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It felt a little rehearsed, like I needed some orchestral score behind me to make it more dramatic, but in the moment, I’d have Mila’s face to work off of. Bagel was great, but she wasn’t giving me the responses I needed to power through this thing. I continued to plow forward, reaching the point I wanted her to hear.
“Look at Bagel,” I said. “If we did a paternity test between me and her, there would be zero match. And what difference would it make? She’s still my baby, just as yours will be.”
I paused. Should I really compare a dog to her baby? Fuck. My. Life. I sounded like a giant idiot. Whatever. I’d be able to read her body language, I figured, when I finally got in there. And, by this point, it didn’t matter anyway because I was pulling into the parking lot, and I was completely out of rehearsal time.
“This is it, girl,” I said to Bagel. “Wish me luck.”
I leaned in and kissed the tip of her snout, and she responded by licking my face. She was the best girl.
I grabbed her leash and led her out of the car — leaving my belongings behind where I could get them later. Bagel and I went up the stairs, straight to Mila’s apartment, where I knocked on the door and waited patiently.
No response.
I knocked again, a little bit louder, keeping an eye on the hallway to make sure nobody was coming or popping in or out of their apartment.
Again, nothing.
She probably just wasn’t home. I went to my apartment to drop Bagel off.
I thought hard, trying to piece that afternoon together, but it was all a blur. All I could end up picturing was the disappointed look on Mila’s face when I walked in and how it only got worse the more I talked. My confidence was beginning to wane. If I couldn’t convince her the other day, what made me think that I somehow had an ace up my sleeve now? What if I only made things worse?
After dropping Bagel off at the apartment, I returned to Mila’s unit and knocked on the door one more time. When she didn’t respond again, I tried looking through the peephole, but saw nothing. It was dark in there. I tried the knob, and it turned. It had been left unlocked. I opened the door and looked inside her completely bare apartment.
My first instinct was that she’d been robbed, but after half a second’s thought I realized that made no sense. What thief would take literally everything out of someone’s apartment? How big a team would they have had to have in order to do that?
No, that wasn’t what happened at all.
Mila was gone.
I pulled out my phone and tried calling her, but it didn’t even go to voicemail. There was a recorded operator alerting me that the number was no longer in service.
Seriously? I thought. She got rid of her phone just so she wouldn’t need to deal with me ever again? Then I saw it, the key to Kiefer's apartment sitting on the countertop. That solidified it. She was gone.
It seemed extreme, but it was clear that she was serious about wanting to keep her distance. I returned to my apartment and lay down with Bagel, pulling up my phone and composing an email to her, trying to put the message that I was going to give her in person into a written message, but it was the same as it had been back at the motel room: the words just didn’t look right on the page. Nothing sounded good to me. I had to tell her in person.
I paced and paced in the apartment, trying to come up with a way where I could at least talk to her and get a chance to redeem myself. Maybe I could hire a private detective to track her down. Or do one of those dark web internet searches to get her address.
But as I continued to pace and come up with more and more ways to see her even though she clearly didn’t want to be seen, I realized that I’d had my chance, and it was the day I had called her on the phone and told her the results of the test. And, while I wanted a second chance now, she’d made her decision, and it was as clear a decision as I’d ever seen.
The fact was that Mila did not want me to convince her. She didn’t want an explanation as to why I wasn’t sure, nor did she want a promise that it would never happen again. What she wanted was for me to disappear from her life and never come back.
In our modern age, there were a million different tools that I could have used to get in contact with her and track her down, but none of it would matter. If I truly cared about her, as much as I hated it, I would need to respect her wishes and allow her to live on, happily ever after, by herself with her baby.
And when my mind finally wrapped itself around that idea and accepted it, all I could do was shake my head and let out a single word.
“Fuck.”
CHAPTER29
***MILA***
Time used to go by so slowly when I was young. Sometimes a full week away might as well have been forever in the future. As an adult, though, time was precious, and if you weren’t keeping a close eye on it, it would speed away from you at the speed of light.
With all the distractions between work, the house, and the baby taking up more and more room in my body, time was moving even faster than usual. Before I knew it, several months had passed. Dorothy’s room was completed, and she was close to being here. I chose Dorothy as her name because she was my “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Her room had a crib, stuffed animals, along with a mobile. I’d painted the room a subtle shade of lavender, not wanting to go pink like most people did when they were having girls, but I had also put my limited artistic skills to use and filled the walls with cartoon animals, which the woman from the design department at work helped with. I basically just traced her drawings and, if I may say so, they came out pretty darn well.
I walked around the room and tried to imagine what it would look like to fresh eyes that had never seen anything before. What would she make of the smiling hippopotamus? Or the pair of elephants with their trunks raised triumphantly in the air? I hoped, at the very least, the bright colors would bring her a sense of comfort in her earliest years. Eventually the world throws everybody for a loop, but my job as a parent was to protect her from that long enough to also prepare her for the inevitability of the real world.
That thought triggered another in my head, and instantly I was back in the apartment with Leo. I was hoping that I would have been over him by now — it had been more than long enough to allow myself to come to terms with my decision and move on. But there was still a part of me that regretted not sticking around a little longer.
