Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
RYDER
“ D aughter? You have a daughter?” Travis’s voice breaks through the deafening silence.
“Yeah, I do.” I glance down at Ryland, and she’s taking everyone in. I can’t stop staring at her and taking in every little detail. I’ve only felt this instant soul-consuming love twice in my life. The day I met Eve and the moment I first laid eyes on my daughter this morning.
“Ryland, this is your family. This is your cousin, Max, and this is Uncle Travis and Aunt Sophia,” I say, pointing to them. And over there are your Uncle Jake and Uncle Miles.” I’m not sure she understands at two, but I need to break the ice somehow. I can feel my brothers’ confusion and anger being thrown into the mix.
Sophia must feel it, too, because she comes up to us to soften the blow. “Hi, Ryland,” she says softly. “I love your pink pajamas.”
“Pwincess,” she says, pointing to the little princess covering the top.
“I love princesses too,” she smiles. Nemo comes running in the kitchen, and Ryland’s eyes light up.
“Doggy!” She giggles.
“Yes,” Sophia says, laughing. “That’s Nemo. Do you want to pet him?” She nods her head excitedly and reaches for Sophia. Smiling, she takes her from me and meets my eyes. I know she’s making sure I’m okay as I nod briefly. “Why don’t we go in the living room, and you can throw the ball to Nemo with Max?”
“Thank you,” I say softly, knowing she’s letting my brothers have a moment with Eve.
“Come on, cutie. Let’s go play with the doggy.” I watch them walk over to the living room area and grin when I see her laugh as Nemo licks her cheek.
My brothers are standing at the island waiting for me. I know they want answers. That makes two of us. Eve follows me over there and I can tell she’s nervous as hell to face them. One of my brothers is hard enough, but to have all four of us staring her down has got to be intimidating as fuck. The need to make her feel more comfortable overtakes my hurt and anger as I give her a small, encouraging smile. She takes a deep breath and faces my brothers.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“You’re sorry?” Jake looks at her in disbelief. “Do you have any idea the hell you have put Ryder through? That you have put us all through? We were a family, Eve. We trusted you. You were like a sister to us, and you fucking left without so much as a goodbye. Then you show up three years later with my niece in your hands. A niece I knew nothing about. You kept Ryder’s daughter from him for three fucking years.”
“I swear I had a good reason. You guys were the only family I’ve ever had, and it killed me to leave like that.” Her voice trembles as tears fall down her face.
“Do you know how many days it took for Max to stop asking about you? He cried and begged me to bring Evie over. I had no clue how to explain why you just left like that when I didn’t understand it myself. I trusted you enough to get to know my son. You knew how much trust that took, and you broke it.” Travis’s words make her cry even harder.
Unable to watch it any longer, I pull her into my arms, and she buries her face in my chest while she sobs. It’s the first physical contact I’ve had with her in three years, and it’s like touching the other half of my soul. I close my eyes briefly at the sensations it brings and try to get my emotions under control as they all slam into me at once.
“I think we need to take a minute,” I say when I can speak. “I know we are all hurting here and have questions, but we don’t have the whole story yet.”
“What do you mean? You guys haven’t talked yet?” Miles and Eve were probably the closest, and I know he’s hurting the most out of the three of them right now. Jake is being protective of me like Travis is with Max, but Miles took it personally when she left. She was one of his best friends, and we did a lot together since we were all so close in age.
“No, I couldn’t process it last night and left. I spent half the night walking the beach before I crashed on the couch. When I woke up, I saw Ryland’s eyes and knew right away she was my daughter. We didn’t want to get into it with her in the room, so we are waiting until we can be alone.”
“I think this is a good time for Ryland to get to know her uncles. Why don’t you two go have that talk.” Jake looks at me, and I can tell he’s worried about what this will do to me. I don’t even know the answer to that myself.
Eve lifts her head from my chest and sniffles. “I really am sorry. It killed me to leave Max that way.”
Travis sighs, and I see some of the anger fade away. “I’m not sure why you did it, but I do know how much you loved Max, so I’m really hoping there is a good explanation for all of this.”
“ Love Max,” she corrects him. “I still do. I never stopped. I never stopped loving any of you.” She glances at Travis and Jake before looking at Miles. He quickly looks away, giving none of his emotions away.
“Yeah, well, you have a funny way of showing your love for someone. I can’t wait to hear what this good reason is.” Miles walks away and joins Sophia in the living room.
“He’s hurting Eve. We all are. It’s going to take some time,” Jake gives her a small smile before following Miles.
“Can you make sure Ryland gets a muffin? I promised her a muffin for breakfast,” I say to Travis. “I’ll have my phone on me if she needs us for anything.”
“Don’t worry about her. She’s going to be well taken care of.” Travis looks at Eve and hesitates before speaking. “No matter how hard it is, Ryder deserves to know everything. Even if the truth hurts him and it’s not what he wants to hear, just be honest with him. He deserves to know.”
“I know,” she nods. “I’m telling him everything.” Travis studies her before running his hand roughly over his stubble and walking away. She looks at Ryland, giggling with my family, and another tear slides down her face. “She’s missed so much,” she whispers.
“We all have.” I swallow down the hurt as I watch my daughter open up to my brothers. They are all gathered around her on the rug, and a huge grin appears on Miles’s face when she scoots back into him and sits on his lap. He runs his hands over his soft curls before wiping away a tear that escaped.
“I can’t watch anymore,” she whispers and walks quickly to the back deck before running across the pool area and down the stairs to the beach. I hurry to catch up with her as she drops to her knees in the sand and breaks down, sobbing.
Unable to deny her anything even after all this time, I pull her to me and hold her as she gets it all out. When she first appeared on my doorstep, all I wanted to do was haul her into my arms and lose myself in her, but all the hurt and anger came crashing down on me.
When I noticed she had a child, I was consumed with envy and jealousy. I assumed she had left to be with someone else and when it didn’t work out, she came crawling back to me for help. I’ve never felt so out of control with the thought of her having a child with another man. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. It took me hours of walking the beach before I felt in control again. I spent the rest of the night just watching the two of them sleep before my body was too exhausted to feel anything. I crashed on the couch, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up to beautiful grey eyes staring back at me. Eyes I knew with every fiber of my being were mine.
“I thought I was doing the right thing, but if I did, why does it hurt so much? What if my dad was lying, and I just believed him? I should have fought harder.” She rambles into my chest, and I try to make sense of it all. When she finally calms down, I pull back and look at her. She hiccups and swipes away the last of the tears.
“I need you to tell me what happened so I can try to understand.” This not knowing is killing me, and I’ve gone through every scenario in my head. None of it makes sense.
She hugs her knees to her chest and stares out at the ocean before looking back at me. “I found out I was pregnant the day I left. I was so excited to tell you. Even though it wasn’t planned and we were still so young, I knew how excited you would be. I was going to make your favorite meal and tell you when you got home from work.”
This was not what I was expecting. “I would have been excited. We talked all the time about having kids and how much we wanted them.”
“I was getting ready to go to the store for dinner ingredients when my parents showed up. They had been calling me for the past month, but I was dodging their call and texts. The minute they rejected you and us being together, I didn’t want anything to do with them.” I nod my head because we talked about how toxic they were to her life, and we agreed she was better off without them.
“My parents told me they were on their way to the airport because my dad had to move for work in Seattle, and they wanted me to come with them. I told them no, of course, that I wasn’t going anywhere with them. Then my mom found the pregnancy test on the counter, and they learned I was pregnant. They went crazy and started yelling about how we would never be able to take care of a child, and I was too young to even know how to raise one. That no grandchild of theirs was going to be raised in a place like ours.”
My hands fist at my sides. “And you listened to them?” I stare at her in disbelief.
“No, of course not. I knew what they were saying was just them trying to control the situation. They hated that they had no more control over me. But then,” she stills and bites her lip. I resist the urge to release it as my gaze goes back up to her eyes.
“What did they say, Eve? Tell me.” I feel my heart racing, and my gut is saying this is something that’s going to break me.
“My dad told me that if I didn’t go with them, they would make sure your business never happened. He would stop the loans, the clients…everything. He would have seen to it that you never got anyone to do business with you,” she says softly.
“You left because of my fucking job?” I stand up and pace the beach, unable to sit still as anger flows through my body. “After everything we shared and felt for one another, you believed that I would want my job over you? Over our baby?”
“No,” she says, quickly getting up. “I knew you would choose me, and I told him that. I told him his threats were useless because I knew Ryder. I knew that what we had meant more to you than your job. We would have figured something else out and would have been happy because we were together. He went a step further, though, when he realized his threat wouldn’t work.”
I run my hand furiously through my hair before looking back at her. “Tell me,” I say through clenched teeth, my jaw throbbing from the pressure.
“He told me that everyone I loved would be affected if I didn’t leave with them. He told me how Travis was a single dad and just starting his tattoo business with Jake and how hard it would be to take care of Max if the business suddenly got taken from him. Miles was just starting to tour with his band which he worked so hard for, and Savi had her heart set on college. He would have done everything in his power to see them all fail. I couldn’t let him do that to them because of me.”
“Fuck!” I yell. The anger I feel towards her parents engulfs me. They took away everything that mattered to me…to us. I take a deep breath of the salty air to try and calm down. “Where is he? Did he decide he did enough damage and just let the threat go? Why now?”
“The FBI has seized all his assets. He has nothing left to threaten me with. I knew he did shady things in his business, and I tried for three years to find it. I got approached by an FBI agent when I was pregnant, and I’ve been working with them ever since. I finally found what they were looking for late one night while I went through his office. He got careless and left a thumb drive out in the open after one of his scotch nights. I quickly copied it before I could get caught. My father is facing a lot of years in prison for embezzlement. They wanted me to run with them but I left in the middle of the night to come back here. After my phone call with Agent Davis, letting him know of their plans, I’m sure my father is rotting in a jail cell right about now.”
“Jesus,” I mutter. My body feels numb, and I have no idea how to feel.
“Leaving that day was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I was afraid if I left a note or tried to call you that, they would find out and follow through on their threats. I was nineteen and scared. I was losing the only person in this whole world who ever made me feel loved. I had to be strong for our daughter, and I knew when I left that I was coming back here as soon as I could find a way out of it. I know you have every reason to hate me. I robbed you of those three years, just like Jake said. I would hate me, too. I did it, though, to protect you and your family, and I would do it all over again if it meant protecting the ones that I love.”
“Like I said earlier, I don’t hate you,” I rub my hand over my face. “I don’t know what to feel right now, but I know I don’t hate you. I’m going to need some time to process this.”
She nods her head and hesitates before stepping back. “Take all the time you need. We should probably get back up there. Ryland will be wondering where I am if I’m gone too long.”
“I’ll be up in a minute. I just need a second.” I watch her walk back to the house, my heart in my throat. I sit down and stare at the ocean. It doesn’t take long before I feel my brothers come up behind me. They sit down beside me, and just like when I was three years old and found out my parents had died, no words need to be spoken. Just them being here helps.
I finally break the silence and tell them what I just learned. When I finish, I look around at their shocked faces. Anger brims near the surface, though, as they come to terms with everything her father took away from us.
“She was protecting us,” Miles whispers. “I knew her dad was a controlling ass, but I had no idea how far he was willing to go to control her. It must have killed him to know he couldn’t control her anymore because she had you and our family. He must have been planning this for a while, and what better opportunity than when they have to move.”
“I wish I could see his ass rotting in jail right now,” Travis grounds out. “He took the coward's way out and threatened his own nineteen-year-old daughter. He knew by mentioning Max that it would get to her. She was too scared that he would hurt us, so she sacrificed her happiness and left.”
“What are you going to do, Ryder? You’ve been in love with her ghost for three years, and she’s back.” Jake says softly. “It’s clear that she never stopped loving you.”
“I don’t know,” I admit truthfully. “I’ve spent so many days wanting this moment, and now that she’s back, I don’t know what to feel. I’m still so angry that I’ve lost all that time with my daughter, and she’s the easy one for me to blame since her dad’s not here.”
“She did what she thought was right regardless of how any of us are feeling,” Miles sighs.
“We’ll never know what would have happened if she hadn’t left and stood her ground. His threats could have been useless, or we could all be living a completely different life right now and not doing the things we love,” Travis admits quietly.
“It’s going to take time to figure out all these feelings, but one thing is for certain. I’m a dad,” I whisper as emotions take hold of me and tears prick my eyes.
“Yeah, you are,” Travis says, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. “She’s beautiful, Ryder. I see so much of Max in her. He’s already taking on the protective older cousin role.”
“Mom and Dad are going to flip when they find out they have a granddaughter,” Miles grins.
“Yeah, she’s going to be over the moon with a little girl to spoil,” Jake agrees.
“I’m thinking I need to FaceTime them later with Savi. I don’t want to wait to tell them until they get here. It will be better if they know now, so it can sink in before they see Eve. Mom thought of her as another daughter and Eve was a sister to Savi. There’s a lot of feelings involved here,” I say, standing up and brushing off the sand. “I told Eve she’s staying here until we figure things out. I don’t want to waste another minute being with my daughter. I thought I would take them into town after breakfast. I want Ryland to be comfortable in my place, so I need to get a few things for her.”
“Sounding like the perfect dad already,” Travis beams at me as we walk back to the house.
“I had the best role model,” I grin back at Travis.
“Geez, I’m going to have to find my manhood again after this morning. I feel like I’ve lived through an episode of Oprah,” Miles mutters.
“You’re telling me. Ryland hugged me earlier, and I almost cried like a baby,” Jake chuckles.
“No shame in that. I’ve been known to cry a few times in front of Sophia. It just means you love hard,” Travis smiles.
I see my daughter spot me as we walk back into the room and the smile she gives me melts my heart on the spot. Yeah, I definitely love hard.