Page 62 of The Broken Beginning: Part One

“So, you went to my family home, where my son lives, and you lied to my wife, upsetting her in the process. Now, she wants to move away to New York.”

“Good! Then she’ll be gone, and we can finally be together the right way!” Shaina screamed at me.

“Nope. The problem there, beyond the fact that you were a mistake I bided my time with, is that if Lily goes, my son goes too.”

“Just take him and let her go,” she shouted at me while ignoring the other half of what I’d just said.

“You want me to take my son from his mother – the woman who protects, loves, and cares for him all day long, every day?”

“I can do all that,” she insisted.

“And what about the baby that isn’t here yet? I’m supposed to miss out on all of that for you?”

“You’ll have your son and me, what more do you need? I can give you another baby. Let her have that one and go.”

“If you don’t do something about this, I’m going to kill her myself,” Robbie threatened through clenched teeth. It was only then that I looked up and noticed how pissed he was. There was blood dripping from one of his hands where his fingernails had dug in and cut through the skin on his palms.

“Do what you want with her. I have to go see Lily before she does something stupid.”

Robbie looked me in the eye then. “I will not force her to stay with you this time.” He pointed at Shaina then. “My daughter deserved more than this bitch coming to her doorstep and throwing shit in her face after everything she’s already had to see. She deserved more than the half-ass attempt you made.”

“You’re right. And if she never wants to speak to me again after our conversation, then I’ll respect her decision – to a point. She isn’t leaving though. Whether we’re still married or not, she can’t take my kids away.”

Robbie said nothing, and I knew I wouldn’t get a fight out of him on that because he didn’t want her to go either, no matter how much he wanted her to be happy one day. The man was just as selfish as I was, only in a different way. I couldn’t complain either, because it might be the one thing that helped me keep Lily here long enough for me to prove to her that there could be something between us.

And there was another baby coming. We were getting a chance to do everything over, hopefully the right way. I turned back to Robbie before leaving the pit. “If things go the way I think they will, I’m going to need to crash at your place for the foreseeable future. She won’t trust anything she doesn’t see and that makes staying hereat the clubhouse impossible now.”

Robbie turned from me to Boone. “Look at that, he’s finally thinking with the right head.”

19 - Fresh Hurts

Tiger Lily

Talking to Stacey helped. I called her two days ago, when I first got the positive pregnancy test. Then, I called her again and left another message about an hour later after some bitch dropped off pictures of her and Merc together. The woman, who I figured was Shaina, claimed to be pregnant by him, but honestly, it sounded like more of a desperate claim than the truth, especially since she couldn’t look me in the eye as she said it.

Still, those pictures hurt me on a soul deep level that I didn’t even realize existed up to that point. She had more of him than I ever had. Even if it was over between them and this was her angry attempt at trying to make me push him back to her. If she only knew. I didn’t have him either. Never had. What I also never had of Merc was a single picture of the two of us together. There were a few around the house of Merc with our son, but none with me. We didn’t even have wedding photos. If someone were to walk into my house and try to figure us out based on what they could see, they would never assume that Merc and I even knew one another. Or at the very least, that maybe he was a distant relative who hated me.

The pictures this woman shoved at me were an assortment of their time together. There were a couple of them laughing, and obviously out on a date. I saw his truck in the background instead of the motorcycle, so maybe he had told me the truth about not having anyone on his bike. Still, there he was laughing and looking happy with this other woman. There was one of them in bed together and a couple of him in what must have been her bed alone. He looked peacefully at sleep with the sheet just covering his naughty bits. She got that part of him. Repeatedly. I’d only ever slept with Merc one time – actually slept – and it was the same day I found out for sure that this woman in the pictures existed. He mistook me for her when he was first waking up, which meant he had built habits of waking up with her over time.

We never had that kind of intimacy. We didn’t have pictures. There was no proof that Merc and I ever existed together at any point except for our son, the piece of paper that documented our farce of a marriage, and now the new baby that was growing inside me. I hoped it was a girl because it would be the last baby I had if it was. No matter whether I left and fell in love at some point, I never wanted to have a child twisted between me and another person again.

I set the pictures aside, and threw myself into a different world, in order to try to forget my own reality. I was so immersed in the world being created at my fingertips, that I didn’t even realize someone sat down in the chair on the opposite side of my desk until he cleared his throat. When I looked up, Merc sat there looking destroyed. Good for him. Maybe Shaina had just dropped the bomb that she was pregnant.

“I thought I told you not to come here without calling first.”

“Would you have let me in if I had called?”

“Sure, I just wouldn’t have been here,” I told him truthfully.

“So, it’s a good thing that I stopped by without calling then. We need to talk.”

I chuckled at that as I continued to type out my final sentence before hitting save and giving the asshole my undivided attention again.

“No need,” I told him as I picked up the pictures his girlfriend had left with me and threw them at him. “I already know about your bullshit.”

“And just what do you think you know?”

“That this woman was so desperate to keep a hold on you that she came to my house with those pictures and lied about being pregnant with your child. Or maybe she was telling the truth about that but lying about some other part of it, I don’t know. And you know what? I also don’t care. Go be with your new woman. At least she got your fidelity for the most part. She certainly got more than you have ever given me beyond that too.”

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