I hated everything about how he spoke. How he sounded like he was in a business meeting discussing a contract. Not a baby.Not my baby.
I moved right in front of his desk and pressed my fingertips to the top.
“Except she’s not your granddaughter, is she?” I said, my voice deadly low.
He didn’t even balk, and that was how I knew I had him. How I knew I was right.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” I bent closer. “I know Daisy’s baby isn’t your grandchild because Todd isn’t your son.”
His parents’ living arrangement wasn’t the only thing Todd had let slip.
“How do you?—”
“How do you think?” I charged, my voice low and taut.
He’d found out the night of his father’s birthday party—the night Daisy and I had talked on the balcony. The night she’d gotten pregnant.
Todd had called me in a panic the next day. I thought it was because Daisy had told him what I’d said—what I’d suggested.
I remembered the way my heart clawed at my throat waiting for Todd to get to the farm. I didn’t know what was going to happen, so I figured it was safest to talk where there was only a field of flowers to hear.
Except the fury—and alcohol—he’d shown up with wasn’t for me. It was for his parents.
Apparently, earlier in the night, while he’d been roaming the house looking for Daisy—who’d been out on the deck with me—he’d walked in on his dad and another man together.
“I don’t understand. I don’t fucking…I don’t understand.” He’d trampled a path through the flowers, chugging from the bottle of vodka as he went.
“I asked him this morning. I asked, and he just brushed me off. ‘We have an image, Todd. A happy family. We don’t talk about what doesn’t fit in that image.’”
“Does Mom know?”
“Of course, she knows. We have separate arrangements, but the family—our legacy—comes first.”
“And me?”
“Enough. This conversation is over and is never going to be spoken of again. You know better than this, Todd. You know how our world works.”
Todd had replayed the whole conversation, letting me feel as though I’d been a fly on the wall the whole time.
Knowing his parents lived mostly separate lives hadn’t been a tough pill to swallow. There were so many couples in that upper echelon that did the same. But learning his father was gay, it cracked something inside him that I couldn’t understand.
Later that week, he’d done a DNA test.
Todd McCormick Sr. wasn’t Todd’s father.
“After the night after he found out you’re gay, he took a paternity test,” I said, watching his eyes dart around the room like some invisible microphone was recording me.
Todd got the results a few weeks later—a few days after Daisy realized she was pregnant. My resolution to keep my distance, to protect my heart, went up in smoke when my friend realized his family, the box he’d cut himself into pieces to fit into, wasn’t actually his.
I told him to tell Daisy, but he wouldn’t. Maybe he couldn’t. But there was nothing else I could do except respect his wishes. Even now…even after the choices he’d made, I’d kept this part of his truth from Daisy. However, my respect for him ended at his parents—crashed and burned when they started threatening my wife and our baby.
“Goddammit, Todd.” McCormick sat back in his chair, his ruddy face taking on a distinctly clammy sheen.
It wasn’t my responsibility to wait while he processed the information. He didn’t deserve that kind of compassion. He certainly hadn’t shown it to me, let alone Todd.
“You want to threaten to ruin my business? Go ahead. I don’t know what Todd told you, but I never relied on your name or connections to make my business what it is. I guess maybe I always knew it was nothing but hollow support,” I informed him coolly. “However, if you try to physically or legally insert yourselves into my daughter’s life, I can promise you that the first thing that will come out is how little biological right you have to do so.”
