Don't Speak (A Modern Fairytale, #5)(111)

“With every cell in my body,” he promised.

Her eyes closed and she nodded. “Th-thank you. I needed to hear that so b-badly.”

“Six years too late,” he said, everything inside him hurting.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she managed in a thready voice.

“It kills me that you went through this alone, that I missed six years with you, that I missed the first five and a half years of my daughter’s life.” He stopped because his heart was racing so fast, he felt dizzy. Calm down. Calm down, Erik. He swallowed over the massive lump in his gullet. “I need to know what happened. Tell me the rest.”

She exhaled carefully, nodding. “Okay.” She took another deep breath, like what she was about to say was going to hurt very much, and Erik braced himself. He’d seen Fancy in action since he was a very little boy—he knew that when her claws came out, blood was spilled, and she was always the one left standing. He didn’t know what was coming, but he knew it was going to be bad.

“Okay. Let’s see . . .,” she said. “I had Thanksgiving at Kyrstin’s and then her husband, Remy, drove me up the coast from Corey to Utopia Manor. I was so scared, but I wanted to see you again. I mean, I knew I was young to be pregnant and we weren’t married, but I still loved you. I felt like we could make it work if I could just get to you.”

“Wait,” he said. “What about Vanessa? I would have thought you hated me by then.”

“I didn’t know yet,” she said softly.

“But I thought you saw the pict—”

“No.” She shook her head. “I hadn’t seen it yet. I saw it much later. I didn’t know yet . . . about you and Vanessa. I still thought Van was just a male friend.”

“You loved me?”

She nodded. “Madly. I was going to ask your forgiveness for how I treated you in the hospital. My father was okay. Whether we planned it or not, I was expecting your baby. I wanted a fresh start with you . . . f-for us, you know, to be a family.”

“Oh, my God,” he whispered, blinking at her through a fresh burn of tears, these revelations more and more painful and frustrating. “You still loved me, and you were pregnant with my child, and you were comin’ to tell me.”

She bit her bottom lip again, her eyes answering his question before she said, “Yes.”

“And my mother?”

“She was outside.”

“Smokin’? By the pool?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“You told her that you were pregnant?”

“Not at first. I told her I needed to speak to you. I told her I was invited.” She looked down at the small space of white sheet beneath them, tracing a small circle with her finger. “She didn’t believe that I knew you. I insisted I did. That’s when I told her that I was expectin’.”

“She threw you out?”

Laire’s sigh was ragged and shaky, and Erik could tell the memory hurt.

“She called me a liar and an opportunist. She thought I wanted to extort money from your family. She said it was . . . a clever plan. And then she threatened to call the police.”

Laire stopped for a minute, clenching her jaw, her face a mask of misery when she finally looked up at him. “But that wasn’t the worst of it.”

“Vanessa,” he said, the name bitter on his tongue. “She made you think that we were . . .”

She nodded. “She told me to look through the sliding glass doors, and there you were, next to her with . . . with your arm around her shoulders . . .”

Her voice broke, and a tear splashed into her little circle. “I recognized her from the photos on your piano. She was wearing a ring that night—a really huge, beautiful ring—and your mother said that you were engaged to her, that you’d been together all summer, that you’d been in love forever, and that’s how she knew that I was lying about being with you because you’d never cheat on Van.”

“Enough.”

Something inside Erik ripped apart, and he whimpered in pain, rolling onto his back and staring up at the ceiling as tears of fierce, sanity-stealing frustration rolled from the corners of his eyes and into his hair.

Contemptible. Reprehensible. And unforgivable.

She’d come to him. Laire had come back to him to tell him that she loved him and was having their baby, and his mother—his despicable fucking mother—had sabotaged his happiness. He’d lost six years of his life, and five and a half years of his daughter’s life, because of that night. He’d lost his faith in women and his trust in love. He’d lost hope. He’d lost himself. And it was so devastating to learn that it had been at his mother’s willful hands, he almost couldn’t breathe.

He threw his arm over his eyes, hiding his tears from her—from Laire, who must have been so scared and alone that night. She’d had no family, no money, no plan . . . and his mother, Ava Grace’s grandmother, had threatened to have her arrested, so she’d run away. How the hell had she survived? How had she and Ava Grace made it?

“Laire,” he ground out, still lying on his back. “Who helped you?”

“Who do you think?” she asked softly.

Erik took a deep breath, thinking back to those days: she’d had her family, right? But they wouldn’t have helped her. The moment they found out she was pregnant, they would have washed their hands of her.