His head snapped up like he had just remembered that I was in the room. “What?”
“The day that I came, I wasn’t just excited about your grade. I wanted to tell you that I was pregnant. I knew that it wasn’t what you wanted to hear right before graduation, but I figured we could figure things out together. Everything changed when I got to your place.”
“My mom,” he said quietly.
“She saw the test. I had a fresh test to take just in case you wanted me to. She saw it. She accused me of trying to trap you.”
“You had my baby,” he mumbled again.
“She’s not?—”
His eyes darkened as his head snapped in my direction. “You were fucking someone else back then?”
“No, of course not. I just think we should get a DNA test to confirm things before you start going around using the wordmine. I don’t want you having regrets later and wondering if she is really yours.”
“She has my whole damn face, Faith.”
“She does not. She looks like my mom.” Everyone said so. Eventually, I started to see it too. Granted, most people who thought she looked like me had ever seen her dad.
“She has my eyes and hair.”
“A lot of people have sandy hair and hazel eyes.”
“That’s my little girl, Faith. I knew it as soon as I saw her. Even before it registered that she called you mom. That’s my daughter. I know it.”
Tears slid down my cheeks as his words settled in my chest. The careful way he spoke like he was the one trying to convince me that Jada was his nearly destroyed me. I accepted that shewouldn’t have a dad shortly after leaving his house that day. It had been a long time coming.
“I want to meet my daughter. I need to set up a trust for her and . . . when did you say her birthday was? I have six birthdays to make up for.”
“Reed, we don’t need anything from you. That’s the reason that I never tried to force you to pay child support or any of that. I didn’twantanything from you. Your mom thought I was trying to trap you. I was determined to prove her wrong.”
“I would have given you everything, Faith, with or without a baby.”
“You left me!”
“I didn’t leave you. I would have never left you.”
“You might as well have left me. You let me go. I’m sure your mother told you what happened. You knew what she told me, and you never came for me.”
“I thought I was protecting you from my life. I didn’t mean for it to be this long. Then I realized that you were probably happier without me.”
“I was humiliated and heartbroken. Then, on top of that, I had to go home and explain to my grandma that I had let some punk get me pregnant and fuck up my life.”
“I love you. I thought I was doing the right thing,” he mumbled.
“So did I,” I said, lifting my chin defiantly.
A charged silence fell over the room as we stared each other down. My chest burned as it rapidly rose and fell. Reed looked just as destroyed as I felt. I wanted to cry for him because, honestly, I knew he didn’t deserve not to be in Jada’s life. I was terrified when I found out that I was pregnant. I thought it was the end of the world when I realized that I would have to be a single mother.
Everything I thought was quickly pushed out of my mind the first time I heard my baby’s heartbeat. She was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I pulled myself together and did what I needed to do to graduate and take care of me and my baby, without having to deal with Reed and his crazy ass family.
Reed started to move. I watched him for a minute, trying to decide what I should say. I didn’t know why seeing him gather his clothes made me panic. When I wanted him to leave, he refused to. Now I didn’t want him to go. Wait, what the hell was I saying?
“You leaving?” I asked.
“For now.”
“For now? What does that mean?”
