How good of a father he could be.
“I’m your father. Or, sorry, let me say that like they do in the movies. ‘No, I am your father.’”
Charlotte laughed. Of course she had no way of knowing the Star Wars reference, but she knew when Daddy was playing with her. And she loved it.
Which meant I loved it. Hell, I was getting emotional watching the whole thing. I could even feel my eyes start to tear up.
It was getting to be a bit much. I stepped away into a side room. I told myself I was letting Liam and Charlotte have a moment, but I knew better. I had finally gotten what I’d wanted, and it was so precious and beautiful that I wasn’t quite yet ready to handle it.
When I stepped into the side room, I let a few silent tears flow. Yes, Liam and I were not together, and yes, we had a lot of work to do. But yes, this was as great a start as any.
But you have work to do with him.
I composed myself, dabbed my eyes with some tissues, and went back into the kitchen. I grabbed a bottle and put it in the microwave to warm up.
“What’s that?” Liam said, nodding to the bottle.
“Breastmilk.”
Something in Liam’s eyes flickered. My mind went straight to the same place that his did, probably. We may have been talking about something very nonsexual, but to pretend that we both couldn’t leap to the sexual quickly was a lie.
The bottle finished warming up, I pulled it out, and I walked over.
“Let me take her to a nap. Then we can talk.”
Liam nodded. But when I went to grab her, he didn’t offer. He didn’t refuse, but as Charlotte was still looking up at him, he still held on to her.
For a moment, it was beautiful, and I let it remain. But as precious as it was, I did have to talk sooner rather than later.
I grabbed her finally, took her to her room, and laid her down.
“You finally met your father,” I said. “And I’m glad you’re into him.”
Who knows? Maybe I will be too.
A few minutes later, Charlotte had fallen asleep in her crib. I put a blanket over her, tucked her in, and kissed her on the forehead. It had been a long while since I’d felt this good about her future.
But now I had to have a tough talk to see if that future was what I thought it was or if I had gotten too swept up in the moment.
I headed downstairs back to the kitchen to find Liam sitting at a table, a beer from my fridge in his hand.
“I’ll buy you a six-pack,” he said. “I just felt like I needed one for the moment I’d just had.”
“Why?”
“To celebrate.”
I let myself smile. He didn’t smile back. The gruff exterior had returned—but that wasn’t inherently a bad thing.
“I promised you an hour of your time, and that’s all I’ll use.”
“Really, you’ve used like twenty minutes of it already,” Liam said, “but I suppose I could be nice and allow you to mean an hour of conversation. I already finished my job of finding her father. Not like I have two jobs at once.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or serious. I smiled again, just to reassure him, but it didn’t seem to have any impact on him.
“You should know everything that’s happened,” I said, “so you can understand why I reacted the way I did yesterday.”
I took a breath. Once the tough conversation started, it wouldn’t be tough to continue it. But boy, getting it rolling was going to prove quite difficult.
“When I moved to Breckenridge, I was a terrible mess,” I said, “and the truth was, we didn’t divorce because we hated each other. We divorced because my inability to conceive created such tension and such fights that we really never had a shot. It was unfair to him, but that was the way it went.
“When I moved out here, I was more or less resigned to being alone for the rest of my life. I didn’t have any reason to believe that I’d magically conceive, not when I had a man who was medically proven to be fertile. Not when I hadn’t any interest in trying to try again, fearing I’d get rejected by biology again. But when we met, when you were Trent, well, for one night, I more or less forgot all of that and just went with the moment.”
Liam’s expression never changed. Compared to fury and outrage, though, I suppose it was much better.
“In the first couple of months after that encounter, I sort of rode the high of the moment. I didn’t think it meant anything beyond that night, most especially because of the way you walked out on me, but boy, was it fun. And then when I learned I was pregnant, for a couple of months, I felt fucking cursed. Like, what kind of a God would play a cruel trick on me like this, to knock me up once I was single?
“But then, when I had Charlotte, my world changed. No longer was I depressed. No longer did I feel like I had nothing left and was just passing the days. I felt invigorated, purposeful. Well, at least compared to where I was. I guess you could say she sort of saved me. After a year of having her, though, I felt like I needed something more. I needed…you.”
I gulped.
“Or, at least, I imagined if I wanted Charlotte to be the adult I wanted her to someday be, she needed you. So I reached out to Emily to get this
