Chapter 10
Micah
Ivy and I follow Nathan wordlessly down a maze of identical hallways, rats in a trap. Rage and treachery swim through me. I feel like I’m going to be sick.
When we reach his office, Nathan takes Nell’s hand—
…Penelope Michaela Cole, pleased to meet you!…
—and leads her in a different direction, mentioning something about the ice cream in the cafeteria, leaving me and Ivy to stare at each other from opposite corners of the room.
When we were kids, silence could sit comfortably between us and that meant something to me.
Something important. I’ve always been the guy who rushes to fill quiet moments with whatever the hell decides to come out of my mouth.
Ivy was the only person to make me feel relaxed enough to sit quietly and enjoy simply being.
You better believe silence sits between us today, but there’s nothing comfortable about it. It’s charged, crackling with electricity. With pain. With betrayal and rage and…
“That’s my daughter.” I flare my hands as the word crushes the breath in my lungs.
I have a daughter.
A six-year-old little girl who doesn’t even know who I am. Who looks to some other man as the only father she’s ever known. She has hopes and fears and dreams and favorites and I just learned her whole name today.
Why?
Why would Ivy do this to me? Why would she break me like this? Was I not good enough for her after all? Not good enough to be part of our daughter’s life? Was everything she said to me a lie?
Ivy folds her arms across her chest. “You act surprised.”
“Surprised? Surprised?” I press a hand to my mouth to keep from saying something I regret. “There isn’t a word for how I’m feeling right now.” I barely recognize my own voice and slide my hand back up to cover my mouth.
It would be better to say nothing than what’s in my head right now.
Unfortunately, my mouth isn’t paying attention to that thought.
“I have a daughter, Ivy. We have a daughter.” I can’t stand still.
I pace, crossing the room, back and forth, stopping in front of Ivy to hold out my hands in frustration.
“I’ve missed out on everything that’s ever happened to her!
And you stand here and have the balls to look offended that I’m surprised? ”
“That’s on you!” She stabs an angry finger into my chest. “You made the choice not to be in her life.”
I grab her wrist and lean close. “You never gave me the luxury of a choice.”
Her eyes meet mine, flashing with anger, with adrenaline, with whatever the hell happened to lead us to this moment. It boils inside her, scorching me with its heat.
I dreamed of having Ivy this close again, but not like this.
Never like this.
I release her wrist and step back.
“It’s funny you would say that,” she hisses, hands on hips, eyes burning with defiance. It’s the first time she’s seemed like the Ivy I remember, and I have to look away. “In my world, not stepping up when you get your girlfriend pregnant is a choice.”
“Nope.” I cross my arms and glare at the floor, the wall, the ceiling, anything that isn’t her. “Don’t make this my fault. I made a promise to you, Ivy.” My voice breaks and I clamp my jaw shut.
A promise I intended to keep.
To be there for her, no matter what.
And I keep my fucking promises.
I risk a glance in her direction.
“A promise you broke.” Ivy looks disgusted.
“I texted you, Micah. Over and over. You never responded.” Her voice cracks and she turns away, covering her face with her hands.
“Can you imagine how I felt? Because you did promise to be there for me, no matter what, and I was na?ve enough and in love enough to believe you. I stood up to my father, defending you. I put it all on the line with him, confident you’d step up, he just had to wait and see.
Then you proved to him how big a fool I am.
Can you even, for one second, put yourself in my shoes and understand how humiliated I was? How betrayed?”
“You wanna talk about betrayal? Hmm? Put yourself in my shoes. I loved you, Ivy. I loved you with everything I was and believed you when you said you felt the same. Then, what? A week after you move to Seattle? Two weeks? You break things off with me with two shitty texts, hide my daughter from me, then just come back home and blame me for the whole thing?”
“I didn’t hide your daughter from you, Micah.” Her lips curl in revulsion. “You never responded to my messages.”
It’s like she’s told the lie so many times, she believes it. “I never got any messages about you being pregnant, Ivy. Not one.”
“Well, I sent them. Every day. Before school. After school. Any time my dad would let me have my phone. I begged you to respond.” She swallows hard, frowning.
“And what are you talking about? I didn’t break things off with you.
I did spend weeks screaming into the void and then, three months later, you text me from a new number like nothing happened and everything’s normal. ”
“If you sent me texts, I didn’t get them. In fact, I got so few texts from you, I started to lose my mind. You were my everything, Ivy! And you were just gone.” I rake a hand into my hair, then pause, frozen as the timing of it all starts to make sense.
…from a new number…
Oh, fuck…
Fuck, fuck, fuck…
“You’d already started school?” I ask, my voice echoing and bending through my head. “When you found out you were pregnant?”
She nods. “And Dad thought he’d teach me a lesson by homeschooling me for my senior year. Ask me how easy it was to make friends…”
Oh, shit no! You’ve got to be kidding me.
When my parents refused to replace my phone, I put up a hell of a fight.
I screamed and cursed, certain they were ruining my life while they were adamant they were saving me from falling off the edge.
I almost told them to go to hell, but Uncle Caleb stepped in and talked me down with a heavy dose of tough love.
He explained that my parents wanted what was best for me.
He helped me see myself through their eyes.
Then asked what was the worst that could happen if I accepted the consequence.
Never in a million years would I have come up with something like this.
“I didn’t get your texts, Ivy.”
Guilt lands on my chest and crushes my heart.
She scoffs. “So you keep saying.”
“No, listen.” I step forward, reaching for her, suddenly questioning every angry thought, feeling, and word over the last twenty minutes because if she sent texts I didn’t get, I understand what happened.
And it’s the shittiest timing.
“Remember how hard it was to talk back then? With the time difference and your dad taking phone time away and…?” I swipe a hand over my face as it all comes into focus.
“I was going fucking crazy, waiting to hear from you, missing you so bad I could barely breathe. The day you broke up with me, the day you stopped responding, I lost it. I mean I really, really lost it. I threw my phone at the wall and shattered it beyond repair. My grades were shit. My attitude was worse. My parents refused to replace my phone until I got things under control and when they did, I got a brand-new number…for a fresh start…”
What’s the worst that could happen? Uncle Caleb had asked.
I’d listed trivial things like being left out of inside jokes and missing parties.
He’d promised the important things would still be waiting for me, so I accepted the challenge like a fool, texting Ivy from my dad’s phone to let her know my number wouldn’t work even though she’d already broken up with me.
There were important things waiting for me, all right.
The woman I loved and the daughter I didn’t know I had.
And they’ve been waiting for seven years.
An ache settles into my chest. Like I’m grieving a loss I don’t yet understand. I want to go back in time and stop any of this from happening but there’s nothing I can do. No action I can take to fix this mistake.
“Holy fuck, Ivy.” My voice cracks. “You must have felt so abandoned. So alone. I’m so sorry this happened.
But I don’t understand how I missed your calls.
I mean, obviously my number wouldn’t work, but you had my parents’ numbers, you knew where they worked, and even if you couldn’t reach them at The Pact, it’s not like you couldn’t have called The Hutton Hotel and eventually gotten to me… ”
Shock spreads like ice through my veins. Did my family keep this from me? Surely, somewhere, someone answered a call from Ivy and whoever that was decided I didn’t need to know she was pregnant with my child.
Why?
Because they didn’t think I could handle it?
Because they didn’t think I was good enough to be a father to my little girl?
I slide my hands into my hair and pull, wild with emotion, staring into the eyes of the woman I’ve always loved, the woman I accidentally abandoned…
Tears well and I swipe them away. What right do I have to tears when she’s been raising our kid alone?
“Ivy…I am so sorry…” My throat is so tight it hurts to speak. “I…I don’t even know how to begin to make this up to you. To Nell…”
Nell.
My little girl. If Ivy hadn’t already made me believe in love at first sight, Nell sealed the deal. Seeing her sitting there, her face so like mine, her hair so like her mom’s, my heart shifted, making room for this little person I only just met.
What did Ivy tell her about me? Does she think I abandoned her too?
I close my eyes while the thought breaks what resolve I have left. I have never felt so low, not once in my entire life. Not when I couldn’t keep my grades up to the Hutton standard. Not when Ivy left. Not in the hospital, waiting for news on Tucker.
I always knew I wasn’t as good as the rest of my family, but this…
I can’t breathe under the weight of the guilt, my body burning, like Tucker caught beneath the beam that would ruin his life.
“I didn’t call.” Ivy’s voice is low. Flat. Toneless. But it strikes me with the force of hurricane winds.
“What did you say?” I stagger like she hit me, reaching for the wall for support. “You didn’t call?”
She visibly deflates before me, the fight leaving her body. “When you didn’t respond, Dad said you’d made your point clear. No response is a response. You know? And if I had to track you down through your family then… Why keep fighting for someone who wasn’t interested?”
She blinks rapidly, sucking in her lips, and I can’t fucking swallow, let alone breathe.
“Micah…” Ivy reaches for me, and I yank my hand out of reach before her touch shatters me.
“What about email?” My voice rises. “I know you weren’t allowed to have social media, but what about calling my parents?
You’re telling me you thought it was okay to stop trying to reach me when all you’d done was text?
Because not responding to learning you were pregnant with my little girl seemed like something I would do? Jesus, Ivy!”
“I made a mistake. I wasn’t thinking clearly. You have no idea how hard things were.”
I turn my back before I can unleash a barrage of hatred. “That’s right. I have no idea. Because you listened to your dad instead of believing in me.”
She covers her mouth with her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
Of course she believed him. Because everyone’s always looking for proof that Micah Hutton isn’t worth the family name.
“I was young and terrified and made a mistake.”
“A mistake that cost me the first six years of our daughter’s life.”
“I’m sorry, Micah.”
“Yeah, well, so am I.”
There’s nothing left to say, but we’re miles from a conclusion. We stand there, drenched in pain, eager for the other to say something to solve the problem. To erase everything and make it all better.
Ivy’s the first to break the silence.
“I understand if you don’t want to offer your assistance anymore. I do. I understand if—”
I whirl. “Are you kidding me? Do you really think learning that little girl is my daughter means I’d be less willing to make sure you two have what you need? What kind of man do you think I am? Honestly, Ivy. Who do you think I am?”
“I…”
“You and me? We may never be okay. I don’t even know if I can look at you.
But me and that little girl? My little girl?
We have a lifetime of catching up to do.
I have an entire second floor I don’t use with spare rooms and a bathroom.
Because of work, I’m not home a lot. I want you to have the space. The offer stands. Take me up on it.”
I reach for the door on instinct, ready to get the fuck out of here before things get worse.
“Micah…”
Ivy’s hand on my arm is gentle. It reminds me of a thousand times she’s been the voice of reason, calming me down when I revved myself up. I look at her slim fingers as a lifetime of memories slap me in the face.
She’s the one.
It’s always been her.
The only person to make me feel like the world makes sense.
Until today.
Because right now? Nothing makes sense. Not one shitty thing.
I meet her pale blue eyes, glimmering with unshed tears, then open the door and walk away.