Page 35 of Shot Through the Heart

“No. I came over after giving you space for two weeks after the crash and your mom—” Her eyes widen as she cuts herself off. She doesn’t finish her sentence, just snaps her jaw shut.

“What about my mom?” I ask, my patience wearing thin. But Stella just shakes her head as she backs away with tears swelling in her eyes.

“Hold on,” she whispers before turning away and darting back up the stairs. I bite back the urge to yell after her but remember the comment about our daughter sleeping.

When she comes back a minute later, her cheeks are ashen as she carries a box in her hands. She approaches slowly. Her normal sass and confidence are nowhere to be found as she extends it out for me to take.

“What’s this?” I ask but reach out to take what is obviously a shoebox.

“Proof of what I’m starting to think actually happened,” she whispers, sinking down to sit on the ottoman in front of me.

My eyebrows pinch together as I remove the lid. My stomach drops at the sight of the ultrasound that’s in the box. With a shaky hand, I carefully take it out for a closer look, only to notice the other things below it.

A stack of letters with my name and address are rubber banded together, with bold red letters reading “return to sender” over the writing. I move the stack aside, finding folded papers of what appear to be printed out emails, and below that, a few uncashed checks with my mother’s name on them.

It doesn’t even feel like I’m breathing as I finally meet Stella’s tearful eyes.

“What is all of this?” I ask, even though I think I already know.

“I came to tell you about the baby.”

“You came to my house,” I say, trying to piece together what she’s saying versus what I’ve thought for five years. Staring down at the ultrasound pictures in my hand, it’s even harder to continue believing what I thought I knew to still be true. Especially when the proof is sitting in my lap.

“I came to see you, to tell you about the pregnancy and to just…get you back.”

From the corner of my eye, I see her swipe at her face, and I finally look away from the ultrasound.

“I went to the hospital, but your mom said only family was allowed to see you.”

I shake my head. “All the guys from my team came to see me.”

Stella nods, but there’s a lifelessness to the movement. She drops her hands, giving up on wiping away the tears.

“After two weeks of not hearing from you and finding out from your friend that you were finally discharged, I came to your house with the ultrasound to tell you. Your mom answered the door and told me you didn’t want to see me. So I told her.”

She pauses, letting her words hang in the space between us. If I weren’t already sitting, I know for a fact I would fall on my ass. Hell, even sitting, I still feel off-kilter.

“My mom knew?” My voice sounds rough, but I ignore the itch in my throat and watch another tear slide down Stella’s cheek.

“She brought me to the study and told me she would go tell you.” A scary laugh slips out. “At the time, I thought she sounded hopeful. She even said that she thought the news would finally get you out of bed…but she never actually told you.”

Everything she’s saying, everything she’s showing me, sounds so insane that even as I try to fight it, there’s no doubt that she’s telling the truth. Logic doesn’t seem to be working at a normal pace right now, though.

“So you just…walked away? Without seeing me or talking to me in person?” I ask her, my words holding little weight. However, if she had just come to me directly, we could have done this together.

“Don’t do that,” she snaps, pushing to her feet so she can glare down at me. “I was a teenager. I was scared, hurt, and alone. An adult that I had no reason to doubt told me that you didn’t want me—didn’t want us! She comforted me and offered to help even though you didn’t want it. She told me to think of my baby and not myself, so I did.”

Stella stomps over, grabs the shoebox from my lap, and digs through it.

“She gave me this check.” She slaps it onto the ottoman in front of me. “And gave me her number so that if I needed anything else, I could reach out to her directly. So tell me, Greyson, what the hell reason did I have not to trust whatyourmother told me?”

She reaches into the box and pulls out the phone to hold up. There’s a crack in the screen, and the mint green border is immediately recognizable as the phone she had throughout high school. “If we find a charger, the unanswered texts I sent to you will all be here. This phone is also the only one I ever logged into the email I used to send your mom updates. But those are also printed out in the box.”

Stella drops the phone back into the box and crosses her arms.

“I left based on the information I thought to be true. I needed to do what was best for me and the baby.”

Her words sink in and guilt slams into me. It knocks the breath from my lungs faster than any impact I’ve ever felt. She’s right. Never in my life would I ever imagine that my mother would stoop this low. Clenching my fists, I breathe through the rising anger. It would be misplaced here, considering it’s my mom who caused all of this.

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