least he’s keeping his voice down and the bar area is mostly empty, but I still don’t really want to have this conversation in public. Or at all.
“Are you seriously judging me right now? You didn’t care about that last night when you fucked me up against your front door.” I’m hissing too, but it’s the only acceptable volume where no one will overhear this incredibly private conversation.
“Yes I did care. Of course I did, but you showed up announcing that you want me. I’ve fucking loved you for a decade, Dani. How did you expect me to react?”
“You would’ve stopped yourself if you’d have known about her?” I challenge.
“I don’t know. You kept it from me so I didn’t really get the chance to make that decision, did I?”
I sigh. Fighting isn’t going to get us anywhere, and it doesn’t matter anyway. What’s done is done, and there’s so much more I need to tell him. He knows she exists, and he’s already mad, and maybe this is my window to finally come clean.
At Carne’s.
Where it all began for us.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” I say, and nerves ping in my chest as I try to work out the right words.
“I can’t believe you’d keep something this big from me after everything we’ve talked about over the last few weeks.” He shakes his head. “I thought I knew you.”
The bartender hands him a bag of food. “Thanks, man,” he says, and then he turns toward me. “Fuck,” he mutters, as if something else just dawned on him. “Is this what you do all day? Is this why you don’t work at the arena anymore?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I’m a stay at home mom. My husband took my career out from under me. The man I love lives two thousand miles away and I’ve screwed up every aspect of my life so royally that I don’t even know how to straighten it back out. But it starts right now.”
His eyes dart to mine. “What starts right now?”
“The truth.”
His brows push together, and I spit it out before I lose my nerve.
“She’s yours.”
CHAPTER 29
TYLER
“She’s yours.”
The words echo hollowly around my muddled brain.
When I decided I wanted Carne’s for lunch, I walked into the joint with a smile on my face and love in my heart. Even though she’s still married and what we did last night was wrong, it was hard for me to feel like it was wrong this morning considering how right it felt.
And now...
“She’s...” I say as my mind tries to reconcile the words she’s telling me with the kid I just saw her holding in her arms.
I can’t. I don’t get it. Calculation does not compute.
“Yours,” she says.
Before last night, it had been over two years since the last time I was with her. I don’t know how to guess a kid’s age. I know nothing about children. But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say the timing works out.
“How old is she?” I ask stupidly.
“Nineteen months.”
I do a quick calculation in my head because I don’t get it when people speak about their children’s ages in months.
That’s a little over a year and a half. Add nine months of pregnancy on top of that, and the timing checks.
How can there be a child who is half me and has been on this Earth for a little over a year and a half, and how could her mother just not tell me that?
None of this makes any sense.
“But you’re married,” I say, like two people who aren’t married can’t still share a child.
She nods. “I am.”
“This isn’t making any sense, Danielle.” My voice comes out as a plea. I’m begging her to get to the point. To tell me the truth. To try to explain what I’m not understanding.
“I found out I was pregnant about three weeks before your tour ended. I was waiting for that day to come so I could tell you in person. So we could start a future we both wanted. I was desperate for that day to come.”
“And then I told you I was going on that reality show,” I guess, and she nods.
“Right. We had a fight and I felt like you were choosing the band over me, which is fine. It’s your prerogative to do that. But I was terrified that if you’d choose the band over me, you’d choose it over your child, too. I wanted her to have a father, one