Daddy's Big Package Page 19

  "Let me come with you," she protested, following closely behind me as I headed to the lot where I had parked my car.

  "No," I shot back, furious. "Why would I do that when you’re the one who told them this?”

  "Morgan, I would never—"

  "I didn’t tell anyone for years and years, and I tell you, and ten days later some shitty talk-show host is out here asking me about it?" I fired back, turning on her, stopping in my tracks so fast she almost crashed straight into me. She opened and closed her mouth. There was pain in her eyes, but it could easily just have been guilt for what she knew she had done to me.

  "I don’t know where the hell you get off on doing something like this," I continued. There were a few people passing by from lot to lot, but they didn’t stop to listen in – they had probably seen the interview, probably knew that I was on the brink of exploding anyway. I just needed an excuse, and I would go off on the next person who looked at me sideways. One fucking wrong move from anyone in a twenty-foot vicinity, and I would have to be taken out of this place in a police car.

  "I told you something that I had never so much as thought about sharing with anyone before," I continued, the words pouring out of me, all of the anger and the hurt I felt bursting forth. I couldn’t control it. I didn’t want to. She had betrayed me; she deserved everything she was getting from me right now.

  "Please, listen to me," she begged, but I was done with listening to other people. What had landed me in this in the first place? My agent, telling me that I needed to sort out my reputation. If I had told her where to get off, none of this would have happened. I needed to take control of my own fate again and not let anyone else near me. As if it weren’t already too late for that.

  "You did this after I left that night, didn’t you?” I demanded, the pieces suddenly falling together in my head, as though they should have been obvious all along. "When I was around at your place and I left suddenly."

  "Morgan, I would never—"

  "Look, Kari, I really thought things were different with you," I cut her off. "I never felt the way I did with you with anyone else, you know? When I was with you, it felt like something new. Like something better."

  She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. I ran my hands through my hair and continued.

  "Listen, before I met you, I didn’t think I could do any of that family shit," I confessed. I had already told her enough now; I might as well keep going, right? Plus, I knew that this would hurt her – I understood that I was just lashing out because she had hurt me, but that didn’t matter at the moment. All that I gave a damn about was making her feel as bad as I did in that second. Ripped open. Like the entire world could see the most vulnerable parts of her.

  "I didn’t think I wanted kids, didn’t think I wanted a family, didn’t think it was a good idea for me to even go there," I continued, lowering my voice to make sure nobody else could hear us. I wanted these words to be only for her, wanted them to pierce into her the way that the words Amber had spoken to me just had.

  "But then when I was with you, I felt – shit, I felt like there might actually be a chance in hell," I continued. "When I spent that evening with you, I thought I could do it. I really believed that I would be able to make this happen. Not easily, sure, but I thought I could try it, and I thought that as long as you were there with me, I could find a way."

  She stared at me, her mouth slightly open as though she couldn’t make sense of what I was saying to her. I knew this was cruel; I knew I was just lashing out, but how could I not? What had just happened in there had changed everything. The man that she had known before wasn’t here any longer. He had been replaced by someone who had just had everything he had tried to keep to himself exposed on live television, and he could be forgiven if he didn’t want to be around anyone at that particular moment.

  "Morgan," she finally replied, reaching out to grab my hand. I didn’t pull away at once. Even in the midst of all of this, her touch was soothing to me, calming, and I couldn’t help but crave more of it.

  "Morgan, I had nothing to do with this," she continued desperately. I looked down at her – I couldn’t believe her, even if I’d wanted to. This had to have been her. Nothing else made any sense. She was the only one who knew, the only one who knew and could have exposed me as brutally as this. I didn’t know why she’d thought she had to do this to me, but she’d obviously made the decision, and now, both of us were fucked.

  I pulled my hand away from hers, shaking my head.

  "I need to get out of here," I muttered, turning away from her. She followed me once more.

  "Please, can we just talk about this?” she implored, her voice aching with sadness and confusion. I turned to her and looked her dead in the eye to make sure there was no room for any misunderstanding any longer.

  "I don’t want anything to do with you anymore," I told her firmly. "I want you to go. I should never have trusted you in the first place."

  And with that, I headed to my car, marching toward my escape from this place. As I climbed in, I shot one more look over my shoulder and saw Kari standing there at the other end of the parking lot, with tears streaming down her face. I didn’t feel triumph at seeing her that hurt. It didn’t take away from what had just happened to me. But it was something, at least. Something to remind me that I wasn’t the only one hurting right now.

  And with that, I climbed into the car and took off, hoping to God that I could leave this entire mess of a day behind me once and for all. But I had a grim feeling that it wasn’t going to be that easy. Leaving Kari behind, leaving behind everything she’d brought into my life? Yeah, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to shake her just like that. Because even after all that had happened, I didn’t truly want to.

  20

  Kari

  “Yes, that’s wonderful," I replied to the person on the other end of the line, rubbing my hand over my face and wondering how many coffees I could drink before I went into some sort of caffeine coma.

  "So, where can I leave my donations?" the woman asked excitedly.

  "I’ll pass you through to the collections side of the agency, alright?” I suggested. I could easily have figured out the donations questions myself, but I didn’t want to. My brain felt as though it was about to crash in on itself, and the best I could do was motion my way through the day and then go home and sleep.

  "Thank you!" the woman replied, and then she fell silent for a moment. I knew exactly what was about to come out of her mouth, and I wanted to divert it, but I couldn’t stop it in time.

  "Is Morgan there?" she asked keenly. I pinched the bridge of my nose and rolled my eyes, glad that she couldn’t see me through the phone.

  "No, he doesn’t work for the charity, just with us," I replied through gritted teeth. "Alright, I’m putting you through to the donations line, okay? Let me know if you need anything else from me."

  "Thanks!” she replied cheerily, and that was that, at last. I hung up the phone and massaged my temples. I already had the beginnings of a throbbing headache, and my stomach wasn’t exactly feeling great, either. It could be the winter flu, or it could be that I was being tormented with everything that was going on with Morgan right now.

  I hadn’t seen him since the day of the talk show we’d been on together, although it hadn’t been for lack of trying. I was pretty sure he had tried to stop the show from going out, or at least from being uploaded online, but it was already all over the place. And I understood why he was so hurt, why he was so pissed that it had gone down the way it had – but I was still mad that he was pointing all of that anger in my direction.

  I could still remember everything he had said to me when we had stormed out of that studio. He had been angry, that much had been obvious, but he had been lashing out at me instead of the people who had put him in this position. I knew that was typical, especially of people being forced to relive their trauma, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t hurt by what he had told me.

  He had said, an
d I could remember the moment exactly, that he had been able to imagine a life with me. With the kids. With all of us. And I was pretty sure that that had been the hardest part of all of this. Knowing that I had been so close to having what I wanted from him and that some stupid fucking talk-show host with her eyes on a bigger prize had fucked it all over for me.

  I mean, I shouldn’t be too mad, I supposed – because since our talk show appearance, the project for Christmas had taken a sharp upturn in the public interest. We had been receiving calls almost constantly since, asking if we were accepting monetary donations, or volunteer offers, or gift cards, or presents for the kids this year. It was fantastic, bigger and better than anything we had ever managed to put together for Christmas before, but it was exhausting more than anything else. At least the hard work had kept Adam firmly out of my way so that I could focus on stewing over what had happened with Morgan.

  I was still trying to figure out how in the name of holy hell they could have found out about what had happened to Morgan when he was a kid. I knew that Morgan assumed I’d been the one to blurt the news out to them, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t so much as told Clara about what I had discovered about him that day, and I had no intention of doing so, either. That was his life, and I understood as well as anyone who had worked with kids in bad situations as long as I had that victims of trauma had to come out about it in their own time. No matter how cruel I thought he was being to me, no matter how vindictive, I never would have told a soul about that. In fact, I was a little hurt that he even imagined I could.

  But he was frightened, and I got that. Everything that he had tried to keep in all of this time was out for the world to know, to judge, and to pry into. He must have been scared shitless. The reputation that he had been trying to address was changed for good, and it was completely out of his control.

  And I supposed that’s why he hadn’t so much as bothered to drop me a text since the day that it had all gone down. I had tried my hardest to get in touch with him, but he just wasn’t having any of it. I was sad, yes, because I missed him, but more than that, I was worried – really worried about the state of mind he might be in. He was a reckless guy at the best of times, and who knew what kind of bad decisions this revelation would push him to now that it was out in the open?

  I leaned back from my desk and let my hand drift to my stomach. I really wasn’t feeling so hot today, and I couldn’t figure out why. Maybe it was just the stress of everything that had happened. Maybe I was a little nervous, worried about keeping on top of this project. I didn’t know, but something didn’t feel right.

  Maybe it was just that Morgan wasn’t around anymore, and I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around it. None of it felt fair – I wished that I could just talk to him, explain to him that this had had nothing to do with me and that I never would have chosen to expose him like that if I could have stopped it.

  He would have done the family thing with me, if I could have protected him from what had happened. And I knew it was ridiculous, blaming myself, but it was easier than blaming him, even though I was still angry at what he had said to me. The fury he had directed my way had come from a place of fear – there was no doubt about that in my mind – but that didn’t mean his words had stung any less.

  I clasped my stomach as I felt a wave of nausea run up through my system. Leaping to my feet, I managed to make it to the bathroom just in time to throw up.

  I pulled myself up from the bathroom floor and went to wash up, running my hands under the cool water and splashing a little on my face. I looked at myself in the mirror – I looked peaky and off, like there was something wrong with me. But I couldn’t figure out what it was. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt like this. It had probably been when I—

  And that’s when it hit me, like a ton of bricks crashing down right on top of my dumb head. I grasped the counter as I felt my knees trembling and my vision blurring. Oh my God. There was no way, was there?

  The last time I had felt like this was when I had been pregnant with my kids. Which was crazy because I couldn’t be pregnant. It wasn’t like the two of us – it wasn’t like Morgan and I had even had sex enough times to really get pregnant, right? Adam and I had tried for a few months for both of our children, and there wasn’t a chance that I could be...

  I knew that I had to get out of the office and pick up a pregnancy test. I wouldn’t be able to let this go until I knew for sure, that much was obvious. I made some vague excuse about how I needed to grab some stuff for the kids before they got home, and I high-tailed it out of there and shot straight down to the nearest drugstore. I picked up a handful of pregnancy tests, all different brands, and headed back down to the house. The kids were at daycare, thank goodness, so at least I would be able to do this in peace and quiet.

  I slid into the bathroom with my new purchases and closed the door tightly behind me. My heart was hammering hard enough that I could barely think about the churning that was still taking place in my stomach. My entire body was on edge, my head pulsing and my heart pounding so hard it felt as though it was going to come popping right out. As I took the tests – getting three done at once, just so that I didn’t have to wait any longer than I strictly had to – panic was consuming me. I tried my best to soothe myself, to convince myself that it was all going to be just fine and that I had nothing to worry about, nothing at all, because I was going to take these tests and they were going to come up negative and that was going to be—

  I tossed the tests on the ground in front of me, closed my eyes, and waited. I counted down the seconds in my brain, and finally, when they were up, I peeled my eyes open and looked at the three pregnancy tests scattered in front of me.

  And all of them said the same thing: Positive.

  I couldn’t come close to describing what I felt in that moment. First, it was fear. Because I knew that I couldn’t afford to support another baby – hell, I was having a hard enough time dealing with the two I already had, let alone another one. And then there came that surge of protectiveness, the kind that flooded through me without warning at the thought of the kid who was already growing inside of me. I planted a hand on my stomach and imagined it squirming around in there, too tiny to have the brain cells to know what was going on, but living. I remembered that feeling from my other two pregnancies, and it sealed my fate in that moment – I knew that I would have to keep it. Because I had already formed that bond, that unshakeable attachment. There was no getting away from that.

  But swiftly following that came a surge of sadness. Because I had already raised two children without their father in their lives, and that had never seemed fair to me. Not just for me, but for them. They deserved a full-fledged family, and I had always told myself that if I was ever to have any more children, then it would be with the kind of man I could be sure would stick around this time.

  And yet, what had I gone and done? I had fallen for the kind of man who was almost comically removed from the life that I needed him to live with me. He had his own world out there, a world that I could never come close to understanding or fitting into. Those days we’d spent at the cabin, what had they been but an escape from reality? Even then, I had known that was all they were, yet I had allowed myself to believe that there was something remotely real between us.

  And maybe there had been – once upon a time – but whatever it was, it was long gone by now. It had been screwed over by the messiness of everything that had gone down. Perhaps he could have been the man I needed him to be, raised a child with me at his side, stepped away from the life he had hung on to for so long, and found something new. But he had made it pretty damn clear that he had no intention of sharing that with me anymore.

  The tears came fast and hard after that, and soon, I found that I was sobbing helplessly on the bathroom floor. This was all such a damn mess. I hadn’t intended for any of this to happen. I’d thought that being with him would be fun, light, and entertaining, a chance for me to esc
ape the binds of being a mother and running the charity and having to put up with my ass of an ex day in and day out. But all I had gotten from it was another pregnancy, another ass of an ex, and more on my plate than I could even begin to think about handling.

  I realized that it wouldn’t be long until the kids were back at the house, and I needed to pull myself together before they arrived home. I couldn’t let them catch a hint of what was going on, not yet, not when I still needed a little more time to process all of it myself and to figure out where the fuck I was going to go from here.

  I wrapped up all of the tests in bags and stuffed them deep into the trash, where I knew neither of the kids would be able to find them. Sammy and Olivia were smart, but I just had to keep one step ahead of them to make sure they didn’t find out about their new brother or sister. By the time the babysitter had run them back home, I was almost back to normal. Almost.

  I answered the door with a big grin and gave Sammy and Olivia a hug as they barreled through the door toward me. Paying the babysitter, I told her she could take off for today.

  "I was home sick from work anyway," I explained. "I’ll take them from here."

  "You sure you don’t need me to stick around to help you out?" she asked, concerned. I shook my head.

  "I’m good, thank you," I assured her. In truth, I wanted to spend a little time with them, just the three of us, while I still could. She nodded and headed back to her car, and I got down on my knees to give both of my babies a giant hug.

  "You said you were sick?” Olivia asked, pulling back and looking at me with concern. She was already such a little mother, insistent on taking care of everyone in her life. She was going to make an amazing mom someday. She had been too little to take care of Sammy when he was a baby, but maybe she could try with her new sibling.

  "I’m okay, baby," I assured her, pressing my forehead to hers. "Just a little tired. You want to come tell me about your day and we can all hang out on the couch?”