AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Nora, I feel like maybe I haven’t been clear, and I wanted to make sure that you understand that I want to be friends with your mom. I want to get along with her. But we’re never going to get together.” He didn’t want to be harsh, and he hated hurting his daughter more than anything, especially since he didn’t get to spend that much time with her to begin with. But he couldn’t allow this to continue, and he couldn’t allow her to hope for something that was most definitely not going to happen. Not ever.
“Matt. That’s harsh. I think you could have done that a little bit more carefully.” Eva sounded affronted, and her hand tightened on his arm, although she did not let go. He wished she would. He didn’t want her to be connected to him.
“I don’t want to be harsh. I want to be realistic. We can do things together. I think that we’ve tried hard to be friends over the years. But there is absolutely nothing else that is going to happen. And I think it’s important for Nora to know that. I... I got the idea that she might be thinking that there were possibilities that aren’t there. Is that right?” He allowed his voice to show his concern and made it as gentle as possible as he looked at his daughter. He wished he hadn’t made the mistakes he had. He wished he could fix them now.
He knew without a shadow of a doubt that trying to get together with Eva was just going to end up in more heartache. For all of them. It was better to be honest and upright. Upfront.
“Why not, Daddy? You guys get along just fine. Why not live together? Why not be married and be a real mom and dad?” Nora, his sweet little girl, had her chin jutted out in an irritated, stubborn way.
“Because your mom and I were never really together to begin with. We just screwed up and did things we shouldn’t have. Sometimes when you do things you shouldn’t have, it affects people that you don’t even know it’s going to. Like you. You are not a mistake. But your mother and I weren’t married, we had no intentions of getting married. We didn’t even like each other that much.”
“Speak for yourself. I was in love. I knew you wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”
“That’s news to me. You didn’t say anything like that at the time. In fact, I think when we woke up the next morning, you were mad at me because I...slept on the wrong side of the bed. I’m pretty sure that’s what the problem was.”
“I don’t remember anything about that.”
He remembered her yelling at him because he’d left her on the side of where the door was, and she was afraid someone was going to see her if they walked in. She said if he had been a gentleman, he would have slept on the other side. She hopped out and hadn’t talked to him for days. Which, honestly, hadn’t bothered him much. Other than he wasn’t sure what to tell his mom. Knowing that she would be disappointed in him. In fact, he decided not to tell her anything; he was twenty and was perfectly capable of doing things without his mother knowing about them.
He’d been acting as the man of the family for years, since his dad had left, and figured that he could make a mistake or two without having to admit it to everyone.
Turned out that wasn’t true, since four weeks later, everyone knew about his mistake. Much to his chagrin. But there wasn’t anything he could do about it then.
Nora turned stormy eyes on him. “Mom’s willing to work things out. You are not. I don’t know why you have to be such a jerk all the time.” Nora crossed her arms over her chest. “Mom, you were right. He’s a big jerk.” She looked down her nose at him and pulled up her lip. “I don’t know why I idolized him so much when I was younger. If this is the way you’re going to be, I want to live with Mom.”
“Hold on. You’re not old enough to make that decision. Your mom and I have decided where you’re going to be, and you need to abide by our decisions until you’re older.”
He held onto his temper with both hands. He didn’t want to dump all over Eva, but it was obvious that she was filling Nora’s head with a bunch of lies and trying to get Nora to gang up on him with her.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that things didn’t work out. But that’s the way life goes for people. I didn’t want my dad to leave, but he did. Maybe there were things my mom could have done to keep him. But him leaving gave me the opportunity to grow up faster, shoulder responsibility, and become a man of integrity and character, the opposite of what he was. I don’t blame him for leaving, and I don’t hate him. I just admire what my mom did after he left, raising all six of her children alone.”
“I hear you. So you had a really hard life. So did I. But you are standing here in front of me, and you could make my life better, and you refuse to.”
Eva looked smug as Nora stood there with her hands crossed over her chest.
He focused on Eva. “I think it might be a good idea for you to find a different place to stay. If this is the way you’re going to try to drive a wedge between my daughter and me. This time, summer, is supposed to be my time with her. I’m willing to share it, I’m willing to have you be here, but not if this is the way things are going to go.”
His voice sounded reasonable, even though he was boiling inside. He wanted to take a hold of Eva, grab her by her throat and shake her. How could she have done this? He had a really great relationship with his daughter all through her school years, her childhood. He’d made sure of it. And now, now that Eva had left her husband and set her sights on him, apparently, and she wasn’t getting what she wanted, she was going to try to destroy everything he had.
He supposed that she could probably be successful. Nora didn’t look inclined to be the little girl that he’d known all of her life. She looked inclined to be the spitting image of her mother.
It made him sad.
It made him regret the mistakes he made and wish he could redo them, but of course that was impossible.
“Nora, I think you and I need to walk home. Eva, I’ll talk to my mom if I need to, but you need to find someplace else to stay. Have a great night.” He looked at Nora and lifted his brows, just to see if she was going to argue.
She set her face, glanced at her mom, but didn’t wait for permission before she turned her back and started marching down toward the beach and his cottage.
“Eva. I’ve never said a single bad word to her about you. And you know as well as I do that there’s plenty I could say. Times you were late, times you cheated me, times I gave you money. Times where I had to take care of Nora because you were running around with a man who wasn’t your husband. Nora never knew anything about those things.”
He shut his mouth. He could tell from the look on Eva’s face that it was a waste of time to try to talk to her. She felt she was in the right, and it didn’t matter what he said.
He shook his head. He wanted to tell her to make sure that she found another place to stay, but he’d already said it twice.
Disgusted that the evening hadn’t turned out the way he had hoped and heartsick that his daughter was upset with him, he turned and walked down the street. Hopefully, he could talk to Nora and they could come to some kind of agreement. Or at least, he could convince her that he wasn’t trying to ruin her life.
Maybe her mother had already poisoned her brain, and there wasn’t going to be anything he could do other than just act with integrity and character, and hope that eventually, as she got older, she’d see that Eva was the one who wasn’t telling the truth.
