Page 65 of Best Friend Burden

If she immediately jumped into a relationship with someone else, she would have told me that. After all, it wasn't like she was shy about saying that she'd been sleeping around (and I wasn't sure I believed that — her face turned just red enough, and she paused just long enough for me to get a strong impression that she was lying). No, she wanted me to think that the baby wasn't mine because she was certain it was mine.

I felt like Sherlock Holmes for coming to that conclusion, but once I did, I tried to mentally talk myself out of it.

And this internal monologue continued as I got home, where Jackson was waiting for me.

The second I walked inside, he paused what he was watching on TV.

“How’d it go?” he asked. I didn’t need to respond. He saw the expression on my face. “Oh.”

I walked down towards him and collapsed next to him on the couch.

“Is the baby yours?” he asked.

“She said it wasn’t,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure she was lying. She’s never been much of a poker player.”

He was speechless. I suppose there wasn’t much to say to that.

“Am I a bad dad for abandoning my son?” I asked.

“Or daughter.” he corrected me.

“Or daughter,” I said.

Jackson thought for a moment. “If she says it’s not yours, you need to accept that, even if you don’t believe her. What are you supposed to do? Demand a paternity test to prove it’s yours?”

“No,” I said, “I just… I know it was mutual that we called things off, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve done something wrong. I’m doing something wrong by leaving them both behind.”

“You gave her the opportunity to ask for help. She certainly doesn’t need it, and it sounds to me that she may not even want it.” He said.

That hurt. I don’t know why it hurt, but it felt like rejection. Like she was breaking up with me all over again.

“You can reach out again when you get back,” he said.

“Yeah, but that’s six months from now,” I said. “That’s forever in the future.”

“It’s going to fly by,” he assured me. “It’s the frustrating thing about life. Everything ends eventually, and, for the good things, it’s never enough time. You’re going to have a blast in Japan and before you know it, you’ll be on your way back home with pictures and memories and stories to tell.”

The eight months since I’d last seen Melody both felt like forever and a blip. Working on the album had kept me so busy that I didn’t notice the passage of time, but the idea of us being together was so distant in my mind that it almost felt like a dream or somebody else’s life.

“You may be in a different place six months from now, too,” he said. “You may meet someone out there.”

Not likely, I thought.

“Or she might meet someone else here,” Jackson said. “That’s how life goes sometimes.”

That seemed more likely to me.

“You know, it’s like with me and Natasha,” he said. “We had almost a full year together, and we’re ending things on good terms because it’s what’s best. Am I happy about it? Of course not, but life will go on, and we’re better off for it. She’ll be back in six months' time or, I don’t know, maybe she won’t be.

“What it comes down to,” he said, “is that if it's meant to be, it's meant to be. And if not, well, we'll still get to hold on to those happy memories.”

The sentence came out of his mouth like an icepick through my heart.

Because it wasn't so simple as he made it out to be. I could choose to stay. I didn't need to get on that plane. I could go back to Melody and tell her I know that I'm the father of that baby and, even if I wasn't, I wanted to be.

An entire lifetime flashed before my eyes. The baby being born. Us getting married. Us raising the baby, and me teaching it to play piano.

I'd become a boring old dad instead of following the rock star dream I'd intended to so many years ago. All I had to do was not get on that plane.

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