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“What are you doing here?” I demand, holding the door for balance.
“I came to see you, Bailey.” He holds out the flowers. “These are foryou.”
What am I supposed to think? Does this mean he wants to make up, apologize, or what? Resist, Bailey. Don’t fall down the rabbit hole again…
“I don’t want to see you, Zayden. Go home.” I resist the offering, as behind me, my mother advises me not to take the flowers. “Stop,” I murmur over my shoulder.
“I just want to talk to you,” he continues, unfazed by my flat rejection of his offer.
“We have nothing to say to one another.”
“Someone there?” Zayden tries to get a good look behind me. “I just want to talk toyou.”
I open the door, so he can see how well he disturbed the ant farm. Not only are my mom, dad, and Mrs. Miller out of the house looking on, but now so is half the neighborhood. “You better make this good,” I tell Zayden. “You have most of the town for an audience.”
Zayden takes a look around at all the faces watching him. “Small town,” he mutters. Taking a few steps all the way up to the stoop, he wisely stops when he sees that I have no intention of taking his flowers nor hugging him. “Bailey, look. I wasn’t ready before…”
Behind Zayden, my dad smiles smugly, breathes on his fingernails and buffs them off on his shirt, like he knew this would happen. Yes, Dad, you told me this is how it would godown.
“Ready for what?” I’m going to just pretend I don’t understand a single thing he’s saying. He’s going to have to do all the work. I hold strong, even though I’m trembling with fear and anxiety.
“Ready for anything. For you, for Olivia, ready for the way I was feeling.”
I tremble even harder now. Something worse than fear and anxiety begins to take over…hope? It’s so easy to build ideas up in your mind, though. So hard to take them down, and I cannot spend another year of my life undoing the damage Zayden does. I push out the door and past him, ignoring the scent of his skin as I do. “I can’t listen now. I have an interview to getto.”
“Bailey, please. Just listen to what I have to say. I promise it will be worth yourtime.”
“My time,” I reply, “has to go to people who will make a difference in my life. People who know they want me, like the principal currently waiting for me at her school. Let me go, Zayden.”
“Bailey, I loveyou.”
His words stop me at my car, my hand curled under the handle. I pause there, processing the words. For months and months, I dreamed about him saying those words to me. I imagined him as a changed man, ready to accept the new emotions he was feeling with me, with Olivia. I wanted it to happen so badly and now it has, only perhaps toolate.
They say putting thoughts out into the universe comes back toyou.
Olivia.
“What about thebaby?”
“I love her, too. I wasn’t ready to deal with the loss, and I knew the day would come when I would lose her. So I put up walls to protect my heart. After the hurt I’d been through in my life, it was the only thing I knew how to do, the only thing I coulddo.”
“Where is shenow?”
“She’s with her mother.”
My hope begins to deflate. I don’t know that I could ever be with Zayden if he doesn’t accept Olivia back into his life. “You don’t seeher?”
“Not yet. But I’m going to. Bailey, I hired a lawyer. I’m going to fight for custody. I have a pretty good chance, like you said. I know, I should’ve listened to you from the beginning.”
I smirk and back myself up against the car, arms crossed. “Full custody?”
“Well, yes, but the most I’ll probably get is fifty-fifty. Honestly, I’d be happy with anything, but the important thing is that I want to be in her life, I want to be an active father. Bailey, you must understand how it all came out of the blue forme.”
“You came out of the blue for me too, Zayden. Yet you didn’t see me freaking out, turning hot and cold on people, and being an asshole.”
“You’re stronger than me,” he says, and for a whole minute, I get to see a very weak side of Zayden, as he admits that he’s not the big man everyone thinks he is. Not when it comes to feelings, anyway.
“That’s not true,” I mutter softly.