Page 42 of Doctor Daddies

Oh God.

This is the part that I don’t know how to explain to him. Because it’s not just about a secret we’ve been keeping for a couple of months, like the matter of the pregnancy. No, it’s one that has been kept under wraps for years, one that I know will shatter him if it comes to life. But is it worse to keep it from him or to just come clean? I don’t know. I don’t have a clue.

“Because this won’t be the first child that we’ve had together.”

There it is. The words, out, before I can stop them.

In some ways, it feels like a relief, a balloon of weight rising from my chest as I finally tell my brother what I’ve been keeping for him for so long. His brow creases with confusion as he tries to make sense of what I’m saying to him—but then his eyes widen, and his jaw drops.

“You mean…?”

I nod, biting down hard on my lip. I scan his face, waiting for a response, and he rubs his hand across his jaw, staring off into space like he can’t even come close to making sense of what I’ve just told him.

“When you met, that night at the party,” he speaks at last, his voice low, his tone uncertain. “You…?”

I nod again. No point denying it now. Better for all of us to lay out the truth, even if I haven’t given the guys a chance to have a say in all of this. But this isn’t between me and them; this is between my brother and me, and there’s almost nothing I won’t do to clear the air between us now that the truth is out.

“Which one is it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, slightly confused.

“I mean,” he grits out, his tone tense. “Ross, James, or Cole? Which one of them is Lewis’s dad?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know,” I whisper.

For a second, he just stares at me, like he can’t be sure he has heard me correctly.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he mutters, shaking his head. “All this time, when you told me that it didn’t matter who Lewis’s father was, it was because you didn’t know which one of them it was?”

“No!” I exclaim in protest. “It was because I knew you would treat him differently if you knew how—if you found out how he had come into the world. And I didn’t want him to have to deal with that. I didn’t want you to look at him the way that you’re looking at me right now!”

My voice breaks as his judgment comes swimming off him in waves, his disgust at everything I’m saying etched into every feature right now. I search his face desperately for some sign of my brother, some signal that he still sees me as his family, but I can’t find it.

“I would never have let that get in the way of my relationship with Lewis,” Matt tells me, voice quiet. Not in a comforting way, but as if he’s so furious that speaking louder will make him lose control completely. “But this…”

He plants a hand in the kitchen doorframe, and I can see the muscles in his neck tense as he tries to wrap his head around it.

“How the fuck could you all go behind my back like that?” he demands at last. “All of you?”

“Nothing was meant to come of it,” I plead with him. “It was just meant to be one, stupid fucking night, that was all. I neverthought that anything would come of it. I never thought I would see any of them again?—”

“I don’t need to hear this shit,” he grunts, and he brushes past me, striding toward the door and pushing it open. “There. Go. Now.”

A lump tears at my throat, his voice so cold I hardly recognize it as belonging to my brother at all.

“Matt…”

“I’m done hearing you out,” he tells me, his eyes not even meeting mine, as though he can’t even bring himself to look at me. The ache in his voice is impossible to ignore; it reminds me a little of the call he made to me to tell me that our parents had passed all those years ago, the same deep, helpless sense of loss at knowing that the people close to him would not be in his life any longer.

But this—is this worse? At least our parents didn’t go behind his back to hurt him the way we have, me and his three best friends. Even his nephew, who he adores so much, has now been tainted by association, a living, breathing piece of proof as to how all of us turned our backs on him and betrayed him so profoundly.

I don’t know. But I do know that the harm I’ve hit my brother with might be more than we can repair. I want nothing more than for him to be here for me through this pregnancy, than for him to be a part of the lives of his best friends’ children and the siblings of his nephew. But now that I’m standing here before him, I get the feeling that the harm is too deep to be undone, the pain of it too stark for him to ignore.

Like I might have hurt him in a way we can’t come back from.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. They are tiny words, nothing compared to the hurt that I’ve dealt him in these last few days, but I need him to hear them from me, if nothing else. You can’t put something like that back in the bag, but I can at least show him that I mean it when I say that I see how much I have hurt him.

And with that, I make my way to the door, head low as I step out of his apartment. The door closes behind me and I hear the key scrape in the lock, an unspoken signal for me to keep my ass moving, and I take it.