Prologue
My name isn’t Tom, but I’m Petty AF.
—T-shirt
Ramsey
I sat in the college campus coffee shop and waited for Nadine to show.
She was a professor at the University of Arkansas where she taught sociology.
She, of course, was late.
Really, really late.
I glanced at my watch again and realized that she was so late that it likely meant that she wasn’t coming.
How surprising.
It’d been the same old song and dance ever since I’d found out that she was pregnant.
I’d been pretty neutral about finding out that she was pregnant.
It wasn’t like I wanted kids—I was in the fuckin’ military for Christ’s sake with no end in sight—but I wasn’t opposed to having them.
When I’d found out, I’d said that I would be there every step of the way.
Only, she hadn’t wanted me there every step of the way.
She’d wanted me gone and never missed an opportunity to share that she didn’t want me there.
I’d had to fight for everything that I got timewise with my kid, and she literally fought me at every turn.
Hell, I hadn’t even realized she’d had Dean until three weeks later.
Which fucking sucked, because I’d missed having time off with him before I’d had to go back to work.
I’d gotten to see him for six short hours before I’d been forced to return to the base, where I’d then been sent out on a mission.
The next time I got to see Dean, he’d been two months old and terrified of me.
Apparently, Dean had never been around another man.
I’d learned from a private investigator that Nadine had been a lesbian, and she’d wanted a child. But she and her girlfriend had been too poor to go the route of in vitro. They’d tossed a fucking coin to find out who would be pregnant, and Nadine had won.
Nadine had gone out one night with her girlfriend’s permission and had fucked the first dumb bastard that gave her attention—that dumb bastard being me.
They had intended to never tell me, but Nadine and her girlfriend had had a stroke of conscience and had thought…we should tell him. But he’s military, so he probably won’t care anyway.
Well, I had cared.
I’d wanted to be a part of my son’s life.
But it’d become so increasingly hard to do that that I’d had to leave the military.
I’d gotten a place in Little Rock and had fought to see Dean.
Only, more often than not, Nadine violated court orders and never showed up for our court-mandated swaps.
