Page 47 of Head Over Heels

Liv’s mouth is open, a little. She closes it, then opens it again to say, “You fell in love with her.”

“I fell in love with her.” I shake my head. “Dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Hey, now. None of us falls in love with the wrong person on purpose.” She gets a faraway look on her face, and there’s sadness, too. Regret.

There’s a story there,I think. I’m about to ask her about it, when she says, “And then she got pregnant.”

“Well, no, that’s not exactly how it happened. Not from my perspective.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“She quit her job and moved to Seattle. Made it clear that she’d thought the whole time we were both having fun, taking a walk on the wild side. She didn’t exactly say she’d been slumming it, but I knew that was what she meant. She broke my heart. Or, I thought she had. You know the punch line, though, so you know that wasn’t the worst of it.”

“So you let her walk away?”

She still hasn’t gotten it. “She’d broken up with me. Told me she didn’t have feelings for me. That was all. I couldn’t change her mind.”

The light dawns, her eyes widening. “Oh. God.” She puts a hand to her chest. “She didn’ttellyou she was pregnant?”

“She didn’t tell me,” I confirm.

“How did you find out?”

“About eight months after that, my mother was at a conference in Seattle and saw Thea with Katie in a front carrier. My mom wasn’t close enough to talk to Thea, but she was close enough to be sure of what she’d seen. My parents never found out I’d been with Thea, so it didn’t occur to my mom, when she told me she’d seen Thea with a baby, what a shock it would be. I lost my shit, freaked both of us out.”

“God. Chase. That must havesucked.”

I don’t let myself think about the way it felt, getting hit with the truth. I make myself remember like I’m looking at the past through the wrong end of a telescope, remote and unconnected to me. “It did.”

“Did you confront Thea?”

“I figured out where she was working and flew to Seattle to talk to her. I was as calm as I could be, and I asked to meet Katie, and then I asked Thea if she’d ever planned to tell me and she said no. And I asked why, and she wouldn’t answer.

“But she didn’t have to. I knew. She’d grown up with a dad who was a drunk and a deadbeat, and she’d told me, more than once, that it would have been better to have no dad at all.”

A look of horror freezes on Liv’s face. “She couldn’t have been thinking that about you and Katie—”

It’s funny what a relief it is to see the anger and the hurt I felt back then reflected on Liv’s face now. Like, there was no one to feel it for me or with me when it happened, but now there is, and that takes some of the pain away.

Liv shakes her head. “Even if she thought she didn’t want you in their lives, she must have seen she was wrong. As soon as she saw you with Katie.”

I shrug. “Yes and no. She came around, for sure. I moved to Seattle to be close to Katie, and that softened Thea a bunch. And I got the job and cleaned up my life and did everything I could to be a good dad, and it made a difference.”

“But?”

“But it was still tough to get time with Katie. I was supposed to have her Sundays and Mondays, and half the holidays, but I swear at least sixty percent of the time there was something in Katie’s schedule that Thea couldn’t work around. Thea wanted things exactly her way all the time. She thought Katie needed structure and consistency, and she didn’t think I had anything to add to the life that she was making for her.”

“Did you ever think about getting a lawyer?”

“Everyone I talked to said that it would take years and a fortune in bills, and that at best I’d carve out a little more time. And in the end, I felt like I couldn’t do that to any of us, but most of all Katie. That money that I would have been spending, that money wasKatie’s.And as she got older, she would have known. That we were fighting over her.”

“You’re a good dad,” Liv says quietly. “A really good dad. Whatever Thea believed about you, she was dead wrong.”

It’s one thing to know something for yourself. And it’s another thing to have someone you care about say it to you. It settles in my chest, warm and exuberant and expanding. And I don’t know what to do with it except to reach my arms out to her and say, “C’mere.”

Chapter 25

Liv

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