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“You would guess correctly.”
Dalton laid his ball cap on the kitchen table. He had a buzz cut now. He ran his hand over his shorn hair. “You have to accept part of the blame for how it turned out Luka. You left her high and dry.”
“Fuck no, I don’t Dalton. I didn’t know she was pregnant.”
“Watch your language Luka,” his mother admonished him.
“You broke her heart man,” Dalton explained.
“No excuse for not telling me that she was pregnant with Ava.”
Their voices were getting louder and louder. Luna rose from the kitchen floor in case she had to intervene between her two, much larger sons. She wouldn’t put it past these two to start throwing punches.
“Good enough reason for Skylar.”
“So that is how it is going to be. You’re taking her side.”
Dalton rubbed his hand across his jaw. “Luka, man…I’m not trying to take sides. I was here when Mom told her that you were gone. I saw what you leaving did to the girl. She was crushed when you left.” His brother’s voice had gone soft.
“You didn’t even say goodbye to her. If you had you would have known about your child. She would have told you. Mom, Benji and I were here when she came looking for you. She was expecting you Luka…after school and you didn’t show up.”
Luka wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.
“The pain that came from that girl when Mom told her that you left in the night about tore my heart out.” Dalton looked at his mother. “I picked her up off the porch and carried her in the house for Mom.”
Luka turned his head and stared through the patio doors that led outside to a large deck that ran the length of the big ranch sized house.
“I thought she was going to make herself sick crying. Then she told us she was pregnant.”
Luka’s head snapped around. He looked at Dalton first then at his mother.
“She kept saying how could he leave me.” Dalton was choking on his words. The experience still painful to remember. He had only been a teenager at the time. “Then she suddenly stopped crying. You know Skylar,” Dalton said. “She’s one hell of a woman. She said to us, I guess it’s better I didn’t tell him. It would have stopped him from going which is what he wanted. What he needed…more than me.”
“You remember all that?” Luka asked.
“Luka, I remember every goddamn word the girl said. I remember her walking down the driveway with her spine stiff with determination and her face set in stone even though inside, her heart had shattered.
“I guarantee you that at night, she cried in her bed when there was no one around to hear her because that is Skylar’s way. She never said another word about you. Never asked a question about you. Nothing except that we not tell you about Ava. Hell, we didn’t hear from you until she was about to give birth to her and she didn’t want you running back for her and the baby. She felt like you would have ended up resenting her.”
“You seem to know a lot,” he said.
He shook his head. “I’ll be honest with you. Both Brett and I have offered to marry Skylar.” Luka could feel the rage burning in his gut. Of course, his brother Brett had asked her to marry him.
“She wouldn’t have us. Not that she didn’t care about us but she wouldn’t saddle us with a woman who had no heart to give. Those were her words.”
Luka dropped his head and gazed at the floor. He still held onto one thought. He couldn’t let it go. It was eating away at him. His heart. His little girl did need him and he should have been told she existed. Luka walked past his brother and out the front door. He needed to be alone. He needed to think before he exploded on somebody which would not be good.
**
Skylar could hear Luna laughing with Ava. She was almost ready to go out tonight. Lucky for her she was meeting Tag in town so if she was late she wouldn’t hold him up and piss him off.
He was the mayor of their fair town, Haley Cove. He started the town square meetings every week with a speech. Then kicked off the dances in the square’s hall. An old barn that had been renovated and was rented out for events like weddings and parties and their Friday night dances.
They had been dating for thirteen months. Tag talked about marriage on occasion but Skylar had no intention of ever marrying Tag Richardson and she reminded him of that. He just laughed at her.
For one thing, she didn’t love him. For another he wasn’t the greatest with Ava. He wasn’t mean to her, just indifferent. That was something she just couldn’t tolerate. The feelings were too familiar because of her own parent’s aloofness regarding her and her sisters.
Not that Tag was around Ava a whole lot. Skylar had worked hard on keeping the two pieces of her life separate. She intended to keep it that way.
