“There’s something you should know,” Piper says, starting up another conversation. Whatever it is, it looks important. Her eyes are flared wide, and her bottom lip develops a tremor. “I really should have told you this before, but I was scared, Caleb.”
And now she’s makingmescared.
I turn my body around in the driver’s seat, keeping the engine off. “Piper?”
“Sonny is yours. You’re his father.”
I can’t be hearing this right.
Maybe my ears are playing tricks on me, but her eyes are not. She’s scanning every corner of my face for my reaction.Whatever face I’m giving her, it can’t be a good one, because she pulls away and faces the window.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“No.” Her voice is tiny.
“Piper?”
My voice carries enough weight to steer her back around to me. I have so many questions flooding my head, but all of them dissipate the second I lock eyes with her. “Sonny is mine, and you decided to keep that information from me.”
“I had to.”
“I deserve to know who my son is.”
I think back to the late-night conversation we had out on the porch. I’d asked her what the deal was between Sonny’s father and her.
“It isn’t worth talking about. Trust me.”
I relay her own words back to her. “It wasn’t worth talking about? What the hell did you mean by that when we had our conversation on the porch?” I swipe a thumb over my jaw. “You wanted me to trust you that it wasn’t a big deal, so I did, and never mentioned it again. I thought it ended badly.”
“Itdid.”
“Which part?”
“When I found out I was pregnantafteryou left.”
That explains why she lied about Sonny’s age at first.
We get on well, and things are natural with Sonny and me, but it never occurred to me that he could be mine.
“I was protecting Sonny.”
“And yourself.”
“Yes,andmyself,” Piper repeats. “But can you blame me, Caleb, for deciding to keep this a secret? You promised me everything, and then left. That does something to a person.”
I start the truck engine. It’s time we get the fuck home.
“I couldn’t introduce Sonny to you as his father. I had to make sure that you weren’t going anywhere. And now that I know you’re not…”
“You think I’d be in a rush to leave town with a house and a daughter?”
“I had to consider it.” She turns to the side window, arms crossed over her chest. “You kept things from me too, and I forgave that. Are you telling me that you can’t forgive this?” The desperation in her voice hurts. She wants me to be okay with this, just as I do. But I don’t think I can be.
Not yet, at least.
“You should have come to me,” I tell her. “We could have worked something out.”
“Worked out what exactly?”
