Page 130 of Rival Hearts

“If you decide you want to be with her, if you truly love her, then that’s okay with me. I won’t chase you away. You have my blessing.”

“And if I don’t decide to be with her?”

“Then you just do the right thing. Do right by her, be there for the kid.”

I would never just abandon the baby. That I knew for sure. There was so much I didn’t know in life, but one thing I did know was that no matter how fucked up my life became, I would never make a child feel like they weren’t wanted.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” I said to Gabe.

“Of course.” He pulled me into a quick bro hug. “I’ll talk to you soon. We should still go out for drinks sometime. I feel like we keep postponing so that it never happens.”

I nodded. “We’ll do something soon.” I meant it, but my mind was on other things. It was spinning.

Gabe left, and I turned back to the bar to pour myself another drink, although I left it on the counter without drinking it.

Charlotte was pregnant.

I was going to be a father.

How could I be a man in her life? How could I fill the shoes of a father to look up to?

When I look at you, I don’t see a Blackwood, I don’t see money. I don’t see what the rest of the world sees. I see a man who cares.

She’d been right about that. Ididcare. More than I was supposed to. About her and about everything she was going through.

The thing was, no matter how shit scared I was of being a father, of being a failure. What mattered was that now, suddenly, there was a little person who deserved me to step up to the plate.It was one thing to not believe in myself, but if I was going to have a child, I needed to be someone they could believe in.

And my God, I wasn’t going to let Charlotte or my child down.

I still wasn’t sure about my past, about who I was at my core. But Charlotte and the unborn baby deserved that I do the right thing.

I realized that no matter who my parents had been, no matter what they’d done to me and where I came from, that decision alone meant that I could never be like them.

I was more. By choosing to step up, to be there for Charlotte and for the baby, I was everything my biological parents had failed to be.

And I’d been wrong about myself all this time.

It was time to set things right and show Charlotte that I wanted to be there for her, that I wanted things to change so that we could figure out life together, moving forward.

I just had to figure out how to do that.

37

CHARLOTTE

My phone rang loudly next to me, yanking me out of a deep sleep. I’d fallen asleep on the couch. My arm was dead with how I’d been lying on it, and the laptop was on the floor. I hoped I’d put it down carefully and not pushed it off in my sleep.

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Were you sleeping?” Maya asked over the phone.

“Yeah, I nodded off.” I checked the laptop. It seemed okay.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“No, no. I didn’t mean to sleep. What’s up, everything okay?”

“Turn on your television,” Maya said. “You’re going to want to see this.”