Forty-Four | Jo
Forty-Four
Jo
“Okay—I’m going to need all of the details because what do you mean you have a daughter?” Ashley asked as she turned to face me as we sat in the middle row of the van.
Keith and Dom were upfront with Dom driving and Keith doing something on his phone.
The radio was on, playing music softly throughout the van, but I spoke loud enough for Keith to hear because I was tired of keeping secrets from everyone.
If I were given the opportunity to reconnect with my daughter, the last thing I would do was hide it.
“I, um, I got pregnant when I was fifteen,” I said, clearing my throat.
“I had been dating this guy, whom I thought I was madly in love with. When my father died, I had to move in with my uncle, and he forced me to terminate the relationship. I found out a few months later that I was pregnant, but I didn’t tell anyone.
Once it was time to have the baby, I snuck out and caught a ride to Junction Pass, where I delivered a baby girl whom I named Kaitlyn. ”
“Oh my God!” Ashley exclaimed, covering her mouth as she stared at me with wide eyes and zero judgment. “Jo! Why didn’t you tell me?”
I shrugged and swallowed down the emotions that kept rising to the surface.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I guess I thought I was protecting her by not talking about it. My whole life has been spent running from men who want to hurt me. I didn’t want that to transfer over to her.
I knew my uncle wouldn’t let me keep her, and I never wanted her to know that world.
I also didn’t want Tray to find out about her because I knew he would try to find her so he could use her against me. ”
“I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how hard it had to have been to give her up. Did you ever tell the dad?”
I shook my head, memories of him floating through my brain as I remembered how kind and thoughtful he was. He would have made a wonderful dad, and part of me always hated that he never had the chance to know he fathered a child.
“We were so young when everything happened, and I didn’t know how to get in touch with him after I moved. I thought about trying to find him as the years went on, but then I realized that I would just be putting him in danger, too. Anyone connected to me somehow always ends up in danger.”
I glanced up in time to see Dom’s eyes catch mine in the rearview mirror.
“This is so wild,” Ashley said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you have a daughter.”
I nodded my head in agreement as Keith’s fingers flew quickly over the screen of his phone.
“What was your boyfriend’s name?” he asked, keeping his head down as he typed.
“Why?”
“I want to look him up.”
“No.”
I jutted my chin out and pinned him with a look when he glanced over his shoulder at me.
“I’m not going to do anything to him, Jo. I just want to check things out and see what happened to him. Don’t you want to know where he is or what he did with his life?”
I looked nervously at Dom, not sure how to respond to that.
While I had always wondered what happened to Sean, I knew that the life I had always dreamt of us having would never be a reality.
Even if I did locate him, how would he ever forgive me for keeping a secret that huge for fifteen years?
Not only that, I didn’t want Dom to worry about me reconnecting with an ex-boyfriend, given how well things were going between us at the moment.
While we had yet to label whatever it was between us, I had no intention or desire to be with anyone but Dom.
“I think it would be good to know where he is and what he’s doing,” Dom said, meeting my gaze in the mirror. “It couldn’t hurt.”
“Fine,” I replied with a sigh. “His name is Sean Thompson. He moved to Brooksville a year before we started dating. His family had just moved there from Florida. I believe he said his father was in the Army. He was an only child. That’s all I remember.”
Keith nodded and began searching while Ashley and I found something else to talk about while I tried to calm myself the closer we got to Junction Pass.