Page 34 of Secret Daddies

I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, trying to make sense of what I had just heard. He was my son.He is my fucking son.

I had a child. A child, with Maya, no less. After all this time, all these years apart, all the chances she’d had to tell me, and now she was finally coming clean.

“You’re sure?”

She nodded. “It couldn’t have been anyone else but you,” she replied, her voice cracking again. “I—I wasn’t with anyone else. I didn’t want anyone else, Devon. He’s your son, I know he is.”

My heart skipped a beat inside my chest. Fuck, it was going to take a lot for me to get used to hearing him spoken about that way. I’d never imagined myself as a father, not now, not ever, but here I was discovering that I had a kid of my own, a kid I’d known nothing about…

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, a sudden anger swelling up in my system before I could stop myself. She shook her head, her eyes blazing with a sudden defiance.

“You think this is how I wanted to have a family?” she fired back. “To find out that I was pregnant when you took off to the middle of nowhere with no way to contact you?”

“If I’d known?—”

“If you’d known, can you really tell me that you would have turned your back on your career for us?”

Those words hung in the air between us. I wanted to argue with them, but I didn’t know if I could, not really. She shook her head at me, eyes narrowing.

“Yeah, exactly what I thought,” she muttered. “You wouldn’t have been there for us. Either of us.”

“You didn’t give me the chance,” I growled.

“And if I had, you would have just let me down,” she fired back. “And him. It wasn’t just me I had to think about, Devon, you understand that? It was my son too. I had to think about whatI was bringing into his life if I invited you back. And you had already walked away from me once, so I had no reason to think that it wouldn’t happen again, with a child or not.”

I gritted my teeth. I wanted to argue with her, tell her that she was wrong, that it would have been different if I’d known about the baby, but the truth was…I couldn’t say that for sure. Now, if I found out that someone I’d slept with was pregnant, I would do everything I could to be there for them, but at the age I was when all this happened…I would have sent money, of course. I would have tried, but I had been so focused on my career that I couldn’t be sure I would have been the father my son needed me to be.

My son.Fuck, those words still felt so foreign to me. I couldn’t make sense of them.

“I deserved to know,” I protested, turning the conversation back toward something I could actually defend. “I should have been given the chance. And when I came to you again, I should have been given the chance then too. You should have told me as soon as we saw each other, but you didn’t?—”

“Because my son has grown up and had a normal life,” she argued. “And that’s not going to continue if I tell him that his father is a goddamn superhero! You know how hard it is, trying to make sure that he lives in some semblance of normalcy after everything that’s happened? How hard I’ve had to work to make sure that he doesn’t struggle, that he gets to live the life the rest of his peers do?”

“I could have helped. I would have sent money?—”

“And you would have expected to be part of his life too,” she told me, shaking her head. “You’re one of the biggest names in theworld, Devon. He can’t live a normal life if he finds out about you. And neither can I.”

Her words faltered off, as though she had barely been considering herself in all of this. She looked away from me, breathing hard. And all at once, I could see the girl that I had been with when we were both barely more than kids. I could see the pain in her eyes, and I could see how much she’d struggled, how much she’d suffered in the years since we had last been together. I could only imagine how frightened she must have been when she found out she was pregnant and decided that she wanted to keep it. I knew she didn’t have family to fall back on, or even an established career at that point.

“I wish I could have been there for you,” I told her softly, reaching for her hand before I could think better of it. For a moment, our fingers touched, and she looked down at the point of connection between the two of us.

For a second, I could see her considering it, what I was telling her—considering the possibility of actually going through with this, as if she could reel back time and start where we had left off. Giving me a chance to be in Matty’s life, no matter how hard it might be, no matter what it might cost.

But then she pulled her hand away from me and looked up at me again, her eyes filled with a grief that seemed to run bone-deep.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Yeah, I wish you could have been there for me too.”

And with that, she turned on her heel and walked out of the trailer, leaving me reeling with the shock of what I had just found out, and wishing more than anything that I could go back in time and make it right.

But the real world didn’t work that way. And the real world, right now, was the very last place I wanted to be.

18

MAYA

I pressedmy fingertips into my temples, massaging my head as I tried to figure out exactly how I was going to make these numbers work. So, if I had that much coming in from work, but then I had to pay that much in doctor’s bills…and how long was it before my health insurance kicked in, again…?

I sighed and rested my head on my forearms, right on top of the papers I’d laid out in front of me to try and figure out the financial situation I was facing now that I was pregnant again. I had forgotten how much being pregnantcost,especially when you didn’t have health insurance. I’d blazed through most of my savings when I was pregnant with Matty, but I’d forgotten all about that until that test had turned up positive.

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