Page 13

Chapter Twelve

GREYSON

My feet feel like they’re bolted to the ground as I watch Stella disappear up the stairs carrying the kid.

The kid.

Stella has a child in her house. A really freaking young one at that. Like, that toddler might still be in diapers.

And there’s no doubt in my mind that the kid belongs to Stella. Even filled with tears, the quick glimpse of the little girl’s eyes when she saw me was the spitting image of Stella’s. I’d know that glimmering pale blue anywhere.

But there was still something that nagged at me as I watched the tearful interaction. There was a familiarity that struck me the second I saw the kid.

My gaze finally drifts from the empty staircase and lands on the wall across from the front door. A group of pictures is neatly hung around a rustic home sweet home sign. The sound of the door clicking shut behind me is what makes me realize I’m finally moving. I’m in a trance as I take in the photos in front of me and the longer I look, the more my suspicion grows.

There are pictures ranging from a newborn baby all the way through until ones that look more recent and the word “daughter” bounces around in my head.

As in…my daughter.

Tearing my eyes from the photos is difficult, but as I step into Stella’s living room, I’m only focused on getting all the information I can without storming upstairs and demanding answers.

I spot a bookshelf in the corner of the living room and start toward it. It’s a maze to get across the space without stepping on toys, but I manage. I’m mostly numb as I reach for the framed professional picture of the little girl.

She looks so much like me that it hurts.

Sitting on her couch isn’t something I remember doing. All I can do is study the picture and memorize every detail. In the back of my mind, I know I should let Stella know I’m still here. Maybe make some noise or something to get her attention.

But I don’t do anything except stare at the frame in my hands.

The sound of footsteps coming down the stairs finally pulls me from my spiraling thoughts. I couldn’t say how long I’ve been sitting here. When Stella steps off the last stair and moves toward the door, I notice she’s in different clothes.

“That’s our daughter.” I finally manage to say as Stella reaches for the deadbolt.

She whirls around, a startled yelp slipping free and her hand flying to her chest.

“What the fuck, Greyson? I thought you left.” She glances up the stairs, moving as if meaning to block them from me.

Anger simmers beneath my skin and I can’t stop it from bubbling out.

“How could you not tell me? I had every right to know. Instead, you left and hid her from me?—”

“Keep your voice down. She just fell back to sleep,” Stella snaps, her voice just above a whisper but somehow still scolding enough to feel as if she’s yelling back. “And I did not hide anything from you!”

“Then what the hell do you call her?” I hold up the picture frame. Everything feels wrong. My heart won’t stop pounding and my stomach feels like I just spent six hours spinning in circles on my skates.

Stella crosses the living room toward me, dodging toys without even looking where she’s stepping, and snatches the picture from my hands. “That is my daughter.”

“ Our daughter,” I correct. “The one you hid from me .”

“I didn’t hide anything!”

“Stella, there is a little girl, who looks a lot like me, upstairs. You didn’t tell me about her. That means you kept her a secret.” I seethe, but Stella doesn’t flinch.

“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 what your mother 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.

I sigh, scrubbing a hand over my face as I think about all Stella has had to do without me because of my mom.

“You raised her alone,” I whisper, unable to think of anything else to say.

“No,” Stella says calmly, moving to sit beside me. “I went to New York and moved in with my nana.”

The distant memory of her grandma comes back. She was the only family who truly showed up for Stella, more so than even her parents. If I had to bet, her parents probably haven’t even met their own grandchild, too caught up in their own work and travel to stop and think about their daughter. I used to wonder why Stella didn’t live with her nana but never dared ask because I didn’t want to lose her.

“Nana helped me with literally everything. Finding a doctor, enrolling in college…Good thing she did because it was there that I met three amazing women. They helped me raise her. And stay somewhat sane. We weren’t alone.”

We sit in silence as I process what she said. While I’m glad she had help, I also can’t deny the jealousy of the fact that anyone other than me was there for her and…

“What’s her name?” I ask.

“Harper,” she says, smiling fondly even as a single tear falls down her cheek. “Harper Rose…Owens.”

I smile, repeating the name. I find myself oddly okay with the fact that she has Stella’s last name instead of mine. Or at least, unable to be mad at Stella for choosing to leave my name off, considering she believed I didn’t want her.

“What’s she like?”

Stella laughs, looking around her living room.

“She’s a tornado of joy and chaos. She’s funny, so smart, which is dangerous considering how sassy she can be while being brilliant about it.” She pauses, bending forward to pick up a pink stuffed unicorn off the floor. “She’s perfect.”

The urge to experience Harper for myself right now is overwhelming, but I shove it aside as Stella continues.

“She loves crafts, which means she also enjoys making a mess, clearly.” Stella waves a hand at the toys on the floor and cringes. “I swear it’s not normally this dirty. She got hit with a bug and it’s completely?—”

Unable to resist, I reach over and place my hand on top of hers.

“There’s a difference between dirty and messy. Toys on the floor show me this house is lived in. It tells me that she’s having fun. Your home isn’t dirty, it’s messy. Having a mess isn’t always a bad thing.”

Stella offers me a tired smile and something else she said catches up with me.

“You said she has a bug. Is she okay?” I rack my brain for anything that could be useful when it comes to a sick child but come up blank.

“She’s fine,” Stella says calmly, easing some of the worry festering. “Her friend Zoey was sick and passed along a lovely bug. We should be in the clear and back to normal in another day or two.”

I nod and we fall back into silence for another moment, both of us content to gather our thoughts. My mind races, trying to sort through all the new information and process how I’m feeling.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Stella shrugs. “You don’t?—”

“I should have come to find you.”

She raises a delicate eyebrow. “If I recall correctly, you had a broken leg and wrist. Wasn’t exactly easy for you to do anything.”

“Still, there were so many nights that I planned a way to show up at your house. If I had asked my dad or one of the guys, maybe I could have seen you before you left. I could have been there for you and…” I trail off, emotion clogging my throat before I can say Harper’s name out loud. I’m not exactly sure what I would have done. There were so many nights in those first few weeks where I plotted how to get out of the hospital or my house, but my mom always turned up looking to help me at just the right moment.

Only now I remember all the times she managed to fit in a snide comment about me being better off with Stella gone. I chalked up her newfound hovering and commentary being brought on from the accident scaring her.

Now I see it for what it was. My mother forced us apart and subtly shifted the love we had to resentment and hate.

“Greyson,” Stella says, her voice cracking as she says my name. “We were manipulated and lied to. We made decisions based on what we thought was true at the time. You don’t need to apologize for something you didn’t even know was done.”

“Still,” I start, shaking my head and twisting on the couch to face her. She looks tired, the dark bags under her eyes a testament to taking care of a sick toddler. The exhaustion doesn’t detract from her breathtaking beauty. Her curls are done up in a big, messy bun on the top of her head, with a couple strands escaping and framing her face. Pale blue eyes sparkle as they stare back at me. “I feel…shitty. If it weren’t for my mom…we might still be?—”

“We can’t think like that. We don’t know what would or would not have happened if she hadn’t done what she did. And there’s no use dwelling on the woulda, coulda, shouldas.”

Once again, I know she’s right. We were still teenagers who hadn’t figured out what we were doing past the camping trip.

But I keep circling back to all the years I missed.

My stomach flips and for a second, I’m convinced I might hurl. The white-hot anger I feel about what my mom did morphs, an ache like I’ve never felt before spreading across my chest.

“I missed so much.”

Doctor’s appointments. The entirety of Stella’s pregnancy. The birth of my daughter. Her first laugh, first food, first step…so many firsts were taken from me.

Stella’s blurred face pops in front of me. I try to clear my sight, but it only seems to make it worse.

“Grey,” she murmurs from where she’s kneeling in front of me. Her hands find my face, thumbs caressing my cheeks. The wetness on her fingers makes me jerk back and I stare blankly at her hands as it takes longer than it should to figure out why.

I reach up and touch my face, finding a steady stream of tears flowing. No matter how hard I try to stop them, they continue to fall.

Stella moves slowly, stretching her arms around me and pulling me in for a hug. I suck in a ragged breath, letting the lingering scent of her perfume ground me. We stay like that longer than I would have expected. It appears that years of feeling nothing were all bubbling up and waiting to spill out of my eyes all at once.

When I finally pull away, I pick Stella up to give her knees a rest and set her on the couch beside me.

“I want to meet her,” I say, holding my breath as she processes my words.

“Okay,” she whispers, and I finally exhale. “We need to take it slow, though. There’s no starting this and then deciding you’re not cut out to be a parent. She’s been through a lot this year with moving and a new daycare and I’ve worked hard to give her as much consistency as I can outside of that. I don’t want her to know that you’re her dad until you’re certain this is what you want…I won’t risk hurting her.”

I can’t even be offended by her decision. Stella is doing what she has done for the last five years—protecting Harper.

Whether we knew it or not, both of us were hurt deeply by my mother’s actions. It’s going to take time to rebuild the trust we once had. There’s no denying that I’m all in, though.

Stella owned my whole heart before she left, and I don’t need to dig deep to know she still does. She was and has always been the light of my life. When she left, she took a piece of me with her and now it’s slowly fitting back into place.

Except now, she’s given me an additional piece that I didn’t even know was missing.

“Stella, there’s no doubt in my mind that I want to be in my daughter’s life.” I leave off the and yours , knowing it would be too much for her to handle right now.

I can be patient. I will do whatever she says to gain back her trust and get through her walls until there isn’t a single doubt in her mind that I want both of them.

Love like ours doesn’t just disappear. It got bruised and buried over time, secrets and lies tried to tear us apart, but love never left. I just need to remind her of that.