by Nella Tyler
But the message that I’d gotten told a very different story. Hey! I wanted to let you know I finally got into town this morning. Got any time for me?
I had shut my phone off completely and put it away in my pocket for the rest of Cade’s visit, but the words had seared themselves on my mind. I’d just been thinking of the fact that Titan had almost completely disappeared out of my life when the message had come in. It wasn’t fair.
There was a part of me that wanted to message Titan back and tell him that I’d reconsidered, that I didn’t want him to have any part of my life or Addie’s, and that if he tried to force some kind of connection, I’d send my Dad and my brother to talk to him about it. But I knew that I couldn’t. My parents would stand up for me, but I knew that they would be disappointed. If Titan wanted to have some part in his daughter’s life, I shouldn’t be putting up any barriers to it.
I managed to keep it together while Cade was still at my place. I could tell that he was hoping for an invitation to stay the night, but I was fairly certain that if I let him stay over, I’d end up spilling the beans to him. You would think that after the festival and everything else that had happened, I wouldn’t feel like I needed to hide Titan’s messages to me from Cade, but I did anyway.
I didn’t want him to think that there was anything at all between Titan and me, but I also didn’t want to be petty and deny Titan the possibility of having a relationship with his child for no real reason other than my own annoyance with him.
Cade helped me get Addie ready for bed, and I thought to myself that having someone I was in love with and cared about helping me with my daughter, treating her like his own was exactly what I had been hungry for ever since Addie had been born. I had no idea if Cade actually wanted the job of being a father to her, but I could hope that he did. I didn’t think there was a way for us to have the future we’d talked about that evening if he wasn’t ready to bring himself up to that.
I didn’t want to make him leave, but I also couldn’t let him stay. I knew I needed to do the right thing and reply to Titan, and I couldn’t make myself do that while Cade was watching me.
I didn’t want to lie to him exactly, but I wasn’t sure that I could deal with telling him everything about the situation. I wasn’t sure—even still—how Cade felt about the fact that I felt obligated to let Titan have a chance to get to know his daughter. I kissed him for as long as I could, pressing my body tightly against his, wishing that I could just put everything other than him, my parents, and my daughter a million miles away from both of us.
Once I was alone—Addie in bed, Cade on his way home—I poured myself a glass of wine and tried to psych myself up for replying to Titan’s message. I turned on my phone and unlocked the screen, taking a sip of my wine. The message came right back up as soon as I opened the app for it, and I looked at Titan’s comment to me.
I was a little confused at the fact that Titan had asked if I had time for him, as opposed to wanting to see Adelyn or asking if I had time to arrange a meeting. But I decided that I was going to be straightforward.
Hey! Sorry, I had visitors, so couldn’t reply sooner. I took a deep breath and a sip of my wine. I think I have time to arrange a meeting for you and Addie if you’re still interested. I tapped send and turned on the TV; somehow it was too quiet in my little house, with my daughter asleep and the man I loved away. I put on an educational program that I didn’t even really care about, just to have a little background noise.
About a minute later, my phone vibrated and flashed that I had a reply. Sure thing! When are you free? I frowned to myself, wondering if he had read my message fully, but that wasn’t the problem. If he hadn’t, then he hadn’t. I couldn’t imagine why he would want to meet with me other than to be introduced to his daughter. He had made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t even remotely interested in me anymore.
I’ll be available to meet with you next week in the afternoon, I wrote back after some thought. You can come by the farm, and I’ll show you your daughter. I tapped send and thought for another moment. I’ll have a better idea of when, exactly, after the weekend.
I was going to be seeing Cade after church on Sunday, and I just hoped that I would be able to keep Titan out of my mind altogether when we saw each other again. I knew that it wasn’t fair to keep him in the dark, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to loop him into the situation until I knew the truth about whether or not Titan intended to really be involved in Addie’s life.
I’m looking forward to it!
After that, I turned my phone off again; the alarm would go off whether or not I had it turned on, so I could go the rest of the night without even knowing whether or not Titan had anything else to say to me.
I felt jumpy, on edge, without being able to specifically say why. I was doing what I thought was the right thing, but I knew that Cade might not see it the same way. I hadn’t exactly lied to him, but I’d told him just enough to get him to back off because I didn’t want to tell him the full truth.
I finished off my wine and set the baby monitor in case Addie woke up. I knew I would have to get up early, but as I changed out of my clothes and into a nightgown and washed the makeup off of my face, I was sure that I wouldn’t get even a wink of sleep the rest of the night. I felt terrible about not being upfront with Cade, but I couldn’t see a way—yet—to be fully direct with him. It was obvious to me that Cade had thought that there was still some kind of feeling between Titan and me, and until I saw how Titan meant to be with Addie I didn’t want to disqualify him from my life completely.
I thought about talking to Mom about what I should do, about how I should handle the situation. I knew that she was conflicted about Titan. After all, he was technically the father of her grandchild, but he was also the man who’d abandoned me while I was pregnant. I knew that my parents would probably want me to give Titan at least the chance to do right by Addie, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was suspicious that it had taken him over a year to be interested in her—or in having anything to do with me through her.
I turned over in bed and tried to calm myself down by thinking about what I would need to do the next day; normally it helped me to make a little list of things, but my brain wasn’t having it. It kept circling around to the fact that in a few days, a week on the outside, I was going to be around Titan again and having to deal with the man who had cheated on me and then abandoned me, who had brushed me off when all I’d wanted to do was make sure my daughter had some kind of father.
And now that I was letting him back into my life, even for just a few hours, I was worried that I might be making a bad choice for good reasons. Cade will just have to understand, I told myself, closing my eyes and trying to feel positive, or at least cautiously optimistic, about the whole thing. He’s got to know that you have nothing for Titan anymore, and that you’re into him. You love him—he has to feel that.
I finally managed to slip into that weird state where my body was asleep, but my brain was still going on. It was probably the best that I could manage, considering how anxious I felt and how much I wished that I could both get rest and figure out how I should handle the situation I was in.
At some point, I must have fallen fully asleep, but when the sound of Addie’s voice through the baby monitor cut through the fog in my brain, I didn’t think I had slept particularly well, and I didn’t think it had been all that long. I sighed and dragged myself out of bed to get her, hoping against hope that she would be willing for a “cuddle session” that would let me get maybe another hour of sleep before I needed to get to work for the day.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cade
We were nearing the end of the harvest and I was actually starting to think that of all the jobs I’d done in my life, being a farmhand for Bob Nelson was the most rewarding. Even above and beyond finding Autumn and falling for her, the work itself made me feel like I was doing something more useful than any of the construction jobs I’d taken before.
>
I was still avoiding Tuck. He seemed like he was cooling off, but I didn’t know for sure what would get him riled up again. It was better to just avoid getting into it with him if I could.
Bob had set me on working on the equipment close to the sheds, which I’d thought would make it easier for me and Autumn to spend a little time together; but as the day wore on, I started to wonder if she was actually avoiding me. All of her chores seemed to keep her inside the house.
I had a lot of time to think while I was going over the harvester, making sure everything that needed to be tight was tight, and everything that needed to be clean was clean, and so on. I thought about the fact that Autumn had gotten so jumpy, so distracted, at the end of our last date together. Obviously the text message she’d gotten was more than just some random bit of news, but she hadn’t been willing to tell me.
I had to wonder if she was really as invested in a future with me as I hoped. I had been careful not to talk about the future in terms of Addie—at least not beyond the fact of wanting to move in and what that would involve—but maybe Autumn was concerned more than I thought she could or should be at the possibility of another man raising her child.
I still wasn’t certain that things were as finished between her and Titan as she insisted to me that they were. He was the father of her child, and they had been engaged. He had broken their engagement, but I couldn’t help thinking that she would have to feel some kind of connection to him in spite of that.
At lunch, Autumn came out with food for me, and I hoped we’d have a little bit of time for me to see what she was thinking. “What’ve you got for me today?” I slithered out from underneath the harvester and grinned at her; she smiled back at me, but there was something in her eyes that made me worry.
“Nothing too special,” she said, setting down the basket. “A couple of toasted roast beef sandwiches with cheese, cucumber salad, some lemon squares, and iced tea.” She looked like she wanted to sit down, but then started to step back.
“Sit down a while,” I suggested. She hesitated, but pulled a chair over from just outside of the shed and settled on it.
I used some of the water from the cooler to rinse my hands off and opened the basket, glancing at Autumn. She looked like she was ready to jump up at any moment, and I wondered what was so much on her mind. I kept going back to our last date in my mind, and kicking myself for not pressing the issue of what she’d read on her phone just a little harder.
“Tuck seems to be cooling off,” she said, giving me a quick smile.
“He does,” I agreed. “I’m glad to notice it.” I started digging in the basket and brought up the container of salad and one of the sandwiches. I tried to think of how to get Autumn to talk to me; normally there wasn’t anything between us, but I could feel it since the last date—there was something wrong. I turned to look at her as I unwrapped one of the sandwiches and took a bite. “Is there something wrong?” Her eyes widened.
“Why would you think that?”
I raised an eyebrow and grinned. “You’re jumpy and distracted and avoiding me a little bit. Did you get in another fight with Tuck?” I speared a chunk of cucumber at the end of my fork and bit into it.
“No, no fight with him,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess I just feel anxious about something ,but I don’t know what.”
That didn’t seem like her, but if she was anxious, then pushing her about it would only make it worse. I changed the subject and saw her relax a little bit, but I didn’t think that it did much good for her. She still seemed on edge in a way that made me feel instantly protective towards her.
When she went back to the house after giving me a quick, loving kiss, I went back to work and thought about the situation. I remembered that Titan had been planning on coming back into town to visit his family; it had been the source of an argument between Autumn and me only weeks before. But in the weeks since, she hadn’t mentioned anything about it, and I’d more or less come to the conclusion that Titan’s plans had fallen through.
The thought of Titan being in town made me restless, too. I resented the fact that Titan would have at least some natural entitlement to Addie—and that he hadn’t been interested in having anything to do with the little girl at all for the first year of her life.
The rest of the afternoon, I barely caught sight of Autumn, and I tried not to be hurt at the fact that she was obviously hiding something from me; if she was hiding it, I had to have the basic trust in her that either I didn’t want or need to know, or that when it was important, she would tell me.
I was coming to the end of my formal contract with Bob Nelson, and the future of my relationship with Autumn was ahead of me. We had talked about so many possibilities, and I wanted to see them through. Now that it was heading into fall, and into the off-season for the farm, we’d both have a little more time to be together. I’d help around the farm if Bob wanted me to, and if he ran out of work for me in the winter, I’d find something I could do temporarily until it was time to start tilling and sectioning the fields again in the early spring.
Bob came by where I was working in the middle of the afternoon, wiping his hands clean on a side rag he kept tied to his belt loops as he hunkered down. “Everything’s looking good. I think you did this better than Tuck usually does,” he told me, smiling slightly.
“I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that,” I said dryly. Bob laughed.
“I’m sure he will,” he jokingly agreed. “I wanted to have a talk with you about the offseason work.”
“I was actually just thinking about that,” I admitted. “Do you think you’ll have enough to keep me on for very long, or will it just be a few weeks?”
Bob half-shrugged. “I think I can promise to keep you on until about Christmas, the week of,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of seeing what price we get on this year’s corn and soy, and from there, I might develop the farm a little more. I’d need someone to help me execute that beyond just me and Tuck with occasional help from Autumn.”
“I’d definitely be game,” I said, nodding. “If you’ve got the work to do, then I’m game to do it. I like having longer, steadier work.”
“And if it gives you a chance to spend some more time with my daughter, that’s icing on the cake?” he said with a grin.
I chuckled, feeling a little embarrassed, but not as worried about Bob’s opinion of me dating Autumn as I had been in weeks before.
“It’s definitely a very important fringe benefit,” I agreed. “I want you to know that I really, truly have the best of intentions towards Autumn.”
“That much I can see,” he said. “It’s obvious to me that you two fancy each other, and I think you’re much steadier than that Titan she took up with.” Bob shook his head, sighing at the fate that had befallen his daughter at Titan’s hands. I couldn’t blame him.
“I want to do right by her, and if that means that you eventually need me to move on because you don’t feel comfortable with me working for you and dating her, I’ll do it,” I said firmly. “But if you’re okay with seeing so much of me, I’ll definitely work for you just as hard as ever.”
“That’s exactly why I wanted to make sure you were still good to sign on with me for the offseason,” Bob said, knocking some dust off of his coverall legs. “You’ve been a good worker for me all along, and in spite of what Tuck is trying to pull off, you’ve done better even than I expected from anyone I might have hired. You’ve got a spot here as long as I’ve got work to give you.” He checked the time and looked around. “As soon as you’re done with this, you can knock off for the day,” he told me, gesturing to the harvester and the other equipment I’d taken out to do the repairs.
That was actually welcome news to me: I had been thinking of finding a way to corner Autumn without making her feel threatened.
I finished up my work and put everything away, briefly remembering the time that Tuck had tried to accuse me of stealing from the farm when he’d merely misplaced
the equipment himself.
I didn’t try and find Autumn after I cleared up for the day. I wanted to get into my truck, get home, and get a shower before I came back. I thought about buying her some flowers either on my way home or on my way back to the farm; all I knew was that I wanted to get to the bottom of whatever was bothering her, before it did something to our relationship. I smiled to myself, remembering something that she had told me a few months before, when we’d still been seeing each other in secret. I thought to myself that it ought to be fairly easy to accomplish what I had in mind, and I started my truck and headed down the dirt driveway leading to the road with a little more optimism in my mind.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Autumn
When I realized that Cade had left early for the day, something inside of me relaxed. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that I had made arrangements for Titan to come over and meet Adelyn, and every time I got close to Cade, I was torn between blurting it out and saying nothing at all. It was just too stressful to be around him when I knew that Titan was coming, even if I no longer had any interest in Titan as a potential partner. All I wanted was to get the meeting over and done with, see if there was any hope at all for Titan as a father, and put it behind me. If Titan had any promise as Addie’s dad, I could bring Cade into the discussion as to just how much influence Titan should have in her life.
My parents didn’t even know that Titan was going to be visiting me, so I had to make excuses for going back to the guest house so early. I didn’t bother showering, but I did get Addie cleaned up because I wanted her to make the best possible impression on her dad.
She deserved to be loved, she deserved a father who cared about her, but I wasn’t above hedging my bets a little bit. A little one-year-old girl who was covered in mud might not be as promising a prospect to Titan as a clean, bright toddler in a dress with her hair combed.
