"I'm calm. Answer the question, Emily. Is that my daughter?"
"You're not calm, you're shaking, and I'm not having this conversation with you on a street corner at seven in the morning." Emily turns and starts stomping up the sidewalk back toward the bakery, so I follow hot on her heels. No way she's going to just walk off leaving me like this. I deserve answers.
"Then when? When were you planning to have it? Were you ever going to tell me, or was I just supposed to walk around this townpretending I don't see my own face looking back at me from a seven-year-old girl?" I want to grab her and make her stop, turn her around so she's forced to talk to me, but a man walking his dog down the boardwalk is staring already. I don't need a domestic charge.
"Keep your voice down." She glances up and down the sidewalk. "You're making a scene."
"I don't care about making a scene. I care about the truth. That girl has my eyes, Emily. She has my hair. She has my jawline. I'm not stupid… I can do math. She's got to be like seven years old, which means eight years ago, before I left, you got pregnant." My chest is heaving and my hands are hard fists as she spins around and plants both feet, halting herself so I almost run into her.
"You're wrong."
"Am I? Look at me and tell me I'm wrong."
Her eyes are wet and her chin is trembling but she holds my stare. "You don't get to show up after eight years and start demanding answers about my life. You lost that right when you disappeared."
"That's not an answer and you know it."
"It's the only one you're getting." She takes a step back toward the bakery. "I have to open my shop."
"Emily, don't walk away from me right now. Please. I'm asking you to just be honest with me for five minutes." I follow as she continues backing away, but as she turns, I grab her arm. I can't stop myself. I have to know the truth. I won't sleep until I do.
"Honest?" She whips around and rubs tears from her cheeks. "You want to talk to me about honesty? You ghosted me for eightyears, Jaxon. Eight years of nothing—no calls, no letters, no explanation. You can't even tell me honestly why you never came home." Her eyes narrow and her jaw trembles again. "You don't get to demand answers from me now."
The whole thing is just wrong. We both hurt each other, but this is too much. "Why can't you just tell me? You had a kid, Em…" My heart is breaking. My whole life and everything I thought I knew isn't what I thought it was. "We were best friends and you had a kid?" I feel choked up. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because it's none of your business. My life stopped being your business the day you stopped calling."
"But don’t you think I have a right to know?"
Her mouth opens and closes. She catches herself, crosses her arms tighter, and shakes her head. "I'm not doing this with you."
"Emily, don't walk away from me right now."
"Or what?" She spins on me and I see real anger in her face. "What are you going to do, Jaxon? Yell at me? Follow me? You want to stand out here and scream at me in front of my business so the whole town can watch? Go ahead. But I don't owe you a damn thing and I don't have to stand here and take your angry outbursts ." She pulls her keys out of her apron and walks to the bakery door. Her hands are shaking so badly she can barely get the key in the lock. "Go to work, Jaxon."
"Emily—"
But she opens the door and walks in, then shuts it behind herself and turns the lock. When it clicks in place, I smack the glass a few times, angrily shouting her name, but a few people are starting to gather across the street. It's bad enough that I have tolive in a town that hates me for failing my mother, where every person who sees me knows my dad's a drunk. I don’t need them hating me for this too.
I'm too mad to let it go, but I'm smart enough to know that right now, I’m getting nowhere. I'll have to do some digging on my own or something, but right now, I have to get to work.
Stomping back to the truck, I offer a glare at the staring nosy townsfolk and then climb into the truck. The coffee cup on the dash is in my way, but when I pick it up to move it, I crush it in my hand and what’s left of the cold brew spills on my jeans leg.
The perfect beginning to a day that promises to do nothing but continue to piss me off.
12
EMILY
"But I want to go with you." Mercy is standing in the hallway with her backpack already on, her shoes tied, her jacket zipped up to her chin even though it's sixty degrees outside. She's been ready since before I finished my coffee. The look on her face is killing me.
"Not today, baby. Nana's making pancakes and you love Nana's pancakes."
"I love the bakery more. It smells so good in the morning, Mama."
She's not wrong. The bakery smells incredible at five thirty when the first batch goes in and everything is warm and quiet before the doors open. Mercy used to come with me three or four mornings a week, sitting on a stool in the kitchen eating scraps of pastry dough while Karen and I prepped. But that was before Jaxon started parking his truck across the street every morning, watching the front door, waiting for me to come out.
He's been doing it for a week straight now. He shows up around six thirty and sits there with his coffee watching the store front.After that run-in with him, I don't know what to do. I am not about to subject my child to his temper tantrums, despite his being right about any of it. Mercy doesn't need to see us fighting.
