23. Franco
23
FRANCO
O ne by one, the others filed out of the living room. They pitched in to help Caleb to the pool, seeming to see that I needed a private conversation with the mother of my child.
My son.
Caleb, who was so excited to swim, quick to help a falling toddler, and smart to question Dante.
The boy was already making me proud, and I’d only known him for an hour.
“Is he my son?” I asked Chloe.
She sighed, hesitant to face me, and looked around the room. “Can we have this conversation somewhere more private?”
“Answer me.” My anger swarmed within me, coursing through my veins until I was certain I had to be shaking with rage. “Please,” I added curtly. “Is Caleb my son?”
“He is.”
I wouldn’t have believed her if she said he wasn’t. He looked like me. Acted like me. And his age made sense. If I did all the math and double-checked the addition, Chloe was pregnant with Caleb when she left.
With that realization sinking in, my fury faded and hurt rushed in. Pain nearly knocked me to my knees, and my heart cracked all over again.
“How could you hide this from me?” I shook my head, thinking back over this week that we’d shared. Every time we had sex. Those nights we shared in bed. Even when we talked about parenthood at Dante and Nina’s wedding. She had many chances to come clean and tell me, but she hadn’t, and that was more salt on the wound.
“How could you be so manipulative and deceiving?”
“I can explain?—”
“Why?” I roared, fisting my hands. “How could you? All this time.” I shook my head, needing something to make sense about this. “All these days you’ve been here with me again. How could you ever say that you love me and keep this from me?”
I staggered a step toward her, wishing I could shake sense into her.
But she doesn’t. She didn’t reply that she loved me that night I told her.
“I can explain.” She winced as she took a seat. “And I can explain why I will never tell you that I regret leaving you back then the way I did. I had to.” She swallowed as she hunched over, her elbows on her thighs, her hands wringing together with her fingers turning white at the knuckles. She was tense and coiling in, but she powered on.
“I had to leave to save him.”
“What?” I paced in front of the couch she sat on, too wired up to stay still.
“I was trapped.”
“Not by me!” I shouted.
She shook her head. “No. You didn’t trap me.” She whooshed out a deep breath, as if she were bracing for a long speech. “My parents tried to force me to have an abortion. The week before graduation, I took a test when I missed my period. It was positive, and I was so shocked, I didn’t think straight to hide the test in my garbage. My mother must have either snooped in the trash or the housekeeper found it and told her, but she confronted me, telling me under no uncertain terms that I was to abort the baby. Because it was yours.”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth, fighting the need to roar.
“She threatened to take my allowance. My car. My trust fund. Everything that was ‘mine’. So I said fine. I was worried about it all—having a baby so young—and I wanted to tell you. But you were away for training and I wouldn’t see you until after graduation.”
I remembered it well. She was only going to the ceremony to appease her parents. She’d already graduated ahead of time the midterm before, already meeting her requirements with a perfect GPA, but her parents wanted her to walk and get her diploma with the rest of her class. Our plan was that I’d pick her up from graduation and drive her here to the city. Where she could start a future with me.
Only, she was never there. She’d already left.
The week I was in training was rough, and I hadn’t had cell reception.
“She tricked me, driving me to an abortion clinic, and it was so scary, Franco. She walked me inside. The nurses were so firm. They wouldn’t listen to me. I… I…”
“What?” I frowned at her.
“I punched one of the nurses so I could run out of there. I ran. But I didn’t get far. They had the cops find my car and bring me back home. I was so desperate to tell you, but I knew that your cell reception would be spotty. I almost called Dante, the number you gave me for him, but I was scared that my parents were listening in on my calls.
“The day before graduation, I was kidnapped. They hired someone to kidnap me.” She gestured at her hands. “They cuffed me.” She pointed at her mouth. “Gagged me.”
“Fuck, Chloe. Fuck this !” I couldn’t ever hate her parents more than I did at this minute. They weren’t parents. They were closed-minded assholes.
“The men who kidnapped me brought me to another abortion clinic. My mother was waiting there with these thugs they hired. She said she’d be damned if she’d let our family be tainted with a bastard from a Mafia criminal.”
I shook my head, vibrating with rage.
“I was terrified, so I got desperate and lied. I said it wasn’t yours, that some football player at school knocked me up and that was why you and I broke up. They didn’t know that you were at a specialized training and unreachable that week. I think I figured they assumed we broke up. And I tried to spin it like that. That you weren’t around that week because I got knocked up by someone else and you were mad.” She shook her head sadly. “She didn’t believe me. She ordered them to take me back into a room and abort the baby. But I…” She drew in a deep breath. “But I resisted. I fought and fought, so furious and scared. A nurse helped me, breaking her orders, and helped me get out of the room. And that was when I ran.”
It destroyed me to envision this. The fear she had to have faced. The determination she had to find and keep our baby.
“I went to Santa Fe because it was the furthest from home, and I prayed that my parents would assume that the abortion had gone through. The nurse said she’d lie and cover for me.”
I shook with anger. That she went through this. That she suffered at all. Her parents had taken it too far.
“I couldn’t go to you. It was too close to home. I was terrified that they’d find me and have more cops look for me somewhere near you. You were a place and a person they could use to find me through. I gave birth at the college’s vet clinic, trusting a classmate who knew a few faculty members to hide it. I paid someone to lie on his birth certificate so it wouldn’t be tied to me. I had to hide him from my parents, Franco. From the world. And so, I was a single mother. I worked and studied. I had to drop out when it was too hard to manage it all.”
“And Wes?”
She sighed. “They sent him to look into me, still suspicious of my going through with the abortion. I went no-contact with them from the day I left. They weren’t allowed in my life as far as I was concerned. I went out of my way to hide Caleb from their ever finding out. I was scared they’d take him from me, and he was all I had left of you. Of our love.” She wiped away the tears that fell.
“But he saw Caleb.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “At first, I didn’t know they sent him to find me. He met Caleb. But he didn’t tell my parents. Wes became… infatuated with me. Obsessed with me. It was a sick, twisted mental warfare that he used on me. He saw me as a possession, and once I realized that he knew my parents, he used that link as a way to hold power over me. He threatened to tell them that I had a son if I didn’t do as he said.”
“To stay with him?” I asked, fearing that she’d lied about his abusing her. If he raped her and violated her, I’d never get over it.
“Yes. To keep me with him. It wasn’t love. I knew that. I recognized that something had to be wrong with him, gravely wrong with him to act like this. When I started the job at the deli, I let Caleb go to stay with his friend, Brent. He met him through a pen pal program and they always stayed in touch. I knew that Brent’s grandpa was a good guy, a war veteran, and I figured Caleb could stay there while I settled in during his spring break until I could know I found a decent sitter.”
She rubbed her forehead. “That’s why I had to live under the radar. To have a burner phone. To use cash. No trace and no record. My parents will go to the ends of the earth to ensure that no ‘Mafia criminal blood’ will be in their family.”
“This is fucked up, Chloe. You understand this, right? This is fucked up.”
“It is. But it’s been my life, Franco. I’ve been running and hiding ever since the day I saw that positive line on that pregnancy test.” She stood and rubbed her hands down her thighs. “I will never forsake him. I will never give him up. He is my son?—”
“ Our son. One I had a right to know about.”
She shook her head. “Not if going to you would have put him at risk. Not if coming here would lead my parents to find him.”
I paced faster, gripping my hair out of frustration.
“But how in the world did you find him?”
“Ethan is Liam’s friend from the military,” I answered, defeated and so twisted from her truth. “He noticed Wes lurking at his building.”
She covered her mouth. “He was still looking for Caleb.”
To bring him to your parents, who wished him dead from the beginning.
I couldn’t speak. I could hardly wrap my head around it all. Words remained jumbled in my head, a mix of curses, raging complaints, and more demanding questions. I needed time, a lot more time, to process this bombshell that I was a father. All these years, I had a son and never knew.
“I am sorry, Franco.” She set her hand over the base of her throat as she stared at me with tears in her eyes. “I am sorry, from the bottom of my heart. These last several days, I warred with the decision to tell you. I wanted to, so, so badly, but I feared the judgment you’d give me. I dreaded that you’d scowl at me like you are now. Like you hate me for deceiving you.”
I licked my lips, feeling unsteady and on edge. I didn’t know what I could tell her, what I would say. I was so mad, so hurt, and so stunned by all of this, I had no clue which way to go about my emotions.
“Can you find it in your heart to ever forgive me?” She asked it in such a small, nervous tone, something so uncharacteristic of her that it seemed like it wasn’t even her. Vulnerable and afraid. She’d never been afraid of me. Not of my hurting her, and I almost wanted to laugh at the irony that not forgiving her would be punishment enough.
Numb and locked within the turbulent waves of anger and despair in my heart, I turned and walked away.