Page 99 of Who's Your Daddy?

21. Peter

Dylan had always toldme that my hobbies were unproductive, and I always strongly disagreed. But this time, I have to say, he may have a point. This hobby is a colossal waste of time. There’s no end goal. Nothing is achieved. It’s pointless. Yet I do it every day, some days for hours at a time.

“Hey, Pete,” Cat greets as she enters my kitchen.

I do my best to hide my annoyance. I need to have a chat with the security guards. There are only five people they allow into the complex to see me without an ID or an actual reason. It’s Scott, Dylan, their wives, and Lia. Lia’s never coming back, and the other four seem to be taking advantage of this arrangement because they keep popping in without an invitation. I need to scrap the entire list, and as soon as I can bring myself to do anything productive, I’m going to call Dave at the guardhouse and do just that.

“Staring at your fridge again?” she asks idly.

I don’t answer because it’s obvious that my new hobby entails having endless bonding moments with my fridge. She drops two grocery bags on the counter then busies herself packing the contents into my kitchen cupboards. I don’t say anything. I barely spare her a glance because my eyes stay focused on the empty spot on the fridge.

See, I may have taken the pictures down, but my brain knows they’re supposed to be there, so now it just fixates on that spot. It knows something is missing. It knows the sequence ended before it was complete. At thirty-two weeks, he was the size of a cabbage, and my brain keeps obsessing about how much bigger he would’ve gotten. How big he was when he was born. If he’s doing okay now.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s worrying. And that’s all I do twenty-four-seven. Logically, I know this woman was a snake who lied to me from day one. I shouldn’t give a fuck about her. Logically, I know the child she was carrying isn’t mine, so I shouldn’t care a damn about him either.

But logic seems to be an irrelevant concept to me because the two of them occupy my every thought, every waking moment. And the most frustrating part is that I can’t even call her to find out if they’re okay. She blocked my number. She blocked everyone in my whole damn friendship circle. She won’t even respond to messages from Tori or Shontelle, so I have no idea where she is or what happened to her.

I’ve called every hospital, hostel, and shelter, and all I get told is that they can’t give out personal information. The cops won’t help or even treat her as a missing person becauseI’mthe one who told her to leave. One asshole even told me that based on all the information, it looks like she doesn’t want to be found, so I need to let it go. And I know he’s right, but I can’t seem to shut my brain off. What happened to her?

My best guess is that she went back to her ex. If she’s not reaching out to anyone she knows for help, she’s gotta be with him, right?

And this is the conundrum of emotions I have to work through every day. On the one side, I am absolutely enraged by the very thought of her going back to him. I mean, it sends me into a turbulent death spiral of fury, then flings me into a toxic cesspit of raw, unmitigated jealousy. But then on the other side, that anger turns and is directed solely at me because I’m the one who kicked her out. I’m the one who left her with no other option but to swallow her pride and go back to him.

And then slowly, anger turns to guilt, and guilt turns to worry, and worry turns into irrepressible panic. And right before I go insane, I remind myself that she’s been lying to me since day one, and the anger returns. I tell myself that it’s good riddance. I got out early enough, and I’m better off without her. She’s out of my life, so I should just forget about her and move on.

I remind myself that it’s not my baby, and that’s when every coping mechanism I have collapses. My body switches off, and I just sit here numb, staring at the fridge.

I’m convinced it has magical powers. Sometimes when I stare at it long enough, it traps me in a time warp, and I find myself stuck in the past, analyzing and dissecting every moment we spent together. The signs were there all along.

The first day we met, I asked her age.

“Before we leave, I need to ask you something. Don’t take offense, but you look kinda young, and I just want to make sure I’m not doing anything illegal when we leave these premises. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four. I mean, I’m twenty...” She paused and reconsidered her answer. “Uh...four. Yeah, twenty-four.”

It all makes sense now, but it just shows that it was a conscious effort to lie to me continuously.

“I didn’t get the job,” she said. “I don’t have the necessary skills, experience, or qualifications.”

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