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I might not have offered up the truth about Daisy until this point. But it goes without saying that her and Alana are the two most important women in my life, and have been for a while.
* * *
It might only be two hours, but it feels like a week has passed by the time we’re seated on the same fancy airplane we flew in on.
Kristie isn’t in a good way.
Her breathing is erratic and she is covered in sweat, her body trembling as her withdrawals set in.
Alana fusses around her, doing anything she can to make the situation better, but achieving very little.
She wants to magically fix this. Fix Kristie. But it isn’t going to be that easy.
As soon as we’re in flight, Alana guides Kristie to the bedroom at the back that we were banned from testing out last time.
I guess extenuating circumstances are in place on this leg of our journey.
No sooner have they disappeared from our sight, do we hear the familiar sounds of Kristie vomiting.
“You booked a cleaning team, right?” JD asks Reid. He might be trying to make a joke to lighten the mood, but his tone is dark and serious.
Ignoring him, Reid continues tapping into his phone.
“Anything?” I ask, aware that everyone is desperately trying to dig something up on Kurt, Sheila, and Daisy’s location.
“Not yet. Sheila’s cell is showing at her trailer. Her car is there too.”
I nod, processing his words but not really feeling them.
I’m numb. Completely fucking numb.
Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is that little girl with a gag around her mouth and tears streaming from her eyes.
“Shit,” he hisses, before turning his curious stare on me. “So,” he starts. “Did you want to tell us about your daughter?”
All the air rushes from my lungs as I slump back in the seat.
“It’s not quite like it sounds.”
“Well, she’s three, right? So that makes it sound a lot like you knocked your best friend up while married to Alana.”
“Exactly. Not how it sounds. Ivy…” I sigh again, hating to remember my friend as she was once Daisy was born. Her pregnancy was hard. But it had nothing on the birth. Or the post-natal psychosis that followed. “A few weeks after she gave birth to Daisy, Ivy… changed. The doctors put it down to post-natal depression. But it was more than that.
“She tried her best to cover it up, but I could see it. I knew her too well to miss the signs. But she point-blank refused to get medical attention. She’d already cost Sheila a lot of money, seeing as she didn’t have any insurance. She hated relying on her grandmother as heavily as she did, and she didn’t want to be an even bigger burden.
“I told her I would help, but again she refused.”
“It felt like she was getting worse daily. But she still refused help. There was only one thing she asked of me.”
“She wanted you to be Daisy’s father,” JD guesses.
“Ivy didn’t know who’d got her pregnant. She’d been sleeping around for years. It could have been any number of the assholes she’d spent time with.
“They were all fucking wastes of space, and she didn’t have any interest in trying to find out. She knew Daisy would be better off without them in her life.
“I didn’t really think anything of it until the final weeks of her pregnancy when she blurted out that she wanted to put me on Daisy’s birth certificate.”
JD lifts his hand, combing his hair back while Reid watches me, and listens to me without any kind of reaction.
