A Missing Heart(49)

Tori crosses her arms and shifts her weight to one side, definitely more on the pissed side of things. “So what does that mean? What is she, an ex-girlfriend, wife, or something? You just decided to meet her for lunch today instead of working?”

“It’s not like that,” I tell her.

“Who’s the kid? Her sister?”

“Her daughter,” I correct.

“That’s impossible,” Tori snaps. “She must be a teenager.” I watch as Tori holds her focus on the back of Ever and Cammy’s heads.

“It’s not impossible,” I tell her.

“Okay great, so your ex-girlfriend and her daughter are in town, and you wanted to meet up. Are you bringing them home for dinner tonight too? Should I make extra?”

“Make extra dinner?” I laugh. “When’s the last time we didn’t order out?”

Tori’s eyes grow wide as if I offended her with the truth. Not that I expect her to make dinner every night, considering how busy she is with her errands and Gavin, sometimes, but this is a joke. “Actually, that’s a great idea. I’d love that. You can make one extra seat for her fiancé too.”

Tori seems to relax with the last comment. “Oh,” she says. “I can do that. I can cook. I just—I was a little surprised to see you here with a woman who looks like…that.” Her focus has not left the table I was sitting at, and I get it. I should have told her what was going on before I came to lunch, I guess. “I’ll just go finish up my errands.”

“Okay, I’ll still grab Gavin from daycare. How are you going to make dinner if you’re going to be late tonight?”

“I’ll change my plans,” she says.

“O—kay?” I say questioningly.

“That little girl is beautiful,” Tori says.

I’m staring right into Tori’s eyes now, even though she’s too busy looking at the table. My gaze holds long enough that she finally looks up at me. “Thank you,” I say.

Her head jerks back a bit. “What do you mean by that?”

I suck in my bottom lip and bite down hard before allowing the words to pour out of my mouth. “That’s my daughter, Tori.”





CHAPTER FIFTEEN


I FEEL THE appropriate thing to do is let Tori yell at me at the top of her lungs for however long she finds it necessary. I peer down at my watch, noting it has been four hours since we stepped into our house and two hours since she started yelling at me. Besides a few pausing breaths and a brief break so I could put Gavin to bed, there hasn’t been a lack of words for her to hand me the piece of her mind I deserve.

She hasn’t allowed me the chance to get in a word and if she did, I would only tell her that we agreed to keep our past in the past, and we never had a conversation about breaking that commitment.

I was beginning to think she wouldn’t stop, but she has finally dropped down into a seat at the kitchen table. It’s now six at night and I never even got to work today. I haven’t had a moment to digest the fact that my daughter has stepped back into my life, or that my high school sweetheart, her mother, showed up out of the blue today. I haven’t had a chance to tell Tori I’m not sorry, but I don’t think it would be wise to tell her that right now.

I left Cammy and Ever at the pizza shop without a promise to follow up, or any word for that matter. I don’t have Cammy’s phone number, and I realize now that beyond showing up at her hotel room, I have no way to find them again. Not that I’d be allowed to leave this house long enough to do something like that right this second anyway.

Tori’s been quiet for a long three minutes, and she’s staring through the tiled floor as if it were glass. I’m not sure if I should wait to hear her next thought or if this is the time to speak up.

I walk over to the countertop and rest my hip against it. “I never thought I’d see either of them again,” I tell her. She doesn’t respond, so I continue. “Those two made me who I am today, love me or leave me, and I just left them in the middle of a goddamn pizza shop because my wife and I, who know nothing about each other, needed to come home and have this fight. How f*cking normal is that, Tori? Oh, and just to make things worse, it’s my daughter’s birthday today—the first one I was going to be able to celebrate with her since the day she was born. This, though, this is way more important.”

“They made you who you are?” she asks, narrowing her eyes at me. Of course, that would be the only part she heard.

“Yeah, Tori, that’s not something you’re going to hold against me. And you want to know why?”

She stands up from her seat for the first time in hours, and my nerves cringe with the thought of what she might be doing. The last time we had an argument this big was last year, to the f*cking day. “I don’t know what you want me to say or do, AJ.” She opens the refrigerator and pulls out a bottle of water. “Do you want me to reopen my wounds so you can see the blood for yourself?”

Her words are sharp and unexpected, and while I would like to say yes to her question, the way in which she worded it would make me sound like an * for agreeing. Though, it only seems fair to let me in, even if it’s just a little, now that she knows about my past. “I want to help you,” I offer.

“Well, you can’t,” she says, sitting back down with her water.