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We are destroying each other.
“I’m sorry. Please don’t…please, I need this job.”
“I know you do.” His tone is so… detached.
Why is that worse than anger or sorrow?
He shakes his head. “I’m not taking that from you.”
I breathe a sigh of relief.
His eyes burn me. Wreck me. Shatter me. “But we can’t–”
I wave my hand. “That’s all I need to know. We don’t need to…I don’t need you to do the whole letting me down easy thing. I don’t deserve that. Let’s just– let’s just–”
“Sonia, wait–”
Without me realizing, my feet have been taking me out the door, into the hall, farther and farther from Edwin. “I’m sorry.” My voice doesn’t come. Just a whisper. A breath.
“Sonia–” He rushes to the door.
“I’m sorry!” I run down the hall at top speed. I don’t stop until I’m in my office, door locked, blinds drawn. I turn off the lights and try to breathe.
I don’t know what happens next.
I’m not sure I want to.
23
EDWIN
If I feltlike a shell last night after Nate castigated me, I don’t think there’s even a shell of me left now that I know the truth.
Sonia is my son’s ex-girlfriend. And she didn’t tell me.
I should be mad at the news. But I’m not. I’m sad. And hurt.
My insides feel like they’re all over the floor of my office. A one-two punch combination of losing my son and the woman I care for in an instant.
I hate that Nate had to see that. I hate it even more that it happened when he was coming to me to make amends.
Things are ruined now. Destroyed. More than I ever thought possible.
I leave the club right after Sonia disappears. I can’t be here. Need to take some time to sort things out.
I go for a walk on a park to try to lose myself. On the view, on the pace, on the mechanical movement of putting one foot in front of the other without care as to where it will take me.
But the longer and farther I go, the more I find that nothing can shake how much this hurts.
I can’t blame Sonia for not having the confidence to tell me the truth. But she betrayed me and allowed me to fall for her.
What could have been an easy choice at the beginning between Sonia and Nate now feels impossible.
I know what I have to do, though.
If I’m trying to be the father I always should have been, I’ll choose my son over Sonia.
I love Nate, want to give him the father he deserves, twenty-nine years too late.
