55. Garrett
Chapter Fifty-Five
GARRETT
G arrett parked the car across the street from the Mendez home, startled to realize that he had no memory of driving there.
He checked the side of the house. Emma and Stella were nowhere in sight.
Shit, the ice cream. Taking out his phone, he ordered it, tacking on some champagne, several appetizers, and a full gourmet meal for good measure.
He had a feeling Mariana wouldn’t be up to cooking after he got through with her.
Garrett found her in the kitchen, washing dishes. She turned to him with a pensive expression but tried to smile.
She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Emma and Stella are upstairs playing Legos.”
He sat at the table, grateful for small mercies. This conversation would be easier without them. “That’s good. Because I need to speak to you.”
He took out his phone and pulled up the quick side-by-side photograph. “So… did you lie to her or is my wife lying to me?”
Mariana startled. “ What ?”
He slid the phone to her .
Brow puckering just like Emma, she picked it up. The moment of recognition hit her like a freight train.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, the phone shaking in her hand.
“I know that child is not yours.”
His voice was flat and much colder than he intended. But that couldn’t be helped. It felt as if his skin was peeling off.
It seemed Mariana was feeling the same. The trembling in her hands had spread to her entire body.
“Sit,” he said, more gently this time.
Too shaken to disobey, Mariana slid onto the bench across from him.
He set his hands on the table, folding them together. “Tell me the truth before they come back.”
Mariana opened her mouth, her eyes going from him to his phone. “ How ?”
His head drew back. “How do you think?”
She sucked in a harsh breath, almost wheezing. “I can’t believe this.”
Mariana wasn’t the only one. Good God, he had a child—a five-year-old child. And Emma hadn’t told him.
“You’re not Stella’s mother,” he said with more composure than he felt. “You’re her grandmother. Emma is Stella’s mother. And I am her father.”
But Emma hadn’t told him. That was the hardest part of this whole mess.
Hell, he knew she had struggled in the aftermath of the accident, but how could she go along with this pretense that the girl was her sister? Or was he wrong about that?
Please let me be wrong.
Mariana leaned forward, casting a nervous eye in the direction of the stairs. “Are you sure Stella is yours? Really sure?”
Garrett tapped the picture. “She’s the spitting image of my mother at that age.”
“I can see that,” Mariana mumbled, looking all around the room with a lost expression. She gripped her hands tightly together. “I had no idea you two even knew each other back then.”
“We were high school rivals,” he explained in a low voice. “But high school ended .”
He wanted to push for explanations, but instinct told him to wait. Mariana was already on the edge. Too much pressure and she would crack.
Mariana picked up the phone again, zooming in on the picture.
“The resemblance is uncanny.” She looked up, her face and tone softening. “She’s gone, isn’t she? That’s what your aunt said…”
She leaned back, clearly regretting mentioning the woman she’d wronged.
“My mother died when I was seven,” he confirmed. “But thanks to Aunt Phil, I have all her pictures.”
Mariana couldn’t quite meet his gaze. She reached for a bottle of water and swallowed some.
“Please tell me how this happened.”
How had everyone in this town come to believe that Stella was Mariana’s daughter? “Emma has no idea, does she?”
Mariana closed her eyes, tears glistening at the corners. She shook her head.
Garrett released a shaky breath, every muscle in his body unclenching. For some reason that made them ache but that was fine. Good even. This was going to be okay.
Except for the self-flagellation he so richly deserved. He should have never doubted Emma. She had always been honest with him. They had never lied to each other. Not once.
He’d forgotten that in his shock today.
Besides, he had a much bigger problem to deal with. Emma had no idea she was a mother. “It was the accident, wasn’t it? She doesn’t remember having Stella.”
The timing was right. They spent most of Christmas break together at his cabin. Spring break had fallen the third week of March. But she hadn’t come home right away because she’d been freaking out about something .
I guess I know what that was now.
Emma must have discovered she was pregnant while she was away at school. That last month of phone calls. He hadn’t imagined her distraction. Jesus, she must have been so scared, worried about what he’d say.
Had she doubted him? Did she think he would turn his back on her and the baby?
Garrett had been planning on asking her to marry him, but his plans had been amorphous. He hadn’t talked to her about what was then the distant future. Their relationship had felt too new for such serious discussions.
He should have spoken to her about marriage anyway. If he had, she would have felt more comfortable in confiding in him.
She was going to tell you about the baby in person. That had to be why she was in the woods. You didn’t tell someone they were going to be a father over the phone. At least Emma wouldn’t.
But why didn’t she say anything about him to her mother or one of her friends? If she’d told someone they were seeing each other, Mariana would have put two and two together.
He would have known about Stella.
“We got into a huge fight,” he admitted in a distant voice.
God, he’d been such an asshole. “Her ex-boyfriend was in her dorm room when I called one night. She said they were working on a project together for one of their classes, but I didn’t believe her. I assumed the worst and we argued. I thought we’d fix things when she came home but I never heard from her again. When she didn’t return my calls, I thought she chose Edward.”
Damn the man’s timing.
Mariana buried her face in her hands, scrubbing it hard before lowering them with a shaky exhale. “Emma was acting weird on the phone. But she was in college—she was overdue for some sort of meltdown. I had no idea she was pregnant until the doctors told me in the hospital. They gave her a test when they admitted her.”
The sound of a little girl laughing made him jerk in his seat. He gazed at the ceiling. A moment later, Emma joined in.
They sounded like they were having the time of their lives.
The sound wrapped around his heart, squeezing it in a vise. It hurt so bad, under any other circumstances, he would have suspected a heart attack.
Garrett closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Yes, this was a royal fucking mess. But those were his girls upstairs. His .
He would fix his family.
Hands fisted, rage filled his chest when he realized how close he’d come to losing them both.
“She could have miscarried when the car hit her.”
Mariana swallowed audibly, rocking back a touch. “When the doctor first told me she was pregnant, I thought that might be better.”
His feeling about that must have been all over his face because Mariana pushed her chair back a few inches, her features hardening. “You don’t get it. I thought my baby was going to die, her baby with her.”
Garrett tried to unclench. She’s right .
He couldn’t judge her. If anything, she should be coming down on him. He hadn’t been there. Mariana had. She lived through a terrible thing, believing she was about to lose her daughter and granddaughter.
In a very real way, she had lost Emma.
He took a deep breath and leaned forward. “I understand that, I guess. What I don’t get is why Emma thinks Stella is her sister.”
Mariana threw a panicked look over her shoulder at the stairs, but there was no thunder. The girls were occupied upstairs.
She collapsed back into her chair. “It was touch and go the first few days. I didn’t leave the hospital that entire first week. I was afraid to shut my eyes because I was convinced Emma would die while I was asleep.”
Garrett had experienced more than one nightmare about Emma’s accident. This was worse. The retroactive terror at everything he’d almost lost was going to stress-age his organs by a decade.
“But she didn’t die.”
It was as much a reminder to himself as it was to Mariana.
“No, but she didn’t wake up either. ”
“I know. She was in a coma.”
“For almost six months.”
“ What ?” he hissed, flattening his hand on the table. “Six what?”
Mariana nodded. “Months.”
Fuck, the hits just kept coming. “I thought the coma lasted a few days—a week at the most.”
“No. It was… endless,” Mariana said, her youthful face gray.
“The doctors had given up on her. They told me to get ready for her to die. Not in those words, of course, but it was all over their faces. They would hedge, couching every conversation in doctor doublespeak.”
She put her hands on the table, as if bracing herself on it. “But one didn’t do that. His name was Stanley. He gave me hope when he told me this story he’d heard of a pregnant woman waking up from a coma when she went into labor.”
Garrett’s mouth dropped open. “Is that what happened?”
Mariana nodded, the memory lightening the tension in her features.
“Well, sort of. Her vitals began to change when she began false labor pains. She gave birth in this weird sort of half-conscious state. It wasn’t until a few days later that she opened her eyes. But it wasn’t an instant thing like in the movies. She was in and out for weeks.”
Holy shit. That was unbelievable. And so fucked up.
Garrett really should have grabbed a bottle at the liquor store. “She has no memory of giving birth?”
The look on Mariana’s face was a mix of too many emotions to dissect. “I did tell her.”
He held up a hand. “Hold up. What ?”
“When she woke up,” Mariana began. “Like really woke for longer than a few minutes—I told her. But her memory of those first few months after waking up is fragmented. It’s all a blur to her. Emma doesn’t remember our conversation, or any others from that time.”
Mariana’s youthful face was turning haggard. “That was before I realized how badly she was hurt. All I knew was that she was awake and seemed alert. But Emma could barely speak or move. She couldn’t even eat without help. Hell, she had to relearn how to walk.”
He’d guessed some of this after reading her medical records but hadn’t understood the full extent. “And you decided not to tell her again when she remembered?”
It wasn’t meant as recrimination, but his words pissed off Mariana nonetheless.
“You weren’t there!” she cried. “You don’t know how hard it was. For both of us. Emma had to work so hard to get just a sliver of her life back. It took years for her to get to the point where she could take care of herself again. Emma had enough to worry about. So did I, taking care of Stella.”
She shot to her feet, beginning to pace the short length of the kitchen.
“I apologize,” he said after a long minute. “I didn’t mean to imply that you did anything wrong. Far from it. You did everything right.”
He gestured for her to sit back down. She did, but not before taking a detour to get a few beers out of the fridge.
Mariana slid one in front of him, but he didn’t open it. His stomach would have rebelled.
“You could have given Stella up,” he said after a long silence. “No one would have blamed you.”
“I thought about it,” she admitted, wiping her eyes. “But I couldn’t do it. For a long while Stella was all I had. Emma had woken up, but it took so long for her to come back to herself.”
Her voice broke. “You have no idea how hard she had to fight.”
No, he didn’t.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “For keeping them safe.”
“Oh.” Mariana sniffed, straightening. “Well, they’re my family. You don’t have to thank me.”
“Someone should.”
Her laugh was sudden and a bit manic. Mariana clapped a hand over her mouth to stop the disturbing sound.
“Why Stella?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The name Stella. Why did you choose it?”
“Oh. Because of Stanley. ”
Garrett looked at her blankly.
“Stanley, the doctor,” she reminded him. “He and I spoke often when Em was in her coma. He told me once that he was named after the Brando character in A Streetcar Named Desire .”
Garrett snorted. “His mother named him after that Stanley?”
“I hadn’t seen the movie at the time, but he told me a little about it—he even imitated that one scene, pretending to rip his shirt off.” She shrugged. “I liked the name Stella.”
Under the circumstances, it could have been worse. The doctor’s mother could have been a Gone with the Wind fan. He couldn’t imagine saddling his child with the name Scarlett.
He’d known more than one stripper who went by that name, back in his partying days.
“Stella is a good name. I can live with Stella.”
Mariana stilled. “What do you mean by live with?”
“What do you think I mean?” He pointed up at the ceiling. “That’s my kid up there. Not to mention the fact that through some trick of fate, I am now married to her mother.”
It was his turn to get up, but the kitchen was too small for him to pace. “I lost Emma for far too long. But she’s finally mine and I’m not letting go. I’m not letting either of them go.”
Mariana’s sky was falling. Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t tell Emma the truth now! She wouldn’t understand.”
“Then we’ll make her understand,” he bit out. “But things can’t go on the way they have. Emma has to know the truth. And Stella needs to know me. She needs her father.”
Mariana was already getting up, ready to bolt. He reached out, putting a restraining hand on her shoulder. “I know this will be difficult, but you know I’m right.”
Her breaths were coming too fast. If he didn’t stop her, she was going to hyperventilate and pass out on him.
“Mariana, I’m not going anywhere. Emma is my wife ,” he stressed. “They will understand. We’ll do it together.”
“You will be there?”
He nodded. “Yeah. And I’m going to help with everything else.”
Bewildered, she snatched her beer off the table. “What else is there?”
Garrett gestured to their surroundings. “Let’s start with this house. It’s a rental, right?”
Mariana’s expression grew tight. “Yeah. I rent from my friend. He owns it.”
It was the way she said it that clued him in. Well, shit .
“You’re talking about Teddy Bronson, aren’t you?”
She didn’t look at him. Just nodded.
Well, isn’t that just perfect? His aunt’s ex-husband owned this house.