The Resurrection of Wildflowers (Wildflower #2)(28)

“I’m sorry. I should’ve told you a long time ago. I wrote you a letter one time and then chickened out and didn’t send it. You’d already rejected me, and I was so scared of what it’d feel like if you rejected her too.”

He rears back, almost knocking his head into the wall. “You thought I’d do that?”

“Thayer,” I say his name slowly, “you turned into an entirely different person when Forrest died.”

His head lowers and he nods like he knows I’m right. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

Now I’m the one stumbling back. “You’re apologizing to me? Why?”

Warm brown eyes meet mine. “Because, I was an asshole to you back then. I wanted to push you away, and ultimately, I did, and fuck if it doesn’t piss me off at myself that it was when you needed me most.”

“You needed to grieve.”

He clears his throat. “We both really fucked things up, didn’t we?” I don’t answer him so he goes on, “You said she’s a … I have a daughter?” A tiny smile fights for space on his lips.

“You have a daughter and she’s perfect.” Clearing my throat, I add, “I know I didn’t tell you about her, but I didn’t keep you a secret from her. She knows about you and Forrest too. She talks about her brother a lot.”

“What’s … uh … what’s her name?” He’s getting choked up talking about her, and even though this is going way better than I anticipated, somehow this makes me feel worse. I deserve his anger, for him to yell and scream, to cuss me out.

“Seda,” I reply, not being able to help myself when I smile at her name. “She’s perfect and beautiful. Funny and creative. She’s everything.”

He rubs his jaw, brown eyes pooling with tears. “Can I see a picture?”

“Yeah.” I push my wet hair out of my eyes, shivering. “I have a million on my phone.”

He notices me shaking with cold. “Fuck, I should’ve offered you a shirt.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” I shiver again.

Rolling his eyes, he mutters, “Liar,” and heads up the stairs leaving me in the foyer.

He isn’t gone long before he returns with a cotton shirt, extending it out to me.

We both seem to remember at the same moment another time I showed up at his door completely soaked from rain. Only that time I had Binx with me and I was confessing something entirely different, telling him about my past.

“Thank you.” I let myself into the downstairs bathroom and shuck off my wet jacket and tank top beneath, tugging the plain shirt down over my body. My nipples stand erect thanks to being in my cold, wet clothes so long. There’s nothing I can do about it, so I just have to hope the looseness of his shirt helps camouflage it.

Stepping out of the bathroom with my wet clothes in hand, I set them by the door and find him in the living room sitting on the couch waiting for me.

A bottle of water sits in front of him with a Diet Coke beside it.

Pointing at the soda before I take a seat, I say, “You don’t drink that stuff.”

“No.” He eyes the can, then me. “But you do.”

“You just keep Diet Coke on hand in case I show up?”

He looks away, like he doesn’t want me to see him vulnerable in this moment. “Ever since you came back.”

Why—why does that one gesture want to send me into a fit of tears?

Picking up the soda, I take a sip and settle beside him. Unlocking my phone, I bring up all my albums of Seda. Deciding to start at the beginning, I show him a few photos from when I was pregnant with her. His smile is sad, but wistful. He’s handling this extremely well, but that doesn’t erase all the guilt eating away at me.

I never wanted things to end up like this.

I certainly didn’t expect to get pregnant. But when I did, there was a moment when I imagined us together. The three of us. A family.

I show him a few of the sonograms I had saved into my phone before I move onto newborn pictures. I have all her photos organized in my phone in different albums by year, so I let him take it and flick through them. He zooms in from time to time, studying her little face as it grows and changes. Laughing when her bald head gains one tuft of blonde hair that I insisted on putting a bow in. I watch her grow up through the photos alongside him, but I know it’s so different from actually watching her turn from a baby to a toddler and into a child.

“She’s perfect.” He smiles lovingly at a photo of her on her first day of kindergarten this past August. “She looks like you.”

“Like you, too.” I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve ended up with my head resting on his shoulder. “She’s the perfect mix of both of us.”

“Seda,” he says her name softly, carefully, rolling it over in his mouth to test the sound. “That’s an unusual name. Is it a family name of yours?”

I shake my head slightly since I’m still resting against his bare arm. “No. I wanted to honor Forrest. I wasn’t really sure at first how I was going to go about it, but one day when I was searching for names Seda came up, and I loved how it sounded. Then when I read what it meant it felt like maybe Forrest was giving me a nudge in the right direction.”

“What does it mean?” He’s still looking at the last photo he stopped on. She’s on her princess bike with a hot pink helmet. Caleb is running behind her since she was nervous with no training wheels.