20. Ross
ROSS
The moment I know something is wrong, my head snaps up from the desk.
It takes me a second to put my finger on exactly what it is that has caught my attention. My ears prick, eyes darting back and forth. And then, it comes again, the quiet of the clinic split by the sound of someone yelling at the top of their lungs.
“Ross! Cole! James!”
It’s Matt.
I rise to my feet. He doesn’t quite sound like himself, but there’s nobody else it could be.
To be honest, I have been somewhat braced for this after the news broke about the pregnancy, and he caught us in bed with his sister.
That said, I had hoped we might be able to do this somewhere a little more private, but Matt seems to have taken it upon himself to do it right here, right now.
“Get out here!”
I stride to the door and throw it open, to find that James and Cole have done the same in their offices opposite me.
We all exchange a look, grim expressions on our faces.
The most important thing right now is getting him out of here, and making sure as few of the patients and staff overhear what he’s got to say as possible.
The reason we went with Millie in the first place is because we wanted to keep our private life apart from our professional one, but it looks like we’re going to lose out on that.
I make my way to the reception area, where Matt is standing in the middle of the waiting room.
He’s facing the door when we arrive, and he turns, swaying slightly on the spot.
Even from where I’m standing, I can smell the alcohol on him.
He’s drunk. It’s hardly even two in the afternoon, and it looks as though he has been drinking for hours.
I lift my hand, taking a step toward him, moving slowly. There are only a few people in here—two patients, sitting in the far corner, both of them holding up magazines as they try to pretend this isn’t happening, and Isla, our receptionist. She looks stunned, no idea how to react to this.
I don’t even know how Matt got in the building; he must have barged past security to force his way inside. Frankly, I don’t want to know. I just want him somewhere he can’t lay out our personal business in front of so many people.
“Matt, come into my office,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice as even as possible.
He whips his head around toward me, and his lip curls up into a sneer. “Oh, no, I think it’s about time we got all of this out in the open,” he insists, a mad glint in his eye as he makes his way toward me. “We’ve been keeping too many secrets, right? We lay it out here, and then it’s done.”
“You already know everything there is to know,” I try to assure him.
His eyebrow cocks. “Oh, so you thought I wouldn’t find out that one of you fathered Lewis too?”
Silence hangs in the air. Even if the other people in the room don’t have context for what that means, they can tell it’s something heavy.
James moves in now, trying to shut this down. “Where did you hear that?”
“Don’t even try to deny it,” Matt sneers.
“Millie told me herself. Told me that you all got together at that party, behind my back. Fuck, to think that we’ve been friends all these years, and you would do something like that to me.
I can’t believe I trusted you all.” He throws his hand in our direction, half turning away from us like he can barely even stand to look at us in that moment.
Worst of all, I know that we deserve this. We have kept so much from him—of course, so much of it we didn’t even know ourselves, but even when we did, we should have come to him with it first.
“You know how much I love that kid?” he demands, looking at me again. “How much time and energy I’ve poured into him? Because I thought his father was some kind of deadbeat who wouldn’t have anything to do with him? Only to find out that it was you all along?”
He shakes his head. “She didn’t tell you for a reason,” he snaps. “If she didn’t need the money, she would never have agreed to something like this. She chose to keep you out of his life until she didn’t have a choice, and then you decide to take advantage of that—”
“We weren’t trying to take advantage of her,” Cole insists, clearly not willing to let this slide.
He doesn’t even seem to care that we’re in front of all these people right now, every single one of whom is likely committing this to memory.
I need to get this under control, but I don’t even know what that looks like, with Matt flipping his shit as badly as he is right now.
“But you did,” Matt mutters, as he closes in on Cole, taking the bait. “You did. You know how fucking hard that first pregnancy was on her? No? You probably don’t even care, do you? Because as long as you get what you want, that’s all that matters…”
“We’re taking care of her, Matt,” I tell him, shifting so that I’m standing between him and Cole. The last thing I need is for a fight to break out here, and I get the feeling he is all too close to letting that happen.
“Yeah, her and Lewis,” James interjects. As soon as he makes mention of Lewis, Matt’s face darkens once more.
“Don’t you say his name,” he growls. “He—that boy has been fine without all of you for so long, and if you think I’m just going to stand aside and let you become part of his life, when you haven’t done a damn thing to earn it—”
“You don’t get to make that call,” I tell him sharply. “That’s on Millie. I know you care about the kid, but that doesn’t mean you get to decide who can be in his life. Especially since we’re going to be fathering his siblings soon enough.”
That, at least, seems to silence Matt for a moment. It’s out there now, any plausible deniability we might have been clinging to entirely forgotten, but that’s how it has to be. We have hidden so much from him, and he’s right—we owe it to him to at least be honest after all these years.
“We’re going to be family, Matt,” I continue, softening my tone slightly in the hopes of getting through to him. “And I can tell how much you care about Lewis. You don’t want him to feel like he’s stuck in the middle of us, do you? You don’t want him—”
“You don’t get to tell me what I want,” he snarls, his gaze locking onto mine with such brutal harshness it quiets me once more.
“You lied to me. You left her to raise her child alone. And now, you’re using her body to get something you want, just throwing money at her like that will make all of this go away. ”
He snorts, drawing his gaze to the door once more. “I don’t even know why the fuck I came down here,” he murmurs. “I shouldn’t have given you a chance. I know who you are now. All of you.”
He looks between us again, and there’s such contempt in his gaze that I almost don’t recognize him.
The entire time I’ve known Matt, he has been laid-back, happy-go-lucky, always the first one to crack a joke when he can sense one of us is feeling down and out.
But the man who stands before me now is one who feels betrayal on a level deeper than anything I can wrap my head around.
I can’t even imagine how much he hates us in this moment, and fuck, who could blame him?
He turns to the door and heads to the street outside. James makes a move to go after him, but I catch his arm before he can.
“Leave him,” I mutter, and James comes to a halt.
For a moment, all of us just stand there, an eerie silence in the wake of all that chaos.
Nobody knows what to say, what to do. Do we call Millie?
Go after him? Try to fix this? Or will it just make him even more furious if we don’t let him walk away now that he’s done with us?
I don’t have a clue.
I look around the waiting room, remembering, all of a sudden, that there are other people in here.
“Sorry about the commotion,” I tell the two patients, lowering my head in apology. Looking over to Isla, I make my way over to the counter. “Could you tell security to get someone else on the door?” I ask her. “And make sure they review the CCTV footage. Don’t let that man in here again, alright?”
She nods, clearly too shocked to speak. Cole and James are still standing in the reception area, looking as though they have been flash-banged, eyes wide as they try to take it in.
“Cole, call Millie,” I instruct him, figuring that someone has to take control of this. “Make sure she knows what happened, he might try and confront her next. James…”
James looks up at me, his gaze distant.
“Cancel appointments for the rest of the day.” I sigh. “We need some time to calm this place down again.”
And with that, I head back to my office. Not like I’m going to be able to focus on work for the rest of the day, but I need to be alone right now.
Even if I know that Matt’s words will be ringing through my head all day long.