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“Move it. Keys are in the ignition,” Melanie tosses over her shoulder, not missing a beat.
Feet rooted in place, I don’t move. Can’t. This is real. I might have a son… A son named Adam.
How the hell did this happen?
What am I supposed to do?
Fuck.
This could change everything.
CHAPTERTWO
KIT
This is for Adam.
This is for Adam.
This is for Adam.
The mantra turns in my head like a broken record as I put on a brave face and pretend, sitting across from the one mistake I tried to forget, isn’t twisting every part of me up inside.
I had to come.
Or that’s what I keep telling myself.
Anything for my son…ourson. Try that wordage on for size. It sounds strange, even to me.
Being here is harder than I thought. Facing the music and anticipating it are two very different scenarios.
Across a table in the main room of a clubhouse they’re renovating, I watch Gunz’s face contort in a myriad of emotions, switching between confusion and anger. We’re seated at a high top. My legs dangle off the stool as a bottle of water sits unopened in front of me. He cleared the place out for us to talk. Not that I’m sure what to say that hasn’t already been blurted within ten seconds of meeting.
It shouldn’t have gone down like this.
The two-hour drive should’ve prepared me better. It’s not like I didn’t go over what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it a thousand times in a thousand different ways.
The weeks I spent picturing this moment should’ve theoretically made things easier, not harder. I wish that was the case, but it never is, is it?
I drove around for hours, debating if I should stop or not. If I should open this can of worms, I never intended to crack open. Now, here I sit.
I know what you’re thinking. I’m an awful person for keeping Adam from his dad all these years. How dare I drop this bomb tonight of all nights. Truth? I’d think the same thing if I were in your shoes. Would it help if I told you I didn’t know Gunz was Adam’s father until my husband, now ex-husband, needed a bone marrow transplant, and we tested Adam as a match? Talk about a devastating blow to everyone involved when the results came back as they did. Especially for my son, who already grew up feeling out of place, apart from fitting in with a group of small-town hellions. I’d like to say it was the boys’ fault—that their bad influence wore Adam down and turned him into a modern-day version of Evel Knievel or Robin Hood, depending on the incident. But I’d be lying. He’s the ringleader. What you’d consider a bad boy. The kid you wouldn’t want your daughter dating. For your daughter’s sake, I wouldn’t want her dating him either.
Perhaps the man with the dazzling pair of blue eyes that match Adam’s will be the answer to my prayers. Not that I’m a religious woman. Agnostic is more apt, I suppose. Though, I’m sure you’ll agree that you’d eat the grossest, moldiest, most rotten crow for your child if you thought it might save them from themselves.
That’s why I’m here.
I visited Adam in jail today.
If you’ve never visited your child in the slammer, you have no idea how terrible it is. Sickness takes over the instant you walk through those front glass doors of the station. It worsens when you hand your driver’s license through a security window to get those precious fifteen minutes with your son twice a week. You give them money to put on his commissary because you know the food is awful and he needs things. Things you can’t bring him. Then you wait with all the other loved ones on long, metal benches that have seen better days, for the buzz of a steel door and an officer to let you inside a dark room lined with stools and plexiglass booths. Old phones hang on the wall for you to talk to your child. There’s no touching. No hugging. There you wait, once more, for your kid to enter the box in his gray sweats. You’re grateful for those sweats because you know where the men wearing the orange jumpsuits are headed. In sympathy, you flash those families closed-mouth smiles. They return the gesture in kind, their eyes hollow from loss.
Tracing a nail over the grimy tabletop, I wait for Gunz to say something. I deserve to be yelled at. I deserve everything and then some. It’s not his fault, or Jeremy’s, or my ex-husband’s, for what I’ve done to them. It’s mine. I take full responsibility for sowing my wild oats with my girlfriends when I was engaged to be married. When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t even consider the hot biker could be Adam’s daddy. I didn’t consider it when Adam was born with blue eyes when I have hazel, and Jeremy has brown. I also didn’t consider it when Adam looked nothing like Jeremy or his family. It wasn’t until…
“How long have you known?” Gunz tears me from my innermost thoughts.
I blink to refocus on my surroundings, namely the handsome man sparking up the conversation. I’ll tell him anything he wants to know. It’s the least I can do.
“Known what?” I ask.
