Page 89 of Mile High Ex's Dad
I look at him. “Move.”
He doesn’t.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry.”
That almost makes me laugh.
“For what?” I ask. “You’re going to have to narrow it down.”
His mouth tightens. “About earlier.”
“Which part? The rehearsal dinner or your fiancée shoving me in the hallway?”
His jaw shifts. “Camille lost her temper.”
I almost laugh. Not because it’s funny, but because he still sounds exactly like himself. Even trying to apologize, he manages to make it sound like the problem is the general weather of the day, not what he actually said and did.
“You’re not sorry,” I say.
His mouth tightens. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
He looks away for a second, jaw working, then back at me. “I didn’t come here to fight.”
“Right,” I say.
He exhales through his nose and lowers his voice. “Fine. Believe whatever you want.”
“I do.”
I shift to go around him, but he stops me again.
This time when I look at him, I’m not annoyed anymore. I’m done.
Then he says, “I know you’re pregnant.”
Everything in me goes still.
For one second, the hallway narrows. The lights. The carpet. The sound of distant movement from downstairs. It all drops back under that single sentence.
I hold his gaze. “And?” I say.
His expression changes, just slightly. He wasn’t expecting that. Panic maybe. Something that would let him feel in control of the conversation. Instead he gets me standing there looking at him like I have no reason to lie anymore.
He glances once, quickly, at my middle, then back to my face. “We broke up eight months ago.”
I stare at him for a beat.
Then I say, very clearly, “It’s not yours.”
The words hang there between us.
He looks relieved first. I see it happen. That little release in his face, in his shoulders, the part of him that didn’t want that possibility touching his life.
Then the relief curdles almost immediately into something else. Annoyance. Suspicion. A kind of bruised disbelief. Like he doesn’t know what he dislikes more, the idea that the baby might have been his, or the fact that it definitely isn’t.
He studies me too long. “You expect me to believe that?”
