Page 68 of The Betrayal

She is my wife.

And even though I haven’t told her out loud.

I love her.

With every single fiber I have.

This isn’t the way I expected my life to go at forty-seven, but here I am, married to my best friend’s daughter and now she is pregnant.

But she is my life. Titus is going to hate me, but he would hate me even more if I kicked her to the curb and let her live out her life alone as a single mother, raising a baby by herself.

She will never be by herself.

She will always have me.

She will eventually have Titus and Amora. She has Dex and Sage, Killian and Reese, Connie and Kaleb and of course, Nate.

She doesn’t realize it yet, but she has a whole family waiting for her.

She will never be alone.

Ever.

I would make sure of that, until my last dying breath. And if, if the baby isn’t mine and the dad decides he wants to be part of his baby’s life, then she will have him too.

I won’t step aside, but I will let him be a dad.

Because the baby deserves to know it’s father.

Whether that be me or not. It’ll break my heart, but it’s the right thing.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ARIZONA

We walk towards Pricks, and I feel at ease now that Keaton knows. I had no idea how he was going to react, but I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome. He didn’t walk away.

He still wanted whatever this was between us.

He wanted to be here for the baby whether it was his or not.

He still wanted me.

He promised he wouldn’t leave me.

Promised he would be by my side.

My heart sung in my chest, leaping and pirouetting.

His fingers were laced with mine, and it’s like all my worries slipped out from underneath my feet and we were floating. Killian promised not to breathe a word to my dad until I was ready, and I trusted him. Also, Reese wouldn’t let him say anything. It’s not that I didn’t want my dad to know, I would tell him, but I needed to fix what was already broken before I threw something else into the mix. I wanted to call my dad and tell him everything and tell him I wanted to forgive him but it will just take me a little time.

Understandably. I felt betrayed in the worst possible way. My mom left me when I was a baby, and now my dad was married to a girl a little older than me and having another baby. I was his life. But now I wasn’t going to be his everything and that was really fucking selfish of me to even be thinking these thoughts, but I didn’t care. I already lost one parent, and now I was going to lose another one because he chose to move on and have another baby—which he was well within his right to do, obviously—but it still hurt. I was used to being his everything and now, well… I felt like I had been kicked to the curb and disregarded.

But I knew I hadn’t. That’s the annoying thing. My brain was constantly reminding me of what he’d done.

He texts me every morning and every night just like he always has done, but I leave him on read, because I am horrible.

My stomach knots and I feel instantly sad.