Lilah. I want a chance with my boy, and he’ll have to come to Tennessee. I wish it could be different, and I don’t want to frighten him. But I’ve made some mistakes, and this job may be my last chance at getting enough work to make a living.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“I’m not being dramatic,” he said, but then he shrugged, as if her opinion didn’t matter enough for him to explain. “When you pack, add some of Ben’s toys, so he’ll have familiar things around him and his favorite books. Whatever will make him comfortable while he’s with me.”
“This is crazy, Owen. No way will I send my son off with a stranger.” She didn’t trust Owen any more now than she had four years ago.
“I won’t be a stranger for long,” he said.
“You’re not taking him, Owen. I’ll fight you on this. Besides, he and I haven’t spent a night apart since he was born.”
“Then pack your stuff, too.” He paced out of the kitchen, across the living room to the bay window that looked out on her snow-drifted backyard. “If you come along, that solves the problem.”
“If you really care about him, you’d just leave him alone. Ben is a happy child. We have a life here.”
“You have a life you stole from me.” His voice sliced through the air.
Lilah squeezed the towel in her hands. “You said yourself you’re still drinking. You have to stay away from Ben. He’d be afraid of you if he saw you the way you used to get.”
He turned back to her, and his pain was hers for a single moment. She froze, but she felt as if she were vibrating. She couldn’t control her body’s reaction to seeing Owen again.
She didn’t want to remember how much she’d cared for him. Loved him. She couldn’t let him back in.
“I will not frighten my own child,” he said, his voice low, controlled. “Stop dreaming up excuses to keep Ben and me apart.”
“I don’t need excuses. My mother loved me. She was responsible. She only looked away for a few seconds, and see what happened? I was kidnapped by a stranger.” Lilah never talked about the past. She’d dealt with it and moved on, but he needed to know exactly why she’d rejected him as Ben’s father. “I will never turn my back on Ben, especially to leave him with an alcoholic like you.”
Owen barely glanced at her. “Give me a break, and stop comparing me to my father and a kidnapper.”
A switch had turned on when she found out she was pregnant. All the years of healing had disappeared the second she’d read that positive pregnancy test. She’d become a little girl again, running for her life. How easily that man had lured her with his story of a lost kitten that needed her help. “I vowed what happened to me would never happen to my child.”
“Our child. So, you let your own paranoia keep your son from his father? What kind of mother does that?”
“You told me you wouldn’t stop drinking, and I told you I couldn’t live with that. I wasn’t going to let Ben grow up the way you did, Owen.”
“I won’t drink around Ben.” Owen straightened with a pride she’d never seen in him before, not even when he was the star attraction at his exhibitions in her family’s galleries. “I will be a good father to my son.”
“Ben doesn’t know you’re his father.”
“My name is on the birth certificate.”
She clenched her fists to keep from going for his throat. “How did you get your hands on his birth certificate?”
“After I saw Ben’s photo on that gift tag, I took a chance and requested a copy of my son’s birth certificate. I found the announcement your parents put in the paper, and that gave me all the information I needed. I started looking for you.”
“You’ve been stalking us?” She knew she was being ridiculous, but she was angry with herself. She’d left him a string of clues. Made it too easy for him to find them.
“Ask yourself what you would have done in the same situation. I didn’t stalk you, Lilah.”
“What do you call it?”
“Making sure my son knows he has a father.”
“You’re sober now, but you look as if you’ve been on a bender.”
“You didn’t bother to tell me the real reason I should have made sobriety stick four years ago And what about your own issues? I’m not the one who abandoned college after college because everyone I saw looked threatening. And I didn’t move out of my apartment overnight because I thought a woman in my building was following me. Turns out she commuted the same way you did. We both have problems, Lilah, but we’re both Ben’s parents.”
Her skin seemed to be on fire. She knew her face had turned bright red, but she wasn’t so embarrassed about the truth that she couldn’t fight back. “You told me you liked to drink, that you chose to drink.”
He ignored the accusation. “So once again you packed up and walked away from yet another place, without warning, without notice, without reason. Just because of your fear.”
“Ben was my reason.”
“Go to Bliss with Ben and me, or I’ll go to the courts and fight for custody on the grounds you’re not a fit mother.”
This was not the Owen she’d known. “You wouldn’t bring up my past and use it against me.”
“I’m asking again, how cruel would you be if I’d stolen Ben from you?”
The papers, the reporters. She’d been five years old, swarmed by curious faces and camera flashes and questions that only put her back into the bad place.
If Owen took revenge, it would be hard to keep her past a secret. It would be all over social media, complete with photos and old newspaper articles. There’d be commentary on blogs. She felt sick. She’d tried with all her might to keep Ben safe from the notoriety of her past.
She moved closer to him. “You can’t. You won’t. You may not know him, but you must instinctively care about Ben, or you wouldn’t have come here. Making him an object for people to gawk at would hurt him.”
“So, now you’re using him to keep me in check?”
She’d still do anything to protect her son.
“Go ahead and push me,” Owen said, with no hint of the gentleness that had once drawn her to him despite the drinking.
And he’d helped her at first. Pushed her to overcome her fears. But over time she’d grown to loathe his drinking, and hers. Daring anything to prove she wasn’t afraid quickly lost its appeal as she’d pulled and pushed Owen into a taxi or through her apartment door, or dragged him out of a fight in a bar.
But at least when he was under the influence, Owen had never hurt anyone except himself.
“Show some compassion,” she said.
“Like you did?”
She wanted to yell. His warm breath fanned her face. She reassessed her chances of getting Ben out of the house and making a run for it.
But that would be a ridiculously reckless decision. Whatever she had to do to keep Owen from taking Ben, she would. He could threaten her all he wanted, but she would make him see things her way. What was best for Ben would be best for all of them. “Let’s calm down for a minute.”
“I’m not an idiot, Lilah, and I’ve been played by bigger and better cons than you.”
They shared one trait, a survivor’s sensitivity to undercurrents.
“We both care about Ben,” she said, “and you don’t know how many times I wanted to tell you about him.” That was true. If he’d