“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t think I could. You were gone. Half a world away. I didn’t want to make you choose between your dream and . . . us.”
Zay inhaled slow, deep breaths.
His eyes narrowed on the page, suddenly tracing every word, every pause. Every damn comma.
“I imagined you being happy. I thought you were overseas living your life the way you always said you would. I told myself you didn’t need to know.”
No . . .
He blinked and sat up straighter. His heart thudded.
This ain’t—this can’t be?—
His mind raced backward to when they broke up, when she disappeared. To when he first heard through a mutual friend the news that crushed him internally. He looked up at her.
Love was still. Her hands folded over her script with eyes fixed on Shai but not focused. Her expression looked like something detonated in her chest, and she was just trying to stand through the smoke.
Shai kept reading.
“By the time you came back, you had someone else. You had a new life, a new name. I didn’t want to complicate it. I didn’t want to be another woman from your past, asking for something.”
The air grew thick.
Zay swallowed as his pulse quickened.
“But he was yours,” Shai continued. “From the moment I saw that second line on the test, I knew. But I didn’t know how to tell you.”
That one line stopped time.
His breath caught. His mind spiraled. Second line on the test. Overseas. A woman who stayed quiet. A child . . . who didn’t know.
No.
No, no, no . . .
His gaze snapped to Love, and her expression told it all.
She wasn’t watching the scene anymore. She wasn’t acting. She wasn’t even breathing.
It was as if she was bracing.
He heard through a mutual friend that she had a baby a year later. He’d assumed it was someone else’s and that she had moved on.
In that moment, he knew this wasn’t just a story. He realized he wasn’t reading a script. He was reading a confession.
This is the truth. Her daughter . . . is mine.
His stomach flipped. A pressure built in his chest so heavy, it felt like grief. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. His throat was locked.
The timeline made sense when he thought about it. There was no way the girl he fell in love with could find and replace him with a man she wouldn’t know enough about to have a child with. It had been fifteen years, true, but during that first year, surely, she could have been pregnant for nine months.
He pounded his fists on the table with a sharp thump. He stood suddenly, and the chair beneath him screeched loudly on the ground, but his world had just cracked open even louder.
He had to get out.
The members of the cast all turned their heads abruptly toward him, but his back was already turned as he headed toward the door. A few people jumped from the sudden noise and glanced around at each other puzzlingly. Deuce silentlymouthed to Shai “What just happened?” and she shrugged her shoulders.
Malcolm waved his hand toward the cast. “Keep reading,” he told Shai. “Don’t get distracted.”
