Page 136 of Fierce-Hyde

“Did she say I wasn’t your child?” Tori asked, her jaw dropping. When the two of them looked back and forth at each other, she knew her answer. “She did, didn’t she? Did you think it was true? I look like you. We have the same eyes and chin. The same color hair.”

Her mother always complained about those things. That she looked more like her father than her mother. Even in her baby pictures, she was the spitting image of her father. Her grandparents had proudly shared them.

“I told you it was easier for me to believe something that in my heart I knew wasn’t true. Taking the easy way was a mistake.”

“Which is why you’re not now?” she asked. It reminded her she’d said this to Hyde once. That she took the easy way out walking away from a man and even Raina at one point. Guess she got that character trait from her father too.

Never again.

“I owe it to both of us.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You do.”

41

SHE CAME TO HIM

“The fact you are coming right here tells me that things went well or bad,” Hyde said on Sunday. It wasn’t even noon.

Tori had texted him on Friday night and said that she had a lot to process and didn’t want to talk. And that she was feeling very emotional but loved him.

If she hadn’t ended with the fact she loved him, he might have jumped in the car and gone to see her.

She returned to her father’s on Saturday for the day and he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad and didn’t let on last night either.

“It started bad,” she said. “I mean honest and raw but not good either. But we said a lot of things and then Saturday it was easier to go back and just talk.”

“Which means it was good,” he said. “I’m glad to hear that.”

Maybe. He would reserve judgment on what the guy’s explanation was.

“I need to go to the bathroom and I’m starving.”

“I’ve got lunch ordered and it will be here soon. I waited until you were close to home. I got a bunch of Chinese food. I figured we could sit and pick and talk at the same time.”

She’d told him before Chinese food was warm and comforting to her. He wanted her to have it all considering she was coming right to him before she even went home.

“That’s perfect,” she shouted as she ran to his bathroom.

When she was in there, the buzzer went off and he opened the door to get their food and set it up.

“Let’s eat,” he said. “Talk.”

“I’m sure it won’t surprise you to hear this. But it all goes back to my mother.”

“I’m not shocked at all,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

He had to stop chewing a few times.

That Emily lied about so many things regarding Tori was horrible.

But Kevin believing them because it was easier to walk away might have been worse.

“Yeah,” she said. “Shelly was nice. I think I would have liked having her as a stepmother. She gave my father shit and it was funny. I don’t remember him smiling much when I was a kid.”

“Maybe because he felt like he didn’t have much to smile about with your mother?”

“That is my guess. I told him he just messed me up with what he did.”

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