“I…went back to school, but my head wasn’t cooperating with my body. It was pointless. Staying would have been a waste of my brother’s tuition money, and I knew if I told you, you would try to talk me out of moving home. I told my academic advisor, and I told my brother, but I couldn’t tell you. Not when you had so much going on.”
Jack shifts in his chair. “I remember being confused with your about-face. One day you were fine, and when you came back to school from being gone the weekend, you were…acting strange. I didn’t think you’d actually disappear.” He lays his spoon on the cup’s saucer. “I was worried about you. The only reason I knew you weren’t dead or kidnapped was your roommate. She’s the one who told me you went home.”
Why didn’t he chase me?
Why didn’t he show up at my house the way he’d shown up at my brother’s?
We were both so young and foolish, but I was the one shouldering the burden of being pregnant at twenty and left to raise a child. Of my own doing, of course. It was all my own doing.
A life without parole I’d sentenced myself to.
“I want you to look me in the eye right now and say to me what you should have told me before you ran away in college.” Jack’s voice is low and steady—a challenge for me to tell him the truth.
“My intention was never to…lie. Or hide.” What a foolish thing to say. I try again. “I did what I thought was best.”
“Those aren’t the words I want you to say.” His mouth is set in a straight line.
He wants me to tell him he has a child. A daughter.
He wants me to say, “Skipper is your daughter.”
I hold my breath, my bottom lip trembling.
Jack nods once.
“Exactly how old is she?”
I have a lump in my throat. “She just turned seven last month.”
Uncle Davis threw a huge party for her in his backyard. He rented a bounce house and had a giant, three-tiered cake made, and she had gotten to invite all her friends from first grade. Davis even hired princesses and someone to paint faces.
It was a huge spectacle, and Skipper loved every minute of it.
“Let me see a picture.”
I dig my phone out of the pocket of my sweatshirt, scroll through the photo gallery, then slide the phone across the table toward Jack.
He doesn’t touch it, only stares down at his daughter. A picture of her laughing, a gap in her front teeth, and glitter in her hair because we had gone to Princesses on Ice. She’d worn a blue Cinderella dress with her white faux fur coat and little shearling winter boots.
Jack stares holes into that photograph.
Then he looks up at me with a blank expression.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” I blurt out, uncomfortable. This moment is horribly disarming. I’ve never felt so exposed.
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
He stands, pulling on his ball cap.
“Where are you going?” I ask as he walks toward the door, conscious of the fact that the baristas are now watching us with hushed whispers.
Jack barely turns around. “I have to think.”
Helplessly, I have no choice but to watch him go. Watch him through the windows as he strides purposely to his car and slides behind the wheel.
Watch as he sits perfectly still, staring off into nothing as if he were numb, hands clutching the wheel. Watch as he eventually puts the car in reverse and backs out. He pulls into the traffic and takes a right at the light.
I watch Jack Jennings until I can no longer see his car driving off into the distance, wondering where he’s going and what thoughts are going through his head.
Chapter 8
Jack
“I love you.”
She glances up at me from the couch, the pencil in her hand halting above the notebook she’d been writing in—whatever essay she had due was neatly scrawled in longhand. Penelope loved pens, notebooks, and journals, and the one she was using I’d given her last week.
I found it in the bookstore when I was there buying a novel for one of my English lit classes.
“What did you say?”
“I said…I…” I stumble on my words, loathe to repeat them.
I feel like a moron.
Had she really not heard me? Or was she so appalled I’d said them that I had to clarify? I wasn’t confident one-hundred percent of the time. I had an ego and pride this girl could easily crush.
God, why is this so hard to say? “I love you.”
I’ll admit, it comes out as more of a whisper. At this point, my tail is between my legs, afraid of how she’ll react.
“You love me?”
I can do nothing but nod. “Yeah.” I do.
A lot.
For the first time in my life, I was in love, and I couldn’t keep it inside. Not saying anything was driving me nuts.