She widens her eyes and blinks a few times. Great. She’s going to pretend she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I lift a brow and she sighs. All signs of rebellion leave her.
“Yeah.”
“What about your dad?”
“My dad?”
I squeeze her hands. “Your dad.”
She scowls. “I don’t know who he is.”
“What?”
“Mom never told me who he was. The only thing she ever said was he’s a player who dumped her when she got pregnant.”
Things are beginning to make sense now. No wonder Sloane always makes nasty comments about me. She’s lumped me together with her dad.
But I’m not the same as him. I didn’t run away when Daisy dumped Adele on my doorstep. I considered it a few times, but I didn’t do it. And there’s no way I’m letting my baby girl go now. She’s captured my heart. She’s mine.
“Your mom raised you alone?”
She snorts. “Raised? If you consider forgetting to feed me or refusing to buy me school supplies or moving from state to state, raising me, I guess she raised me.”
No wonder Sloane’s flaky. Her mom never taught her any better. Her mom never taught her anything. Except, how to be unreliable and unpredictable. I’ll cut her some slack the next time she’s late.
“I’m sorry for what you went through.”
She wrenches her hands from mine. “Do not pity me. I don’t need your pity.”
I raise my hands in the air. “I don’t pity you. I commiserate with you.”
“What do you know about it?” She snarls. “You with your perfect family. Your loving mother, your five brothers who would literally stand in front of a moving truck for you.”
I hold up a finger. “Technically, it was a car, not a truck.”
“This isn’t funny.” She leaps to her feet and Boozer yelps. She starts pacing around the living room. “I don’t have five brothers who rush to help me whenever life slaps me down. There’s no one to buy me an entire room of baby stuff because I found out I’m a dad. There’s no mom to change my baby’s diaper, so I don’t have to.”
I stand and cross my arms over my chest. “I might have had five brothers, but I didn’t have a dad. He left when I was eleven.”
She screeches to a halt. “Your mom is divorced?”
“Divorced is a nice way of saying my dad abandoned us right before Eli’s sixteenth birthday and no one’s seen or heard from him since.”
“He doesn’t pay child support?”
“He hasn’t had a thing to do with us since he began his new family.”
Her eyes widen. “His new family?”
“And now you know why I can’t be a good dad.” The words slip out but I don’t regret them. It’s a relief to actually say the words out loud.
“Hold on. You think you can’t be a good dad because your dad abandoned you?”
“I didn’t have a good dad growing up. How would I know how to be one?”
“I might not have realized your dad left when you were young, but I do know you had great role models growing up.”
“Role models?”
