his old nickname grated at him something fierce. She’d always called him Benji, and he used to love it, but when he’d met his wife and she’d also tried to call him Benji, he’d put a stop to it. Lisa had deserved something unique—something that hadn’t been done before. Lisa had deserved to be the first for something. He’d always felt slightly guilty for not being able to completely forget about Sofia, and now that Lisa had passed away, the guilt was compounded. He hadn’t given his wife the wholehearted devotion that she deserved.
That wasn’t the point here, though, and he brought his mind back to the petite brunette beside him. Sofia sat in silence, seemingly willing to let him digest what she’d just told him.
“So how?” he asked, turning into a parking lot and choosing a spot as far from the other cars as possible. He slammed the car into Park. There was no way he could have this conversation while driving. “I don’t get it. You were pregnant when you left? Did you know?”
“I knew.” She nodded, and two pink circles materialized on her cheeks. “I was only a few weeks along, and we’d just broken up.”
“It isn’t like we hadn’t broken up and gotten back together before,” he said.
“I didn’t want to get back together. The baby made everything different.”
“Different.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice. He wasn’t sure why he was spoiling for a fight right now, but he was angry—deeply angry. This was a big load to dump on a guy, and why on earth had she waited so long to tell him?
“I should have told you sooner, I know,” she said, as if reading his mind. “At first, I admit that I wasn’t going to tell you anything, but deep down I knew that was wrong. And the older Jack got, the more curious he got. Other kids had dads, and I knew I had to tell you that he existed, but when I got as far as picking up the phone, I didn’t have the words.”
“How about, ‘You’ve got a son’?” he suggested, his tone sarcastic. “That might have been a good start.”
“I didn’t even know if you’d care!”
“If I’d care?” he shot back, the insult slipping deep beneath his defenses. “Of course, I’d care!”
She actually wondered if he’d care that he’d fathered a child? Was that how low her opinion was of him? Did she think that he wouldn’t have cared about her in all of this, either? He’d never have left her to have a baby on her own... He’d have found some way to take care of her.
“You care now!” Her eyes snapped in anger. “You weren’t like this before! You were...” She shook her head irritably. “You were the guy with the leather jacket and the motorcycle. You hated authority. You were seventeen, you just about got expelled from school, and you were—”
“The father,” he interrupted. “I was the father. I deserved to know.”
He had changed. He had to admit that, if only to himself. He’d changed when he found God, and then he’d changed even further when he found Lisa. Lisa had tamed him in a whole different way, introducing him to matching linens and Sunday brunches.
“What would you have done?” she asked. “You weren’t old enough to be a dad.”
“You weren’t old enough to be a mom.” He turned his attention out the window for a moment, trying to wrap his mind around all of this. The facts seemed to float on the surface of his mind without actually penetrating deeply enough to feel real.
“I’ll give you that.” Her tone softened. “It wasn’t easy.”
“So why?” he pressed. “Why not tell me later? Why not call me after he was born?”
“I was trying to protect him.” She said it so matter-of-factly, as if it were the most natural answer in the world.
“From me?” he asked, incredulously. Her silence seemed to confirm it, and he shook his head. “What did you think I was going to do? Did you really think I was that much of a jerk?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to be in his life,” she said.
“So you didn’t bother giving me the chance?”
“You weren’t exactly father material!”
There it was. The truth stung. He’d been a messed-up kid, looking for trouble. He’d flouted authority, put all of his money into his motorbike and taken great pride in doing things his own way. But he’d been a teenager, so it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t been acting like an adult yet.
“I’ve grown up,” he said quietly. “Was I really so bad?”
“There was a lot going on at the time,” she admitted, and she pulled her dark hair away from her face. “My mom used to warn me about rebel boyfriends. My dad had been hers—did you know that? You were just like him—making your own rules, the rebel without a cause. But that doesn’t translate well into parenthood. It’s hard having a father like mine.”
Ben remembered Sofia’s strained relationship with her father. He’d often wondered if she’d jumped onto the back of his bike so readily just to see if her dad would try to stop her. Her father never had—not in the obvious ways, at least. Ben had never had a father in his life, either, so he’d never been one to judge someone else’s daddy issues—something his own son would probably have plenty of, too.
“I know this is a lot to dump on you at once.” Sofia broke the silence. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m sorry. I was afraid. You have to understand it from my perspective. I was having a baby, and I loved that baby more than anything else in the world, even when he was too tiny for me to even show—”
Did she think she had the monopoly on love? It wasn’t all that different for fathers.
“I know exactly what that’s like,” he said.
“You do?” Sofia stopped, swallowed. “You have children?”
He hadn’t meant to bring Lisa and Mandy up, and he heaved a sigh. Here Sofia was in the flesh, a reminder of how he’d failed his wife, bringing the news that they’d made a baby together back before he’d become a Christian—long before he’d met Lisa. And to make matters even worse, when he looked at Sofia McCray, he still saw that gorgeous girl who used to make his heart skip a beat. He wasn’t about to tell her about the family he lost—not yet.
“Never mind. We have work to do,” he replied gruffly. He restarted the car.
She was silent, and he was relieved when he saw a pickup truck whipping through a four-way stop and weaving from one lane to the other. He sent up a silent, and ironic, prayer of thanks for the distraction. He knew who this was—it was Mike Layton, a local journalist he’d already arrested three times for domestic violence.
“Hold on,” he said, slapping on the siren and stepping on the gas. The cruiser roared forward, and Sofia was pushed back into her seat, her eyes widening in surprise.
Making sense of past pain was hard. Pulling over an intoxicated driver—that was his comfort zone. He’d enjoy this one a little bit, and if Mike had been drinking, there was no way he was letting him get home before a nice, lengthy detox. Mavis Layton’s safety relied upon that.
*
