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“I’ve been terrible to her...” He shakes his head. “If I was her, I wouldn’t take me back, but...”
“But?”
“She’s pregnant.”
I blink. For a moment it’s like I can’t breathe, can’t even think. “You’re having a baby.”
“Yeah, she told me the night of the Cielo opening.”
Everything falls into place. This wasn’t just the fact that he believed I was having an affair with Lily... He thought I might be the father of her child. A child he haddesperatelywanted since they started trying as soon as they were married.
And he’d seen it as one more thing I’d taken from him.
“Congratulations,” I say, finding my throat tight.
“I’m going to be a dad.” In spite of everything, Marc smiles. “And you’re going to be an uncle.”
“Zio Daniel has quite a ring to it.” I shake my head. Marc made a huge error by believing the wrong person, but I know his coming here now to admit his mistakes must have taken a lot of courage.
“I...” He rakes a hand through his hair and swears under his breath. “I know I’ve messed up, okay? But I want you to be part of my kid’s life. I’m going to fix things with Lily and I’m going to be a better dad than what we had growing up.”
All I’d ever wanted was for us to be a real family. But I’d never considered how my taking over the company might affect Marc, and I’d meddled in his relationship by pushing my baggage onto him. Those were my mistakes to own.
“I’d like that,” I say. “And I know you’ll be a far better dad than him.”
For a second, I catch a fleeting glimpse of the cheeky boy I knew from my childhood. “It’s a low bar and you know I always liked a gimme.”
I shake my head, laughing and feeling like my old self again.
“I don’t know where we go from here,” Marc says, rubbing his hands up and down his thighs.
“Forward.”
Marc and I finish our conversation and as he leaves my office, realisation settles over me, like dust finding the earth after a storm. In every other part of my life—with the company and my dreams—I look forward. Move forward. But when it comes to my personal life, I’m firmly rooted in the past. In the hurt my parents inflicted on us, in the baggage I’ve shouldered trying to care for Marc.
I’ve let the past dictate my choices in the here and now. And I planted a seed that might very well have killed my brother’s marriage and our sibling relationship. I pushed Ava away at a time when I needed someone like her in my life. Someone who communicates openly, who wears their heart on their sleeve.
I need to stop letting the past control me. And, most of all, I need to trust myself.
I amnotmy parents. The same as Marc and Lily are not my parents.
Even when it hurts, familyisthe most important thing in my life. Only I’ve been stubbornly looking back at the mistakes my parents left behind, thinking my role was to make up for their deficits. But this conversation with Marc has proved one thing: it’s possible to forgive and move forward.
But would Ava forgive me for being pigheaded and blind? For being so stuck in the past I wouldn’t allow myself to see a future with her in it? She was the catalyst for me to break out of my old ways. A woman who loves so hard and so fearlessly she makes me reconsider everything. She’s changed me, irrevocably.
I can’t fix my father’s mistakes, but Icanlearn from them.
I can be the man who builds others up, instead of tearing them down. Who loves with everything he has. Who could be worthy of love.Herlove.
But first I have to tell her the truth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ava
“THANKSFORLETTINGme stay.” I lug the last box into the garage and stack it against the wall where everything else I own—sans clothing and toiletries, which are in the house—will sit in boxes until I move again.
My mother leans against the brick wall, watching me. She wears an apron over jeans and a T-shirt, with a pair of dirty old runners on her feet. Gardening attire.
