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“My mom told you I aborted, didn’t she?” Briggs replies.
“That and a whole lot more.” I wince at the fresh sting of old words.
“Like what?” Briggs shifts her body to face me and I can feel her warmth in the cool night air.
“That you’d realized what a mistake I was. That you were only using me to rebel against your parents. That if I had any sense, I’d stay away from you and realize how I was dragging you down. That I had single handedly ruined your future and if I actually loved you, I would see how toxic I was for you and let you go.”
This is the first time I’ve ever spoken out loud the conversation I had with Amalie Marchand the night she showed up at my house in a torrential rainstorm to threaten me. Her words had buried into my soul with their conviction and I’d happily digested them as truth. Of course, someone like Briggs would never want someone like me. Of course, I was ruining her future, especially if she had my baby. It made sense to my eighteen-year-old brain.
But it also hurt. God did it fucking hurt.
Briggs blinks rapidly, but she isn’t the crying type. She lets her head fall into her hands.
“You believed her?” she asks and guilt rips through my chest. But before I have a chance to respond she continues, “I believed her too.”
“What do you mean?”
“She played us both on our own insecurities. She told me a similar but opposite thing. That you were playing me. That guys like you loved to take advantage of girls like me. That it was all about the chase for you. Making the good girl go bad. But that you had no capability of committing or stepping up when it counted. She told me you’d abandon me when I needed you most.”
“And then I did,” I fill in and she nods.
“And then you did.”
Silence falls over us again, even the creek is drowned out by my thoughts. It’s going to be hard to have this conversation without talking about Amalie’s death, but I really want to only talk about our daughter.
“What’s her name?” I ask. Briggs immediately brightens, pride tugging at her perfect lips.
“Millie,” she answers. “Emilia, but she likes Millie better. I called you when she was born, before I named her. Your dad told me he’d tell you. I waited for you for a couple days. I guess he didn’t tell you. So right before I left the hospital, I named her myself. I called you every year on her birthday until she was three. I even tried to hunt you down online even though I knew you hated social media.”
She pauses with her mouth open as if she wants to say more but she doesn’t.
“My parents were as against you as yours were against me. Why did you stop trying?”
“On her third birthday, the phone number I always called, your old cell phone was disconnected. I called my dad to ask him to find your new one and he told me you’d been arrested. We fought about Millie, about you, about why I was still holding out. Again, I listened to him. He convinced me that trying to connect with you was only going to cause me pain and that the best thing for Millie was to accept what was and move forward. So, I bought a motorhome and left Vancouver and have been moving forward ever since.”
I’m unsure how to process what she’s saying because I get it and I don’t. I understand, but I want to push. We were so eager to break the rules and rebel against what was expected of us, but when it really mattered, both of us freely accepted the labels that were applied to us. I want to be angry with her for believing I could ever leave her to deal with something like raising a baby. I want to explain to her how unbelievably lost I was when she left, how deeply I felt her absence in my life. But what good does that do now? Because I was as quick to accept that she happily left me behind. That I was nothing more than a way to get back at her parents for pushing her so hard to excel at everything.
I ran into her dad maybe six months after Briggs left. He told me she got into a private school and wanted a fresh start. That Raston wasn’t a good place for her given all that had happened. He told me to respect her space. I ate it up. I thought I was doing the right thing. Her fucking mother had died, of course I wasn’t going to hunt her down. I did love her and more than anything I wanted her to be happy. I forced down my pain and carried on throwing myself into baseball, into college, then I got arrested and lost my scholarship. Was completely lost until I got a job at Wildland Fire.
“What do we do now?” I ask as Briggs drained her beer and set it in the stones at her feet.
“I do what I always do. Whatever is best for Millie.”
“And that is?”
“She deserves to know her father. Given the truth that has come out, I think she deserves to know you. But do you deserve to know her?”
Her words are biting but it’s the thing that drew me to Briggs in the first place. You never have to guess or decode what she wants. It’s right there on her lips. She speaks her truth always. She was the calm in the midst of my storm. It always inspired me to my own honesty.
“I truly hope to.”
I need to deserve to know my daughter. Because now that I know about her, I’m certain I’ll never be able to go back to life without her.
