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“Going in?” a man asked behind her as she stood frozen in place, blocking the entrance.
“Oh…no,” she said, moving quickly out of the way to let the man enter.
Through the window, her gaze met Angel’s, and her pulse pounded even harder as recognition dawned on Angel’s face. Whitney saw the other woman stand, and she quickly headed back toward her car.
“Whitney! Hey, Whitney, please wait,” Angel’s voice called behind her.
She desperately wanted to run away. Get as far from the woman and this awkward situation as possible, but she couldn’t run forever, and this conversation needed to happen sometime if they were all ever going to be able to move forward.
She turned slowly and clenched her trembling hands.
“Hi. Thanks for stopping,” Angel said, coming up to her. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry about the other night.”
Whitney shook her head. “It’s none of my business.” She’d broken things off with Trent. She was the villain in this story. What right did she have to be upset that he may have already started to move on? Or that Angel had seen an opportunity to move in? They were both single people, and they were entitled to be together if that’s what they wanted.
“It wasn’t what it looked like,” Angel said with a remorseful look. “My ex showed up, and Trent was defending me…”
“That’s Trent,” she said awkwardly, glancing at him still sitting in the booth in the diner. Hearing about how he was Angel’s knight in shining armor hardly made her feel any better. And if he’d wanted to talk to Whitney, he certainly didn’t seem like he wanted to in this moment. “I should go.”
“Whitney, I really am sorry,” she said and paused. “Trent’s really broken up about this. He misses you, and he loves you.”
Whitney stared at the ground. This wasn’t a discussion she wanted to have with anyone right now. Especially not Angel. The other woman could say what she wanted, but Whitney knew before long, Trent and Angel would be together. If they really weren’t already. They’d looked awfully cozy in the diner together. “I’m sure he’ll get over it and move on with his new life,” she said, turning to leave.
“We haven’t even figured out what to do about him being Eddie’s father yet,” Angel said.
Whitney froze.
Eddie’s father.
The words echoed in her brain, but they seemed far away, as though in a dream. Trent was Eddie’s father? What the hell was going on? Had he known? Had he been keeping this from her? She’d been feeling so guilty for not telling him about her illness…and he was keeping something so important, so life-changing from her?
Trent was a father?
Her mind raced, and her pulse pounded. It made sense now that he and Angel shared a connection, but the thought had never crossed her mind it would be something like this.
Angel gasped slightly. “Oh my God, you didn’t know. He didn’t tell you.”
She had to get away. She had to put some distance between herself and this truth she wasn’t ready to face. She turned quickly and headed toward the car.
“Whitney, wait! Please!”
She kept going.
She heard the woman sigh behind her, but she kept walking, her appetite suddenly gone again. Reaching the car, she climbed in, and her gaze involuntarily drifted toward the diner as she backed out of the parking spot.
And her heart stopped.
It was Max with Angel. Not Trent. The other man was now standing on the sidewalk, his arm draped across Angel’s shoulders as he ushered her back inside.
Max. Not Trent.
But either way, Trent was the father of Angel’s son.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Now…
The atmosphere at the B&B was awkward when Whitney arrived for Marissa’s birthday party that Saturday afternoon. She’d been expecting this first get-together with her friends to be slightly intense, but she hadn’t anticipated the feeling that being the dumper, not the dumpee, she was seen as the villain. Rationally, she knew her friends didn’t think of her that way, but she still hadn’t really reached out to any of them to talk about everything that was going on, and today wasn’t the right time, either.
