Page 115 of This Wild Heart

My phone screen lit up with an email notification, and my heart thumped unevenly at the picture of Leo that I’d set as the background. It was a still from the video of Parker making him laugh. In the corner of the picture, I could see the line of Parker’s jaw and his wide smile.

My dad and I stared down at the screen until it went dark again. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he could hear the erratic beat of my pulse.

“Cute baby,” he said quietly.

“He is.”

I could feel his eyes on me. “Whose is it?”

Mine.

He felt like mine.

They both did. There was no arguing with my heart on that account, but everything else wanted me to get my shit together.

“I have a lot to tell you, Dad,” I whispered brokenly.

He was quiet for a moment. “I have nowhere else to be, gingersnap.” At my childhood nickname, my chin trembled. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Two tears slid down my cheeks, the relief of being able to talk to him so great that it felt like my chest was breaking open. “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened,” he said patiently. “We’ll figure it out from there.”

So I did.

My throat was scratchy and dry by the time I finished talking, and he never interrupted once. The biggest reaction was a heavy exhale when I got to Leo’s arrival, but even then, he listened.

When we were caught up—naturally, I’d kept the story Dad-appropriate, scrubbed of any sex mentions or the insistent longing that clung to my insides—the silence in the room was weighted. Dad leaned his head back and stared up at the ceiling for a long moment.

I tried to be patient, I tried to wait him out, but the clawing urge to know what he was thinking got the better of me. It always did, didn’t it?

“Well?” I licked my lips, angling toward him on the couch. “Anything?”

His mouth hooked up in a half smile. “I should’ve known, that’s all.”

My brow pinched. “What do you mean?”

Dad sighed. “I never even got a chance to know the guy, Anya. You weremarried, and maybe if I hadn’t been so shocked, I might have pieced it together when you didn’t have him in the room with us when we talked.” He chose his words carefully. “If you were in love with someone, you’d want me to know him.”

With a tight throat, I managed an apologetic look. “You’re right.”

His gaze was relentlessly understanding. “Do you wish I knew him now?” he asked quietly.

It took a long second, but my chin dipped twice in a short nod.

One of my dad’s greatest gifts was his intentionality. He never rushed a decision, never jumped headlong into anything. His patience was legend in our family, and even with Willa and Violet and the craziness they brought into our day-to-day, he seemed to slow when it mattered most.

“Lies always weigh us down, gingersnap. It doesn’t matter if they’re the lies we’re only telling to ourselves or the ones we’re telling the rest of the world.”

“We weren’t really thinking about that when we woke up married,” I said wryly.

He smiled fondly. “You climbed your way up the tree before you knew if you could get down.”

“I sure as hell did.”

“The easy part is telling everyone else the truth,” he said.

For a moment, I stared at him. “I’m not sure I want to ask about the hard part.”

---