She shook her head. “Not yet. My stomach still hurts a little.”
“Then I assume you are ready for your punishment?”
I expected a fight from her, but she just nodded. “I knew it was coming, so yeah.”
“You can go sit in the corner and think about your actions,” I told her.
“Seriously?” She arched a brow at me. “Like I’m five?”
“Until you can learn to act like a mature adult, you’ll be treated accordingly.”
She padded across the floor and sat down in the corner, crossing her legs and leaning back against the wall. “This might be weird to say, but I bet you’d make a good dad.”
I turned away from her and tried to focus on Emmanuel’s case files, but the truth was, I couldn’t. I stared at them for two minutes before she spoke again.
“Why do you hate kids anyway?”
My foot beat a furious rhythm against the soft floor beneath my desk. “I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.” She snorted. “Case in point, your work barbecue? You were really rude to that little boy who came up to show you his toy gun. You didn’t even acknowledge him. And then at the shelter, I saw you do the same thing. It’s like you can’t even stand to look at them.”
My head fell forward with a breath that collapsed my chest, and I closed my eyes. She was right, and if I was going to teach Gypsy anything about life, then I had to be honest with her too.
“That’s because I can’t,” I admitted.
I met her eyes, and she almost looked afraid to ask, but in the end, Gypsy was always brave. “Why?”
My throat was painfully tight as I forced the words out. “I don’t hate children, but it’s difficult for me to interact with them. It reminds me of what I lost when I was a father.”
“Was?” Gypsy whispered.
“Yes.” A sour taste filled my mouth as I acknowledged the truth. “My son Dawson was three when he died.”
Silence stretched between us, and I appreciated that Gypsy gave that to me. The conversation was far from over but taking it in manageable steps made it easier. I knew she had a soft spot in her heart for children, so this would be difficult for her too.
“Will you tell me about him?” she asked in a muted voice.
I leaned back in my chair and stared up at the ceiling, allowing my eyes to fall shut as a blurry image of his face came to mind. I often struggled between episodes of wishing to remember him vividly and trying to block it out altogether. Either way, it didn’t help. There would only ever be pain when I thought of him.
“It’s difficult to tell you all the things I would like to because he was taken from me when he was very small.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and choked down the acid burning my throat. “But he loved pancakes. And puppies. He was very good with animals, and I always thought we would choose a dog together when he was a little older.”
I didn’t know what else to say about him. It was difficult for me to remember much about that time in my life, and I never talked about him anymore. I never shared anything about him because it made it feel like maybe I had imagined it all if I didn’t. But I knew Gypsy wouldn’t be able to leave it alone, and she didn’t.
“What happened to him, Lucian?”
Her question was only fair, given what I knew about her. But it wasn’t easy to divulge the most difficult part of my life. The chapter where I’d turned from a boy to a man, forever blackening my soul. I didn’t know if I’d make it through all of it, but I told her anyway.
“I was young when he was born,” I began. “I hadn’t really given much thought to having children at that age. My father had a construction business, and I wanted to work my way up to taking over when he retired. That was all I thought about at the time. Women were on my radar, of course, but I didn’t want a relationship. I dated casually, and I was always upfront about my intentions. I was careful, and I wore protection.”
“There was a girl I went out with a couple of times who’d been chasing me for a while. She told me she was okay with the situation, but after a while, I could tell she wanted more. I tried to break it off with her, but she told me she was pregnant. She’d been sabotaging the condoms.”
“She sounds like a gem,” Gypsy chimed in.
“She was far from it,” I answered. “And it didn’t become obvious to me how unstable she was until I was too deep in it. But regardless of the circumstances, I was having a child, and I wanted to do the right thing. I stepped up and tried to make it work with her for the baby’s sake. I was there through every milestone of the pregnancy, and for a while, I was deluded enough to think that everything was going to be okay. But after Dawson was born, her moods only worsened. She wanted all my attention to the point that it became detrimental to the baby. If I interrupted a conversation with her to feed him or change his diaper, she’d fly into a rage. She was jealous of her own son, and no matter what I did, I couldn’t win. I got her into therapy and got her started on medication, but nothing worked. She started drinking and sleeping most of the day. I couldn’t trust her to take care of Dawson while I worked, so my mother cared for him during the day. But when she started getting violent, I knew something had to change.
“I tried to break it off with her. I offered to let her keep the apartment, and I would pay the rent. She could focus on getting herself help, and I would take care of Dawson full time in the interim. She was heartbroken, but it had nothing to do with Dawson. She kept telling me I couldn’t leave her. That’s the only thing she cared about. Eventually, she got the point that it was really over, and she calmed down. I thought everything was fine. She went into the bathroom, and I fed Dawson and put him down for bed. But the next thing I knew, the cops were banging on the front door. When I let them in, they arrested me on battery charges, and I couldn’t understand what was happening until I saw her come out of the bathroom with a bloody face.”
“Oh my God,” Gypsy murmured. “She beat herself?”