Page 42 of From the Embers
My husband fathering a child with another woman.
That woman being a wolf in disguise, posing as my best friend.
And once again, I had to share that unique and profound misery with one of the best men I’d ever known.
First thing that morning, unsure of what else to do, I’d called Evelyn to watch my kids and gone to him. He deserved to hear it from someone who cared about him, and I mean truly cared about him. Not the bullshit façade Rob and Jessica had crammed down our throats.
I reached for him, needing to touch him, needing him to know I was there, hurting right along with him, but he scrambled away.
“That’s not possible,” he seethed, the muscles on his neck straining.
God, this was going to hurt.
“I don’t know when it started with them. I haven’t gotten that far in the messages. But the night after Luna was born, Jessica sent him a text message saying you had just gone home to get her a few things and for him to come meet his daughter.”
Eason’s eyes flashed wide and rabid, but I kept talking, hoping for the Band-Aid effect.
“Rob told her not to say that, that Luna could still be yours. She called him after the text, so I have no idea what else was said.” I dug my phone from my back pocket. “And then I found this picture on his personal phone of him smiling, holding Luna at the hospital.” I turned the screen to face him. “I’d seen it a dozen times but never really looked at it. There are tons of pictures of us visiting Jessica in the hospital. The same when you guys came to visit us after Madison was born. But look at the clock.” My voice cracked and tears I swore I wouldn’t show him welled in the corners of my eyes.
This wasn’t about me. I was allowed to be angry. I was allowed to be hurt. But my job, first and foremost, was to make sure he was okay. Because, no matter the situation, he would have done the same for me.
“We came and visited the next morning. I remember because we got there around ten after I’d insisted on stopping to get her breakfast from that brunch place we loved so much. We were not at the hospital at six twenty-six that night or any other night, but clearly he was. Either Jessica convinced him or Rob must have thought there was enough of a chance Luna was his that he risked going up there.”
“Oh, God,” he mumbled, the hope draining from his face right along with the color. “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Rubbing the center of his chest, he stumbled to one of the wooden chairs surrounding a rustic dinner table and sank down. “She’d sent me home to ger her pillow and a bunch of other random shit she’d said she’d forgotten to pack in her hospital bag. It was a whole damn list, including stopping to get Coke. The kind with crushed ice, not the ones we had at home. It took me for-fucking-ever to find it all. And when I got back, Rob was there.” Planting his elbows on the table, he buried his face in his hands. “It didn’t seem weird at the time. Why didn’t I think that was weird?”
“Because you trusted him. Trusted her.” I dropped into a squat beside him and rested a hand on his back. “They played us both. This isn’t on you.”
“But it is on me!” He lurched to his feet and sliced his hand through the air, pointing at a closed door. “That is my daughter. That little girl is my entire fucking reason for living, and you’re telling me she might not even be mine? It wasn’t bad enough that he was fucking my wife, but the son of a bitch took my baby from me too?” Swiping out his arm, he cleared the decorative candles from the center of the table. They fell to the floor with a loud crash, breaking just like the man in front of me.
Ducking under his arm, I hurried in front of him. “Stop. Eason. Come on. Think about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“How does this not matter? He took everything from me. My whole fucking life is a lie. Please God, Bree, tell me how to make this feel like it doesn’t matter.”
I stared at him at an utter loss.
I’d been trying to do just that for days, even before I’d found out about Luna, and I still hadn’t figured out how to stop letting a ghost stomp on my heart. There was only one person who ever gave me solace. It was probably wrong given the situation, but as his toffee-brown eyes bored into mine, so much pain carved into his handsome face, I would have done anything to take the agony from him.
