My eyes return to Hayden when he says, “She’s not here; she’s not aware I’m here. I don’t even know why I’m here! I guess I wanted to see it with my own two eyes. I’ll give it to you, boy, you played merealgood. I thought you truly cared for Regan.”
I want to tell him I cared for her more than he’ll ever know, but Kristin’s determined scowl and Addison’s frightened face stops me. This isn’t a conversation I want to have in front of them, much less at an elementary school with parents looking on.
Regrettably, Hayden hasn’t noticed the attention his tall frame, wide shoulders, and angry snarl has gained. All he sees is red. “You hurt my girl.”
I nod, accepting some of the blame for the downfall of my relationship with Regan. “I did.”
Hayden’s next fist clench isn’t as firm. He’s shocked by my admission. He thought I’d fight with the same gusto I did the last time we had words. I don’t know why. I had someone to fight for then. I don’t now.
“Does she know about Rae?” Hayden nudges his head to Kristin, who is frozen at our side. She’s not scared, more cautious than anything.
“Yes.” I nod. “But things aren’t as you’re perceiving them.”
Hayden scoffs, the anger lining his face returning stronger than ever. “You’ve lied before, so why would I believe a thing you say now?!”
“Yeah, I did lie. But I’m not now.”
Hayden steps closer, not willing to back down from what he came here to do. I’ve seen his stance many times in my years at the Bureau. He’s mad, which is making him hostile, and his protective instincts are in overdrive, causing him to be more unhinged than usual. He’s literally seconds away from detonation, but I have no fucking clue how to talk him off the ledge.
“You deceived her.”
“In a way, yes.” I use a calm, nurturing tone, checking my naturally engrained machoism at the door. Now is not the time to let my ego speak. “But not with Kristin—"
Before all my assurance leaves my mouth, Hayden yells, “You made her the other woman!”
“No, Hayden. Never.” My head shakes more furiously than Hayden’s body as he struggles to hold in his anger. “I wouldneverdo that to her. I loved her.”
A mere nanosecond after the words leave my mouth, I want to ram them back in there. I’m supposed to be calming him down, not ramping up his anger.
It’s too late now; his anger has reached fever-pitch.
Addison lets out a squeak when Hayden storms the four paces between us so he can fist my shirt in a threatening way. His angry eyes, identical to his daughter’s in every way, bear down on me as his nostrils flare. “Loved?As in past tense? If you trulylovedher, you’d stillloveher. She’s like her mother—incapable of forgetting.”
Although I wholeheartedly agree with him, for once, I don’t put myself first. The frightened eyes of a little girl are staring up at me as she fights to save me from the monsters I’ve sheltered her from the past three months.
“It’s okay, baby,” I assure Addison when she kicks Hayden in the shins. “He’s just upset. It’s alright. I’m alright.”
“No!” Addison screams when Kristin scoops her up to drag her away from the violent scene unfolding in front of a group of parents arriving to collect their children. “Awex! Awex!”
She kicks and wails against Kristin the entire time, her desire to protect me as fierce as Hayden’s wish to safeguard his daughter from more pain. I understand both their plights. Hayden thinks I did his daughter wrong. Addison doesn’t know me well enough yet to understand I’m not the superhero she thinks I am. I’m just a man trying to forget one failed promise by ensuring he keeps another.
I wait until Addison is snatched from my view by a large tree trunk before returning my focus to Hayden. Not eager to add more pain to his already brimming eyes, I give it one last shot. “I get you’re angry, but you need to calm down. This isnotan appropriate environment to have this conversation.”
After scanning the crowd surrounding us, many of them calling in assistance from the authorities, I pull back in an attempt to yank out of Hayden’s grasp. It appears as though Regan got her stubbornness from her father. Hayden refuses to let me go.
“This is your last warning, Hayden. Get your hands off me.” My once calm voice is a thing of the past. I’m angry, more burned from prior incidents than the one occurring right now, but mad all the same. Our tussle mimics the one we had months ago in the middle of a field, except then, I was fighting to keep his daughter, not let her go.
Hayden is thirty years older than me and a little less fit, but he doesn’t back down when looking a bull in the eyes. “You hurt my girl. Now I’ll hurt you.”
I dip low to miss his swinging fist before leveraging my weight. I need to ensure the twenty pounds of muscle I’ve lost the past three months don’t affect me when I ram my hand into Hayden’s throat before raising my knee to his groin.
Guilt surges through me when he falls to his knees, his lungs wheezing from both my jab to his jugular and his balls. Usually, I use the assailant’s subdued position to secure cuffs to their wrists, but since this is Hayden, a man I have no intention of arresting, I crouch down in front of him until we come eye to eye.
For a man of his age, Hayden’s grit is undogged. He comes at me again, knocking the wind from my lungs as effectively as his daughter’s smile did the first time I saw her. My initial thought is to react to his hit with another bout of violence, but a bell ringing stops me. Instead, I pinch the nerve in his neck. I don’t squeeze it hard enough he’ll pass out, but he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
“If I had my gun. . .”
I cut off his threat by saying, “Regan wasn’t the only one hurt; this has been hard on me too, but you’re not seeing the entire picture. What youthinkyou know, and what youdoknow are two completely different things.” I point in the direction Kristin and Addison went. “Kristin isnotmy wife, and Addison is just a little girl who doesn’t understand why she can’t visit her daddy in heaven.” My words choke a bit during my last sentence, but I pretend they didn’t.
