happening. I’d slept with Jordan again, and he was now my son’s baseball coach. Shay had gotten me out of my parking ticket, and now I might become his realtor. I was about to have lunch with Lucas. Our lives were becoming intertwined in a confusing way.
But I wasn’t confused about one thing: how excited I was to get to know these guys better. Regardless of what it meant, and regardless of where things might lead, it was nice to have adults other than Sara and Harper in my life.
I had really been looking forward to lunch with Lucas. We never did get to catch up at his place—we’d jumped into bed too quickly for that. I was excited to get to know the boy I’d dated in high school, and to discover the kind of man he had become.
The fact that he was Bran’s biological father had a lot to do with that, too.
I wasn’t under any delusions. I didn’t expect Lucas to suddenly step into a fatherly role. Heck, I still didn’t want to tell him any time soon—I’d made the decision to raise Bran on my own, and it wouldn’t be fair to suddenly drop that bomb on Lucas the moment he was back in Vancouver. I wasn’t sure if I ever wanted to tell him, honestly. I was terrified of how he would react.
But I was getting way ahead of myself. Today’s lunch was supposed to be casual. Two old acquaintances hanging out.
In a public place.
Where it wouldn’t suddenly turn into sex.
My phone rang a few minutes later. It was Lucas. “Hey. I got a table already. Walk inside, turn right, and I’m in the back corner by the window.”
Lucas groaned. “You’re going to hate me. But I have to cancel.”
My stomach sank. “Oh no!”
“I’m stuck in a meeting,” he explained. “It was supposed to end before lunch, but now they want to work through it. I probably won’t get out of here for an hour. Can we reschedule?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Let’s text about it later.”
“Sorry, Hales,” he said. “Gotta go. Bye.”
I felt defeated after hanging up. It was more than just disappointment—this was a stronger emotion, one that I’d felt a lot back in high school. He pulled this crap all the time back then: canceling plans last minute, making up excuses. That was part of the reason we’d broken up: I couldn’t trust anything he said. By the time we split, I didn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth.
This was the old Lucas that I remembered.
The old me would have just taken it. I was so passive back then, terrified of confrontation even when I was being lied to. But even though Lucas hadn’t grown up, I had.
I was going to call Lucas out on his bullshit.
I ordered a BLT sandwich to go, then walked outside. Lucas had pointed at the building on the other side of the parking lot when describing where he worked, and a quick Google search confirmed that Nissan had offices in the building. Although at this point, I was wondering if he had lied about working there at all.
The front door was operated by keycard, but I slipped inside when a cluster of women walked out for lunch. The directory next to the elevator said that Nissan had offices on the fourth floor, so that’s where I went.
By the time I exited the elevator, I had a head of steam and some angry momentum in my heels.
There was a reception desk on the fourth floor, but it was empty. Probably because of lunch. Since nobody was there to stop me, I decided to walk around. I could always pretend I was lost. Or make an excuse about looking at commercial real estate.
The entire floor seemed deserted. That made me more confident that I was right, that Lucas had lied to me. There wasn’t some big meeting going on. Nobody was even here .
Then I rounded a corner, and came face-to-face with a large conference room. The wall facing me was floor-to-ceiling glass, giving me a Last Supper-like view of the long table inside. A dozen men and women sat there, their heads turned to face a projector screen at one end of the room.
And standing in front of the screen was Lucas Hollister.
He was wearing a shirt and tie today, not just a polo. And it made him look good, accentuating all of his hard features and making him seem more confident rather than just stubborn. I couldn’t hear what he was saying through the glass, but he was gesturing at the screen and calmly arguing to the room. He looked like he was in charge.
He looked like a man .
A strange sensation came over me as I stared at the father of my child. I could see my son in him in that frozen moment—the way he pursed his lips like he stubbornly wanted to argue, and the way he put one hand on his hip while gesturing with the other. Even Lucas’s hair was combed like Bran’s today. For that crazy split-second, it was like I was seeing my boy’s future.
One of the women at the table pointed at him and began to say something, but then her eyes suddenly locked onto me. She frowned, mouth moving.
Every pair of eyes in the room looked at me.
Lucas’s gaze collided with mine last, and it was the most devastating. All my righteous anger disappeared, and was quickly replaced by a deep sense of regret.
He hadn’t been lying.
And now I was standing here outside his office.
I expected him to be angry to see me standing there, clearly trying to publicly catch him in a lie. But his immediate reaction when he saw me was to smile .
Lucas said something to the room, then hurried through the door and into the hall. “Hales! What are you doing here?”
“I…” Behind him, the entire conference room was staring at us. I had to fix this, not just for my own personal embarrassment, but for Lucas’s reputation. “I felt bad that you had to work through lunch, so I brought you a sandwich.” I held up the to-go box.
Lucas held it in both hands. “You brought me a BLT? You’re an angel.”
“I was going to leave it with the front desk, but nobody’s there. Sorry for interrupting. I’ll get out of your hair now!”
Before he could respond, I turned and walked away. As soon as I was out of sight around the corner, I began speed-walking as fast as I could in my heels.
On the way out, I passed by an office I hadn’t noticed the first time.
Lucas Hollister
Assistant Director of Product Strategy
Oh no.
Just like the other two, Lucas really had grown up.