Page 66 of Penn

The thought of getting up in the middle of the night to handle a screaming baby weighs on me. How am I going to balance that with being a working mother? And who will watch him when I’m working at the bar?

All things I need to figure out now.

“I heard your baby dad came back into the picture the other night,” Misty says. “Wanna talk about that?”

“You heard… How?”

“Small town,” she says with a smirk. “Even smaller club.”

Groaning, I rest my head on the back of the couch. “Stephen wants me back. He says he made a mistake when he let me go. And tried to kill me.”

“Wait, back up?”

“You didn’t hear about that? Yeah, he’s the one who had my place set on fire. I wasn’t supposed to be at work that night.”

“And you’re considering getting back with him because…?”

I know everyone who knows of the situation wants an answer to this question, but Misty’s the only one who has actually come out and asked me. “He’s the father of my son.”

“Zep isn’t Bernie’s bio dad, but if anything happens to me, she’s staying with him, not Ben.”

It hits me that I don’t actually know the full history of Misty and Bernie. Just that she had Bernie as a teenager. “You never wanted to be with him to have Bernie’s mom and dad together?”

“Yeah, back before I learned he was a drug-dealing addict,” she says. “The truth is, Mom and Dad being together doesn’t mean it’s better for the child. It can actually do more harm. Bernie at least knows what it looks like to have her mom loved and cared for, which would not have been what she saw with Ben.”

That hits close to home. All I’ve ever seen is toxic love. Daddy loving Mom, but not loving her enough to stay faithful. And Mom loving Daddy too much and costing herself her sanity. How am I supposed to have a normal relationship when I’ve never actually witnessed one?

“How’d you do it?” I ask.

Misty tilts her head. “I need a little more context.”

“You had Bernie so young. You did it on your own. How did you do it?”

“By the grace of God,” she says with a laugh. “It was hard. It was really hard, and honestly, we kind of grew up together. I got really lucky finding Zep.”

Seeing how Zep reacted thinking he’d done this terrible harm to Misty still breaks my heart. And it showed just how much he loves her. “He was beside himself.”

“I know. He told me you helped him. Thank you for that,” she says and takes my hand, giving it a small squeeze.

“I don’t know what to do,” I admit. “This thing with Penn doesn’t really feel as temporary as I keep telling myself it has to be, but it doesn’t really feel permanent, either. And I’m so scared I’ll end up doing it all on my own.”

“Penn won’t let you do anything on your own. He called the night you went to stay at his house and asked about what vitamins he needed to pick up for you,” she says with a laugh. “The thing I’ve learned about the men in this club is that when they love, they love hard.”

“But Penn doesn’t love me.”

The words feel like a stone in my stomach, and I didn’t think they’d hurt this much. But why does it hurt?

“I’m pretty sure he does. He’s had his eye on you for a while, and he’s finally getting something he hasn’t before,” she says. “You know, assuming you don’t go back to your ex. Who tried to kill you. Like a psycho.”

“Him or me?”

“Both, if you go back,” she says. “I know I should be impartial and let you make your own decisions, but you’re kind of fucked up if you think he’s not going to try again. Only a crazy person tries to kill his pregnant girlfriend. Especially by setting a house on fire.”

The laugh escapes before I realize it, and I can’t believe she said that. But the truth is, she’s completely right. “He says he feels really bad about it. If it makes a difference.”

“Oh, yeah, so much. He’s only a sociopath now,” she says, laughing with me.

“Is it really so wrong of me to want my child’s father in the picture?” I ask once I’ve settled down.