Page 33 of Saved by my Baby Daddy Spy
Chapter Eleven
Holden
PresentDay
I stand outside Hampton’s front door, I consider all the things I want to yell at him about.
The main one being that he knew how to get in contact with my handler and he never bothered to.
That is the part of the entire situation that hurts me the most. My own brother knew about my child and knew how to talk to me. He didn’t bother to tell my handler.
And now I’m finding out about my daughter after missing so many major milestones in her life.
The door opens before I have the chance to knock. Hampton smiles wide as he crosses his arms and looks at me. The smile fades as he steps to the side, letting me into his home.
“You look like you haven’t slept all night.” Hampton closes the door behind me. “It’s barely five in the morning. You want some coffee? We can talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you this early in the morning.”
“Maybe I look this way because I haven’t slept all night,” I say, my tone cold. “Maybe it’s because I just found out that my brother knew I had a child and didn’t do all that he could to tell me about it.”
I spin to face him, but when I see the look on his face, the words disappear. He shakes his head, his hands clenched into fists at his side.
“You really have the balls to say that when I tried calling you and your piece of shit handler every week for a year? After I sent you message after message, trying to tell you about Kerrigan and Hannah? You were the one who didn’t tell anybody that we wouldn’t be able to reach you for two fucking years.”
“You should have tried harder.”
Hampton points his finger at me. “No. You know what you don’t get to do? This shit. I told your handler. He said that he would pass the message onto you. Every time I spoke to him after he promised to tell you, he insisted that he had. So you don’t get to charge in here and accuse me of not doing all that I could to make sure you knew.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut. “Eli told you that he told me about the baby?”
Hampton nods and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Yes, he did. So, before you think that nobody told you, I thought you knew.”
“Did you tell Hannah that?”
Hampton shakes his head. “Why would I tell her that? She was going through enough shit on her own. You weren’t answering her, and based on the shit I was getting from Eli every time I contacted him, I wasn’t about to put a new mom through the same wringer.”
I scowl at the ground as bile rises in my throat. While I can’t believe that Eli wouldn’t tell me something this big, I know my brother. He wouldn’t tell me something if it wasn’t true.
We don’t lie to each other.
Which means that I can’t blame Hannah or my family for not telling me about Kerrigan.
I sit down on one of the chairs in his living room and bury my face in my hands. This is all a lot to process. I’m not sure I ever wanted kids, but now that I have one, it feels like my entire future is changing. I have another person who needs me to step up.
A person who needs me to be a good dad even though I have no clue how to be that.
I didn’t think I would ever need to know how to be a good dad.
Spying for the government is a dangerous job. I would be better off not falling in love with anyone or starting a family. Lying to the people I love every day, taking off for months and years at a time, would be heartbreaking.
If I died while working, the woman I settled down with would have to open the door to a stranger and find out that our entire lives together had been a lie. She would know that I had been less than honest with her for our entire relationship.
That would weigh on her. She would have to figure out what to tell our children. She would have to be a rock while questioning every moment of our relationship.
How do you mourn a dead man you can’t forgive?
I never thought that I would do that to another person and now I have a daughter I need to worry about.
I need to talk to Eli.
