Accidentally All Of Me

by Parker, Ali

I reached out and took her hand across the table, and the silence stewed between us. I had no idea what I was meant to do now. And judging from the look on her face, she was right there along with me.

  Chapter 47

  Harry

  I slumped into the seat as soon as I had dropped Winnie off at school. The last few days had been unfairly hard, and I was still trying to wrap my head around the reality of everything that I had just found out.

  Raina had been there when the news had broken, and she had been nothing but good with me—or at least, that was what she had tried to do anyway. I could tell that she was as flabbergasted as I was, and I could hardly blame her. I couldn’t believe what I was dealing with.

  Just when everything had been going the way it was meant to, just when I had been allowing myself to really love someone again, this had come busting in to make sure that I didn’t get anything close to comfortable.

  “You’ll need time,” Raina told me, her voice as steady as it could be given the revelation that we’d just had dropped on the both of us. “I’m not going to push you. Don’t worry. I understand. You need to explain this to Winnie and everything.”

  Even though she was saying all the right things, I knew that she was struggling to handle this. Fuck, I couldn’t even imagine what she was feeling in that moment. My entire head felt like it was going to pop, and I couldn’t control the way that I was feeling—hopeless, helpless, spinning out of control. And though I knew I could have asked Raina to stick around and be there for me, I knew that it would have been too much, too soon. I had to work this out on my own.

  It reminded me all too vividly of what had happened when I had lost my sister, when it felt like the world was caving in on me and I couldn’t keep my head up to handle a moment of it. It was that same weight, that same panic, that same searing, grinding pain and fear that I wasn’t going to be able to take this on, no matter how much I might have wanted to.

  Winnie was the first port of call. I had to let her know what was happening before things went a single step further. I sat her down on the couch, looked at her, and prayed that somehow this would all come undone in an instant. She had been through enough. She didn’t deserve to have the weight of this piled on top of her as well.

  “What is it?” she asked, a fearful catch to her voice. I felt guilty for making her feel that way. She knew bad news better than almost any other little girl her age, and she knew that I was about to deliver it to her in that very moment.

  “I got a call,” I told her, and I felt utterly unqualified to deal with what I was about to say to her. Could I just write it down and hope that she got the point?

  But the way she was looking at me, I could see that she needed me to comfort her right now, to tell her the truth. Tink came up and snuffled at her feet, and she reached down to pet him lightly on the head. I smiled at the two of them together. They were support for one another, the support that I felt I could have used right about now. Failing that, though, I would do what I had to alone.

  I told her everything that I knew thus far. That there was another kid in the game, that he was a couple of years old, and that his mother had just reached out to me to let me know that he existed. She seemed more than a little skeptical when I told her everything, but she took it in quietly, letting it wash over her.

  “I promise, no matter what, you’re always going to have a home here,” I told her. “Nothing’s going to change between us, all right? I’m still your uncle. I’m still going to take care of you no matter what.”

  I found my voice cracking, and I tried swiftly to stop it in its tracks. I needed to pull myself together. This might have been scary for me, but Winnie needed me to be strong. She needed me to show her that we could make it through this together. I leaned down and hugged her tightly, and she hugged me back. I closed my eyes and prayed that this really wasn’t going to change too much between us.

  The next thing I had to take care of was by far the scariest—actually meeting with the lawyer of the woman who claimed that she had borne my child and finding out what the hell she wanted from me. I had been trying to figure it out since I had heard that she and the kid existed. Why would she bother if she had managed it through the last couple of years without my help?

  First and foremost, I needed to make sure that they knew they were never to get in contact with George again, no matter what. I knew that I could be tough to get hold of, but I wanted to be the first and last point of contact for anything to do with my son. I wanted to control the narrative that surrounded him in my life, and I didn’t want the rest of my family just getting all involved when they had no good reason to be.

  Michael, my lawyer, was waiting there at the other lawyer’s office for me. He waved me down as I approached, a grim expression on his lined face. Winnie was at school, Raina was at work, and it seemed like the whole world had slowed down for a hot second to make it so that I could actually get through the rest of this meeting unscathed.

  “Good to see you,” Michael greeted me, shaking my hand as I got closer. I tried to smile back at him, but I was pretty sure that all I managed was a twisted half-grimace.

  “Can we get this over with?” I asked, and he nodded and gestured for me to go inside. We headed into the building, and I tried to brace myself for the reality of whatever was about to come next.

  Winston Roper, the lawyer we were meeting with that day, was waiting by the door when we walked in. He extended his hand toward me, and I took it. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting—some smarmy, obviously evil cartoon lawyer type with dollar signs pulsing in his eyes maybe—but this guy seemed pretty standard issue, and I tried my best not to let my attitude get in the way.

  “I’m glad that you could make it,” Winston told us as we entered his small office. It wasn’t much, but it was clear he took great pride in it.

  “My client, Allison Bachman, was unable to attend this meeting due to personal matters,” he explained calmly. “But she offers her apologies and her gratefulness that you were willing to meet with me today.”

  “Yes, yes,” Michael agreed, waving his hand. “Can we get to the point of this, please? I want to hear exactly what we’re doing here and exactly what Ms. Bachman expects out of getting in touch with my client again.”

  I was glad that I had Michael there to advocate for me because if I hadn’t, I had no idea what I would have said. In fact, I felt like I would have just screamed at him. I knew that it wouldn’t have gotten me very far, but I still just felt the urge to let this unleash on someone, and he was the bearer of the bad news this time around. I wanted to flip the table and freak the fuck out, no matter how useless I knew all of that was going to be, but instead, I felt like I was pinned to the spot, unable to move, stuck and trapped and caught in this nightmare that I had no clue how to escape from.

  Michael laid down the law about George, making sure that he would never be dragged into this again, and when he was done, we finally got on to Allison.

  She had been a one-night stand from a while ago—about three years, not long before Winnie had come into my life and everything had changed. My bachelor days felt so very far behind me now, and it was hard to remember that I had ever been like that. How had I found the time for it? I had no idea. But that wasn’t important now. What was important was that she had gotten pregnant from the encounter, she had kept the baby, and she had been raising him by herself ever since.

  “I don’t understand why your client would reach out to us now,” Michael said. “After all this time?”

  Winston sighed heavily and shook his head.

  “She had hoped to continue on without any involvement from Harry,” he explained. “But she didn’t have much of a choice after what happened with her son recently.”

  “And what happened with him?” I asked, finally getting involved in the conversation. I knew I had been absent from it for too long.

  Winston looked over at me and winced slightly. I could practically see the apology on his face,
and I knew that whatever he had to tell me, it was some bad, bad news.

  “He’s sick,” he replied.

  The words hung in the air between us, and I tried my best not to let them freak me out, but how could I not? I hated this.

  I hated the fact that I had been dropped into this kid’s life at the time when things were going wrong. It felt like that happened way too much for my liking. Why did nobody ever reach out to me when things were going well? Why was it always when things were bad?

  “She was hoping that by reaching out to you, she might be able to find some support for his medical bills,” he explained.

  My stomach dropped. Medical bills? He was ill, then. Really ill. I felt panic take hold of me. I had never so much as laid eyes on this kid, and yet he was my flesh and blood. And he needed me, and he was sick, and I was still so far from him, so far from doing anything that might have helped.

  I tried to tune in to the rest of what they were saying to one another, but I could hardly keep my head straight as I tried to wrap it around everything that I had been given to deal with the last few minutes. I felt like I was losing my mind.

  I had worked so hard to get everything just so, just the way it needed to be, to put a life back together after losing my sister, and it had only just begun to look like something I could be happy with. Now, it was about to be ripped apart again—ripped apart by this woman who I’d slept with what felt like a lifetime ago and the son that she had hidden from me until she had found a use for me. Well, not a use for me, but a use for my money. That stung. How could she treat me like that?

  But then, I tried to click back into what mattered. All that was important was that she had come to me now. That she needed me, and she had reached out to me.

  I had to be there for her, and more than anything, I had to be there for the son I’d never had a chance to be with before.

  Chapter 48

  Raina

  I made it into work about ten seconds before I would have become officially late, and I stumbled through the door just in time. I felt like I was the living dead that morning, and there was a damn good reason for that.

  I had lain awake all night the night before, tossing and turning and trying to make the slightest bit of sense of any of it. It hadn’t worked so well.

  I had slept through coffee with Reed. I had begged off, claiming illness, because the thought of coming out and telling him that the man I had fallen in love with had just turned up with a baby that he claimed he didn’t know about? Fuck that.

  I was just about to dive into my work for the day when there came a knock at the door. I looked up, and Rita was standing there, her head cocked to one side, eyeing me like she could tell there was something up.

  “Hey,” I greeted her, hoping that the smile I swiftly plastered on my face was enough to convince her that I was doing just fine.

  “Hey,” she replied. “You all right? You look like a zombie this morning.”

  “Well, thanks.” I laughed and shook my head. “I’m fine. I just missed my coffee. That’s all.”

  She cut me off before I could bullshit her any further. “Come on, Raina. What’s going on? You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.”

  I stared at her a moment longer and tried to figure out whether I hated the fact that she knew me so well or if I was glad for it. I could have held out, but I felt my shoulders sagging, and I let out a groan as I dropped my head into my hands.

  “It’s all fucked up, Rita,” I admitted. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  She closed the door behind her, leaving Hannah outside to handle everyone who was coming in, and sat down on the seat opposite mine. She reached over and squeezed my hand, and I silently thanked whoever was up there that they had given me such a sweet, kind best friend, the one who was willing to drop everything to make sure that I was doing all right.

  “Tell me about it,” she ordered gently, and I opened my mouth and let all of it come spilling out. The whole damn mess.

  I couldn’t believe that I had been able to keep it in for so long. Now that I was speaking, it felt like my entire soul was unburdening, like I was finally getting rid of some enormous weight that I’d had no idea I had even been carrying.

  I told her everything. I told her about finding the right guy to lose it to at last, falling in love with him, and then welcoming him into my life and being welcomed the same way into his. It was hard to put into words just how much all of that had meant to me.

  Speaking it out loud now, it seemed to take on an even heavier power, even more than it had meant to me before. I hated the thought that all of that was going to change. We’d had a hard enough time getting where we had already, and now it was all going to be whisked away again, just like that.

  “And when I was with him the next morning,” I finished up finally, “he got this call from someone. I don’t know who. But he—He has a son.”

  “He has a son!” she exclaimed, as though she was announcing it to a live studio audience.

  I almost laughed. She sounded as shocked as I had felt when I had heard the news. It was like being hit over the head with something heavy. I swore I could almost see stars when she put it like that.

  I wished I could travel back in time before I had heard any of this, to those moments where he had told me that he loved me and had been so sweet with me and made me feel like there was nothing in the world for me but him.

  “He has a son,” I echoed. “And it seems like the mother... well, it seems like the mother wants him back as part of this kid’s life. I have no idea what the deal was with him and this kid. If he knew about him and just didn’t want to be a part of his life, or if he had no idea, or...” I trailed off and put my head in my hands again.

  I was getting that thing, the one that had been happening a lot since I had heard the news, where it felt like my thoughts were too heavy to fit inside my head all at once.

  Rita just sat there for a moment, letting all of it wash over her. I looked up at her. I needed her advice. I needed something. I had known that dating wasn’t going to be easy, exactly, but that didn’t mean that it had to be this grindingly hard, did it?

  Rita had dated more than me. Maybe she would be able to guide me in the right direction. Though judging by the look on her face, I doubted that what I had just revealed to her was anything other than a curveball.

  “You said that he just found out when you were with him?” she asked.

  I nodded. “And I haven’t heard from him since.”

  “But you left, right?” she asked. “You left after he found out.”

  “I didn’t want to crowd him,” I replied. “I was worried that he would think I was trying to get in on it or something, if I was too pushy.”

  “You have to think about this from his perspective, too,” she pointed out. “He just got this news, and then you took off, and he hasn’t heard from you since. He knows that this is big—he knows that this is huge—and he’s probably thinking right about now that it’s too much for you to take on.”

  I sat back in my seat. I supposed I hadn’t even really thought about anything like that. I had been too much in shock to really consider anything beyond my own head right now, and frankly, all that was in there was the intense fear that I was about to get booted out of his life.

  But perhaps he was just as worried about the same happening with me. Maybe he thought that I was out of there, leaving nothing behind but a cartoon dust cloud where I had been standing.

  I had been so shocked that I hadn’t considered that he might need me to come through for him now—that he might need me to tell him, without a doubt, that I still wanted to be close to him. That I couldn’t imagine being apart from him, even now, even with the weight of all of this piling down on us both.

  “You should drop him a message,” she suggested. “If you still think you want to deal with any of this, that is. I know it must be heavy, but if you like this guy, if you really like him—”

  “I
love him,” I replied without thinking because it was the truth. I did love him. Nothing was going to stop me loving him, not even a shock on the level of this one. I wanted to be near him, even in this moment, even as I felt like everything we had built was spinning out of control.

  “Whatever kind of shock you’re going through,” Rita told me. “And trust me, I get that it’s a pretty fucking huge one, as they go. But he’s dealing with that times ten. And he probably doesn’t want to dump it on you if you left the morning that he found out.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed, and I pulled out my phone. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I think you should drop him a text and let him know that you’re still in this,” she suggested. “Let him know that you still want to be with him.”

  “You’re right,” I said, repeating myself. I felt like my ability to communicate in full-on words was a little restricted since I was trying to deal with so much else that day.

  Rita reached across the table and patted my arm. “I’ll take care of your first couple of appointments. You get your head together, all right? No rush.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Certain,” she replied, and she grinned widely. “Man, I don’t know how you managed for so long without me. Do you?”

  “Yeah, I’m surprised we didn’t just fall apart at the seams,” I said, and I waved her off and turned my attention to my phone.

  I just needed to let him know that I was there for him. Any way he needed me, I was there. No matter what it was, no matter how big or how small it might have seemed to him, I was there, and I wasn’t going to change that. Not for anything.

  So, that was what I told him in my text. I longed to hear his voice, but I could only imagine how much he was dealing with at that very second. He probably didn’t need me asking for his attention on top of all of that.

  I tried my best to go about the rest of my day without giving him any more space in my brain. I didn’t need to do that. I needed, in fact, to get back to what mattered and to make sure that I didn’t get distracted by trying to figure out what he might have been doing or how I should have been helping. If there was something I could do, I had to promise myself that he would let me know.