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“Hadley, is Brooklyn my daughter?”
Hadley lifts her tear-filled eyes to me and bites her lip.
“Is she? Is Brooklyn my daughter, Hadley?” I demand to know. Scratch that. I deserve to know.
“No,” comes her whispered response.
Why am I disappointed? I should be happy that I hadn’t been deprived of knowing my own daughter her entire life but instead, I feel like I was just punched in the gut.
“She’s not?” I whisper back, disbelieving. But she… she looks like my mother, right?
“I know. I know. I wish…” She pauses, her eyes closing and head shaking back and forth. “When I got back to Chicago, things were a mess. A bigger mess than they were before. I kept thinking of you and wishing I was back in New York in that hotel room where things were just… good and easy. Mom and Dad knew something was up with me and then things happened so fast.”
“What does that mean?”
She’s quiet for a few moments before she tells me, “When we met in New York, I was engaged to someone else.”
“Engaged?” I shout. “You said you werepromisedbut that it didn’t really mean anything because it was just family shit. You told me you weren’t going to actually marry him because you didn’t love him.”
“It sounds terrible. I’m sorry I lied. When I told you that -”
“After we had sex, I’d like to remind you.”
“Yeah, that was shitty of me but I couldn’t… okay, would you relax?” she demands when she notices how wound up I am. Hands balled into fists and my feet planted wide. “I need to explain everything but I can’t if you’re going to act like a damn caged tiger in here.”
“Sorry, it’s just a shock to see you and I honestly thought Brooklyn was mine which is oddly disappointing to find out she isn’t. I also hate that I just found out that the only time you and I were together was when you werecheatingon your fiancé.”
“Cash, listen to me, if you believe nothing else I say, please know that it wasn’t cheating. The engagement? It was all our parents’ doing. He didn’t want it just as much as I didn’t. We weren’t in love.”
“So how on earth do you explain being engaged to him? And why didn’t you wear a ring or tell me?”
Hadley fidgets with her hands. “To explain that, I need to go to the beginning.”
I gesture with her to get on with it and take a seat in one of the chairs. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
She moves the other chair so she’s facing me and takes a seat. “My family, I told you a bit about my past. The truth of it is, I come from old money.”
I knew she had family money but figured it was normal wealthy not… “Old money?”
“The kind where I’m expected to marry someone with the same status.”
“So this engagement…?”
“Was to a guy named Trotter. Our families had been friends since before we were born. It was always the plan. Trotter and I would marry. When he proposed, he barely choked out the words. Then he got drunk and slept with someone else, which I found out about later. Like I said, he didn’t want to marry me either.”
“Your parents expected you to marry someone just because they had the same type of money?”
“Sure did. That’s what they did. What their grandparents did. Aunt Dorothy was the only one in our family who broke away and went down her own path. She was disowned for it,” she scoffs with an eye roll. “I never knew she existed until a year ago. That’s a story for another time, but when I found out, I reached out to her and she gave me the courage to do the same.”
I turn my head and breathe out a heavy sigh. “That night, we shared a lot. And I don’t mean in words. Why couldn’t you have been honest with me?”
“Because I was living a fantasy. It was the one time in my life that I allowed myself to do that.”
“So that’s all I was? A fantasy?”
“No!” she shouts, reaching out to me then pulling her arm back like she’s afraid to touch me. “Not at all. That night was perfect. In every way. I should have explained everything and been more upfront but to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again.”
I give her a look then glance around. “How’d that turn out for ya?”
