Daddy's Toy-Box (A Daddy's Best Friend Romance)

by Caitlin Daire

  I nodded grimly. “Neither do I. But I know what the hell we need to do.”

  “What?”

  “Face the issue head on, Nora. Go up there and see them. Maybe there’s a simple explanation. Maybe that wasn’t even your dad’s blood type; maybe they gave him the wrong card by accident.”

  She nodded weakly. “I know I have to talk to them. But…I don’t know how. I can’t do it alone.”

  “You won’t be alone,” I said firmly. “You’ll have me. Go and get in the car. I’m taking you to Santa Barbara right now.”

  “We can’t go there now.”

  “Why not? It’s only a two hour drive. Filming doesn’t start till late tomorrow. We’ll be fine. We’ll take Oscar. He’ll love the ride. And Nora…you need to know.”

  She nodded slowly. “You’re right. Let’s go,” she said, her voice barely above a murmur.

  The northwest drive was made in silence, save for the sound of Oscar panting with joy as he stuck his golden head out one of the back windows and watched the world speed by. Nora obviously wasn’t in the mood for talking, and I didn’t want to push her. There’d be plenty of time to talk later, once we knew what the fuck was going on with her family.

  When we arrived, it was just after seven o’clock, and Nora’s parents came outside when they heard my car in the drive.

  “Jacob, Nora. This is a big surprise,” Roy said, a wide grin breaking out on his face as he strode toward us. “We were just having dinner.”

  Nora didn’t make any small talk or pull any punches. “I also had a big surprise today,” she said. “I found out you two have probably been lying to me my whole life. Unless there’s some sort of explanation as to why I have a totally different blood type to either of you?”

  She looked at her parents expectantly, hands on her hips and Oscar by her side. Anne’s face immediately turned ashen, and I knew we were right before she or her husband even said a word.

  “Nora…” she began. “I’m so sorry.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Nora

  My knees nearly buckled as my mother spoke, and Jacob held me in place.

  “It’s okay,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”

  That wasn’t true. I wasn’t okay, not at all.

  “Please, can we go inside and talk about this?” Mom said, twisting her hands nervously.

  I shook my head and swallowed. Hard. “No. I don’t want to talk about anything. Not with you. Not now.”

  “Please, sweetie, let us explain.”

  I was so sick of all the lies, so sick of hearing ‘let me explain’ from people. The last year of my life had been filled with deceit, and I didn’t want to stick around for one more second, especially in my current state of mind.

  “No. I’m leaving,” I said weakly, but then my legs almost caved in completely.

  “Come on,” Jacob said, holding me upright, left arm wrapped around my shoulders. “One step at a time. One word at a time. Let’s go and find out what they have to say. That’s why we’re here.”

  I nodded and let him guide me inside, and then I sat and stared at the blank TV, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes. “So I’m adopted, and you never told me,” I finally said once I could see that everyone had taken a seat.

  Mom shook her head. “No, darling, you aren’t adopted. I gave birth to you. You’re our daughter. You’re just not…”

  She trailed off, and Dad took over finishing her sentence. “You’re not biologically my daughter,” he said. “But you’re still my daughter, a hundred percent. I want you to remember that.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Then let us explain,” Mom said. “Nora, do you remember when I told you about how I dated a man before I met your father? A man who wasn’t so nice?”

  I nodded, and she went on.

  “He was abusive. Very abusive. He would hurt me over the smallest things, and I was too scared to leave. But one day I finally snapped and called the police when he punched me in the face over his dinner not being hot enough. When the police arrived, it turned out he was already wanted—he had a warrant out for his arrest for a string of armed robberies. He killed a person during one of those robberies. So he went to prison for a long time.”

  She took a deep breath before continuing. “As soon as he was arrested, I knew I had to change my life. I stopped speaking to all my friends; the ones who’d gotten me involved with a man like him in the first place. I moved to another city, quickly found another job. And then I met your father. We were only together for a few weeks when I found out I was already pregnant.”

  “Three and a half months pregnant, to be specific,” Dad cut in.

  Mom looked at him and nodded. “I assumed he’d leave me. But he didn’t,” she said softly. “He asked me to marry him instead.”

  Dad squeezed her hand. “I loved your mother, Nora, and part of loving her meant also loving and accepting her baby, even if I wasn’t the biological father. And I did. I always loved you, every bit of you, from the moment you were born. Even before you were born. You weren’t mine, but you were mine.”

  I stared at them both, barely able to believe what I was hearing. All these years, they’d kept this from me. Such an enormous secret.

  “So you just thought you’d never tell me who my real father was?” I asked, my voice rising with each word. “You just hoped I wouldn’t find out? That’s horrible! Just because he was a criminal doesn’t mean I didn’t deserve to know he existed!”

  A tear ran down Mom’s cheek, but I didn’t move to grab a tissue from the box next to me on the coffee table.

  “We thought we did the right thing. We discussed it for a long time, Nora, and we ended up going to tell your father about you while he was still in prison. He said…he said I should’ve had an abortion. Said he didn’t care or want you.”

  That felt like a punch in the gut.

  “We didn’t want you growing up feeling different, feeling unwanted. So we ended up deciding not to tell you. When you got older, we considered it again, and we went and tracked him down. Showed him pictures of you. He said the same thing. Didn’t want to know you. He never changed. He was in and out of prison his whole life, right up until he passed, and he never changed his mind about not wanting you.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “He passed away a couple of months ago,” Mom said, not meeting my eyes.

  “So you never even gave me a chance to know about him before he died.”

  “I’m sorry, Nora,” Mom replied, beginning to cry in earnest now. “We thought we were doing the right thing.”

  “He knew how to find you,” Dad interjected. “When he was out of prison, he could’ve easily tracked you down and told you. But he didn’t.”

  “Didn’t I still deserve a chance to meet him? Confront him?” I asked indignantly.

  “Do you think confronting him would’ve changed anything? Do you think it would’ve made you feel any better?” Jacob said from beside me.

  I whirled around to face him. “Please stay out of this, Jacob. This isn’t your business.”

  I knew I was being a bitch to him—this was his business. It had become his business as soon as I told him what was going on and he drove me up here. But right now I couldn’t worry about his feelings. I was too distraught over all my own emotional crap. I felt like I was trapped in some sort of nightmare, trapped in a net of lies that I couldn’t disentangle myself from no matter how much I squirmed and cried.

  My parents were both silent, and I shook my head and abruptly stood up. “I can’t be here anymore,” I mumbled. “I need to get out.”

  With that, I took off toward the back door of the house, and I ran.

  I ran like hell.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Jacob

  “Nora! Come back!”

  I went after her as she dashed away, and Anne and Roy followed me down the hall and into the backyard. Anne was crying, but there wasn’t time for me to sto
p and comfort her right now. I had to find Nora. She was in a really bad place after the news she’d just heard, and I had to make sure she was all right, wherever she’d run off to.

  The yard was empty.

  “Where would she have gone?” I asked her parents.

  Roy sighed. “I don’t know. Did she take the car?”

  I went and looked over the side gate. My car was still in the drive.

  “No,” I said. “But she has to be around here somewhere. She really can’t have gone too far in the last couple of minutes.”

  “We’ll go and look in the park down the street,” Roy said. “She used to go there on walks a lot when she was young.”

  “Okay. I’ll go the other way,” I replied. I went back into the house to get Oscar, and I told him to sit in the backyard for a second. “Hey, boy. I need you to help me find your human. She’s out there somewhere. Go find her!”

  Oscar barked and raced toward the back fence, and I frowned as I followed him. A few of the boards had come loose, and if I pulled all of them back at the same time, it made a space in the fence big enough for a person to fit through.

  “Is this where she went, Oscar?” I asked.

  The dog barked again and wormed his way through the hole, and I followed suit. On the other side of the fence was an expanse of trees and a path, and I followed Oscar down the path until I reached a creek. It was too dark to see much of anything other than the moonlight glinting off the murky water, but I carefully followed the dog down to the creek bank.

  As we approached, I heard sniffles, and I knew Oscar had led me to the right place. “Nora?” I called out. “Are you there?”

  “I need to be alone,” she replied. I had to strain to hear her voice; she was so quiet.

  “Oscar is worried about you,” I replied, taking a step closer to where she was sitting under a tree at the top of the bank. “And so am I. We all are.”

  “You know, just a month ago, I was talking about Walter Simmons’ life and saying how I couldn’t even imagine not knowing who my real father was, like what happened to him. And it turns out that’s actually my life too,” she said, a grim note in her voice.

  “I know. Please come home and we’ll talk about it.”

  “I can’t go back there. Not now,” she replied tearfully. “My parents…they lied about everything for so long. I can’t even look at them.”

  “I know you’re upset at them. Can we at least talk about it, though?” She shrugged, and I took a seat on the leafy bank next to her. “Okay, I know you don’t want to talk, so let me say some things.”

  “Okay. Fine,” she whispered.

  “Remember how I told you about my father? How he took off when my Mom was pregnant?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, see, I always knew who he was. Mom told me who he was, so I kept tabs on him over the years. And you know what? It was fucking horrible. I hated knowing that this man was out there, not wanting me or needing to know me at all. He knew I existed, and he simply didn’t give a flying fuck. You know how that made me feel?”

  “Shitty, I presume,” she said softly.

  “Worse than shitty. It was fucking horrible, growing up knowing that one of my parents didn’t want me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Jacob,” she said.

  I took a breath and continued. “I always felt like I had to prove something to people; prove that there was a reason to want me or need me. But I never really felt like I achieved it. I never felt like I was actually good enough, because deep down, no matter what I did, no matter how smart I was or what I achieved, I still knew that my own father didn’t want me.”

  “But he never even met you. Maybe he would’ve changed his mind if you just had the chance to meet him. That’s why I’m so mad at my parents. They never gave me the chance.”

  I shook my head. “No, he did meet me. My Mom did the same as your parents; tried to track him down and show him photos of me and so on. She even took me to see him once. He threw us out. He didn’t care. Didn’t want me.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “He’s the one who should be sorry. Because you know what? After a while I realized my head was full of shit. I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. I was good enough, the whole time. He was the one who wasn’t good enough to be my father, because if he was, he would’ve shown up and been my father. But it took me over twenty years to realize that.”

  Nora was silent as she digested what I’d said, and I took the chance to make my point. “So I think this is what your parents wanted to do for you, Nora. They had two choices. They could either let you grow up happy and blissfully unaware of your true parentage, or they could tell you who he was. And part of telling you who he was meant telling you he didn’t want you or care about you or love you. The man was a criminal scumbag who literally wanted you aborted. So you would’ve grown up with a similar childhood experience to my own—always feeling sort of empty, always feeling like you weren’t good enough for your own father to want or love. I don’t think your parents wanted that for you.”

  “I guess.”

  “So tell me…if it was you, which choice would you make for your own child?” I asked. “Would you try to give them the happiest life you could, or would you go for full honesty, even if that meant possibly ruining their childhood and emotional wellbeing?”

  Nora was silent, and I knew I’d hit home with my point.

  “Maybe never telling you was the wrong thing to do,” I said. “And that’s all on them. That was their choice. But can you at least try to understand why they did it?”

  She nodded. “I guess it’s a bit like what you did with Ina.”

  “Exactly. I know I did something wrong there. Did something illegal. But if it was between that and sending her back to a horrible life, then shit…I pick the lesser of two evils every time. That’s what your parents did. They made their choice in a really messy situation, and they’ve been living with it ever since.”

  Nora went silent again, and I slung an arm around her. “Your father…well, the man you know as your father, anyway. Roy. He’s the one who loved you and wanted you and took care of you, even before you were born. He raised you, and he never once treated you differently to your younger brother, did he?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “The man who got your mother pregnant—he was nothing. Just a sperm donor. He’s not your real dad. But the man who’s out there roaming the streets right now looking for you…you know who would do that for you?”

  As I finished my sentence, the faint sound of Roy’s voice in the distance carried over to us on the wind, calling out Nora’s name as if to emphasize my point.

  “My real dad,” Nora said softly.

  “Exactly. He gave you a wonderful childhood, and so did your mom,” I said. “Well, a ‘boring, regular’ childhood as you put it a while ago, which believe me, is wonderful. I would’ve killed to have a regular childhood when I was young.”

  “I get it,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jacob. I’ve been so selfish. It never even occurred to me that you went through something so similar. I just…I was so upset I could only see my own problems.”

  “It’s fine. Everyone’s allowed to be a bit selfish from time to time. But I think you should go back and talk to your parents now,” I replied. “You need to stop running and hiding. Face the issue head on, like I said earlier.”

  She sighed and hugged her knees to her chest, looking out at the moonlit water of the creek. “Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll go back. I’ll talk to them.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Nora

  Jacob was right about everything.

  I’d simply been too blinded with emotion to look at anything from a viewpoint other than my own, but he’d opened my eyes and shown me the light. I knew what I had to do now. I had to talk to my parents and actually listen this time, instead of shrilly arguing with them and making unfounded accusations about them being horrible people for never le
tting me know my real father. From what they’d said, my biological father wasn’t worth knowing, and maybe that was okay. Maybe families didn’t have to be dictated entirely by genes and biology. It could be about the people who chose to accept you and love you whether or not you ‘belonged’ to them in a genetic sense.

  I trudged back toward my childhood home with Jacob, Oscar padding behind us. My parents were waiting out on the side porch—Jacob had texted them to let them know to stop looking for me. Their faces were drawn and etched with guilt as we approached, and I gave them a weak smile. “Can we go back inside?”

  We all sat back down in the living room a moment later, except for Jacob, who took Oscar out into another room to give my family some privacy. Mom sighed and ran her hand through her hair. She was starting to get a couple of greys, but as she looked over at me, she looked young, vulnerable.

  Her hazel eyes fixed on me. “I’m so sorry, Nora. Please believe me. We only wanted the best for you,” she said, her voice weary.

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t easy keeping something this big from you all these years. Perhaps it’s a good thing that it’s finally all come out now,” she murmured. She looked down, then back up and across the room, not at the row of photos above the mantel, but into the past.

  Dad put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed it for a second, and then he moved over next to me. “I’m sorry too, Nora. But no matter how long you stay mad at me for, I’m still your dad. And you’re my daughter, whether you like it or not,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion.

  “I do like it,” I said, my own voice cracking. “I know you’re my dad, and I wouldn’t want anyone else.”

  I cried then, for longer than I cared to admit, and when I was done and my eyes were dry, we talked. I heard in great detail about everything my parents hid from me over the years, how hard it was, how many times they’d thought of telling me. How many times they’d been terrified that I’d inadvertently find out their secret from a simple doctor’s visit, just like I had today. They’d been waiting for things to come crashing down for a long time now, but neither of them had really been ready for it to happen. And how could anyone ever be ready for such a momentous thing?