“What? That you have another girlfriend or a slew of lovers across the country?” I used to joke about wanting that. Now, it felt like a punch to the gut, turning my stomach over. How many girls just like me had he led on like this?
“Of course not. I’m just a fuckup who keeps messing this entire thing up, obviously.” He started to pace, though there wasn’t very far for him to go.
“You have a girlfriend then.”
“No.”
“Then, what is going on?” I asked again. “You promised we weren’t lying this time. You promised me honesty. I thought that the only secret you still had was that you grew up here in Barnett.”
That was it. That was supposed to be the big issue between us. Not this.
He put a hand to his head. “That was part of it.”
“I thought I knew who you were.” Both of us paused as I finally said the words out loud. “Why do you continue to keep things from me?”
“It’s not like that.”
“What are you keeping from me?” I rephrased.
“I have a daughter.”
I blinked. “What?”
“I have a kid. I have a four-year-old daughter,” Dom repeated slowly. He licked his lips as he took a deep breath. “That’s who I’ve been on the phone with all this time. Her and her mother.”
“You have a daughter,” I said the words, trying to process them as I stared at Dom, still standing, hair dripping wet and dressed in his sweatshirt and nothing else.
“Yes, I have a daughter. I have a daughter who has been calling a lot recently because she’s wondering where I’ve been for the past month. Her mom is right there with her staring to question it. I had to leave to come here and find you right when I felt like was just starting to trust me again,” Dom explained slowly, calmly. “I didn’t… I didn’t expect to be here for this long away from her.”
Dominic Rovnik had a daughter. Dom, with his tattoos and dark hair. Dom, who worked harder than any remote analyst I’d ever figured would. Dom, who arrived on my doorstep frantically begging me for a quick fix to a curse so that he could… go home to his daughter. Dom, who started to look at me a little differently than he did last summer for so many reasons I didn’t understand.
I still didn’t understand.
He had a baby. A little girl had been at home, waiting for him—not to mention whoever was the mother.
“Are you and her mom …” I let the question hang in the air between us.
Dom shook his head. “It was a onetime thing.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“Because …” He sighed. “Last summer, I did think that this would’ve been just a fling or something. I was out of town. Ineededto get out of town since, for the past year, I had been fighting for more visitation and custody of Piper.”
“Piper.” Dom’s daughter’s name was Piper. “Can I see her?”
I watched him visibly swallow as he looked back down to his phone. He scrolled through a few pictures before stopping. Twisting the phone around, he showed the image of a little girl in someone’s lap, sitting outside in a backyard. She grinned. She had tight, dark brown curls and surprisingly light eyes compared to his. They were still filled with a familiar, mischievous quality nonetheless, glimmering.
“She’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, that’s her.” The corner of Dom’s mouth curved into a slight smile before he nodded once. He took the phone back and slipped it into his pocket. “At the end of the summer, I needed to go back home though, after everything. My lawyer was finally free enough to take on my case, and I couldn’t exactly bring you along with me. I needed to show I was stable so I could be focused on her. I couldn’t be there when Piper was born. I didn’t know about her then. So, I’ve been trying to be there more. I want to be there for the rest of my daughter’s life.”
“I still don’t understand. Why didn’t you just tell me that?”
His lips shut.
It made no sense. All of this could’ve been avoided if he had just talked to me. If he hadn’t wanted to go but he’d had to go back to see his daughter, sure, it would’ve been a little awkward after so long together, where I hadn’t known that he had a child, but …
I stared at Dom, waiting for more of an explanation. I inhaled.
