Page 40 of Inevitable
Emma had good reason to believe she was infertile back then.
My mind was still trying to accept the fact that I had a daughter I hadn’t known about for thirteen fucking years.
“Were you upset when you found out?” I finally asked huskily.
“Not upset,” she denied. “I was shocked. I knew my entire life was going to change, but I wanted Wren from the moment I found out that I was pregnant. I’d already resigned myself to the fact that I’d probably never have the child I wanted. I consoled myself with the thought that I might be able to adopt someday as a single parent. After I found out, my mother urged me to come home to Cherry Cove so she could be there to support me and help me when I needed it. I relocated back to Michigan before Wren was born and started my own business.”
That information sobered me, and I wanted to kick myself for not giving a thought to how difficult this pregnancy must have been for Emma.
She’d been a single parent trying to start up her own business.
She’d been there for our daughter when I hadn’t been.
“I should have left you my damn contact information,” I said, my voice raw.
“No regrets,” Emma said emphatically. “I would have told you if I’d had your contact information, but I didn’t. I don’t regret it, Colin. Wren has been the joy in my life since the moment she was born. We can’t go back and change anything that happened, but please know I’ll never regret having our daughter. I wanted you to know the truth, but I don’t expect anything from you. Wren is going into high school. She survived her childhood just fine without two parents.”
I quickly calculated my daughter’sexactage.
It hadn’t been quite fourteen years since Emma and I had been together.
I frowned. “She has to bebarelythirteen.”
Emma nodded. “We just celebrated her birthday last month. She’s been a mini adult since grade school. She has a genius IQ that she definitely didn’t inherit from me, but I wouldn’t let her skip a grade until she told me she was bored in school. I finally agreed to let her skip her last year of grade school after she begged me to do it. I wish I could show you her picture, but I don’t have my phone.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and requested, “Tell me what she looks like.”
Emma shrugged. “She looks like you. She has your brown hair and gray eyes. To me, she’s the cutest kid on the planet.”
Fucking hell!
I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I had a child in the world that I didn’t know, but I was slowly accepting it.
“Who is she staying with while you’re gone?”
“She’s in San Diego with my mother. That’s the only reason I agreed to go to Lania,” Emma shared. “She’s been spending time with my mom in San Diego in the summer for the last few years. The two of them are really close.”
“What does Wren know about me?” I asked.
“As much as I know,” Emma told me. “She’s always known that I didn’t know where you were and it wasn’t your fault that you didn’t know about her. I told her the whole story about Virginia Beach just recently because she finally asked those questions. I saw no reason not to tell her that we had a fling and that we didn’t share any information. I’ve always tried to be honest with Wren. She’s not going to expect anything from you, either, Colin. She knows that you never knew about her.”
Everything that I’d missed in Wren’s life suddenly hit me.
I hadn’t been there for Emma, and I hadn’t been there for my daughter all of these years.
“Fuck that!” I said angrily. “She should expect things from me. You should expect things from me. I’m her goddamn father.”
“You’ve known you’re a father for a matter of minutes,” Emma argued. “What I’m saying is that you don’t have to jump in as a father if you don’t want to, and we’ve managed okay financially. I’m not suddenly going to start asking for child support or something.”
“I’m going to have to insist that you let me help,” I answered tersely. “You’ve borne the expense of our daughter alone for all these years. That’s bullshit.”
“She hasn’t suffered because she didn’t have a father, Colin,” Emma said softly.
Yeah, that was probably because Emma had sacrificed everything to give our kid everything she needed.
That was going to end right fucking now.
“I’m not wealthy like my billionaire partners,” I informed Emma. “But I’m extremely well-off. I’m more than capable of handling our daughter’s expenses and her college expenses in the future.”
