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Her eyes were wide and her lips parted like she might say something, but no words came out.
“Holy shit.” Rory handed the phone back to me like I might know what to do with this new information. “Is that your daughter?”
Of course it was her fucking daughter, but we had to get confirmation. Had to know for certain.
She paused for a second before nodding. The girl looked just like her and we both knew Ivy had no siblings so it couldn’t have been a niece or nephew. Which only left a daughter.
Holy shit, Ivy was a mom.
“Who’s the father?” I asked. Suspicion gave my tone a hard edge and I saw her blink rapidly in response. This was exactly what I’d feared. There was no way in hell Ivy was single—I should have known that was why she had been so hesitant to see us, why she was running out now.
Rory rubbed his face like he was trying to wake himself up from a dream. “Are you involved with someone, Ivy?” His voice was kinder than mine had been and some of her shock seemed to fade.
“I told you I wasn’t,” she whispered. It was almost hard to hear her words over the hum of the air conditioning.
Rory gave me a look that made me feel guilty for jumping to conclusions. So she hadn’t been having an affair with us. Thank god.
“So who was he?” I asked, swinging my feet over the side of the bed, grabbing my boxers off the floor and slipping them on. I didn’t want to talk about a guy who got her pregnant with my dick hanging out. “Did you get married? Were you in a relationship in college?”
Ivy’s brow creased in confusion as she looked from me to Rory. Then she shook her head and sighed. “God, you guys don’t even see it.”
Rory and I looked at each other. “See what?” I asked.
Ivy bit her lip and looked up toward the ceiling. Then she exhaled loudly and faced us. “That’s my daughter, Lily. She’s six years old.”
Rory and I were silent as that sank in.
After a second, Ivy groaned. “You guys have never been good with math, have you? She’s yours, boys. Lily was conceived that night in Baker’s field.”
The silence was deafening as Rory and I stared at Ivy. I had a daughter…or Rory had a daughter. Either way…we had a daughter.
For the second time in my life, my world flipped upside down. But unlike the accident, this upheaval didn’t make me crash and burn. It lifted me up, opening a space in my chest I didn’t even know was there.
Holy shit, we had a kid. A daughter. Lily.
I looked to Rory and saw that he was just as awed by this revelation. We had a kid. A kid that we’d never known about. A kid who probably didn’t know we existed. A jolt of anger had me jumping out of bed and reaching for my jeans. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I had my reasons.” Ivy had never been good at lying or being evasive. Every one of her emotions showed on her face and right now I could see the fear, the guilt, the regrets plain as day. She might have had her reasons, but she was far from confident about her actions.
Rory was out of bed now too, halfway dressed as he crossed over to her. I could see the pent up anger in his body and understood it. To Rory, family was everything. He’d never had one to speak of—not one that was loving anyhow. And all he’d ever wanted was for us to have the family he’d never had. We’d come here to make that, not discover we’d been lied to, to be denied what he’d wanted all along.
“You should have told us, Ivy. We could have—”
“What?” she snapped. “You could have what? Put your dreams on hold? Given up a chance for a career in the military so you could stay in Bridgewater and raise a baby at eighteen? You could have supported us with that part-time job you had to get at the grocery store to pay for diapers?”
Her eyes flashed with anger, but it was a defensive anger. Still, her point hit home. I turned to Rory. “What the hell could we have done back then?”
He shrugged, clearly irritated that I wasn’t on his side. “I don’t know. But we would have helped. We would have stepped up.” He ran a hand through his short hair. “Hell, we would have loved her.”
Ivy’s eyes were suspiciously bright, like she was fighting back tears. “I know you would have, Rory.” She looked at me. “And you, too. I knew you both would do the right thing if I’d told you. Which was exactly why I didn’t.”
She dropped her arms and let out a sigh. “I didn’t want to make you guys feel trapped or think you needed to put your lives on hold. We were too young, we were all too young.”
I could see that Rory wanted to argue, but he let her speak.
“By the time I found out, you boys were off at boot camp and I was in Seattle.” She shrugged as if at a loss for words. “I had to make some tough decisions, and I had to make them on my own. Besides, it wasn’t as if the army would understand the Bridgewater lifestyle. They wouldn’t let both of you just leave because you said you’d fucked me together and wanted to do the right thing.”
She looked so bereft as she stared down at her feet, I moved toward her on instinct and pulled her into my arms, into a tight hold.
