Daisy is still on the porch when I pull up in front of the house. A white car is parked in front of me. It’s the white car we saw the other night. Fuck, that makes me even more pissed. She was driving around spying on us.
“Wes, you came.” Daisy stands, stiff from the cold, and comes over.
“Stop.” I close the Jeep door behind me and hold up a hand. “I’m not here to be won over or any of your other bullshit. I’m here so you’ll go home.”
“Can I at least come in? I’m freezing.”
“Fine. But when I say we’re done, we’re done.”
“Fair enough.” Daisy goes up the porch steps and picks up the doormat. “You got rid of the key?”
“That was an obvious place to hide the key. I took it out the day you put it there, but you weren’t around enough after that to figure it out, were you?”
“Wes, I’m…”
“Save it.” I use my body to block her line of sight when I punch in the alarm code and turn off the system.
“I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t expecting an apology this early on in our conversation. She wants something, I’m sure of it.
“Wow.” She looks around the living room. “It’s different yet the same.”
“What do you want?” I ask her. “It’s late and I’m tired and want to get this over with.”
“How’s Jackson? He’s at your parents, isn’t he?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, please, Wes. I know you and know you’d only trust your mom with our son.”
I don’t like hearing her say our son. It’s what he is, and I’m well aware she’s his mother, but it sounds so wrong. She hasn’t raised him. Hasn’t been here to sit up with him when he’s sick. To calm his fears in the middle of the night.
“What do you want?” I ask again, taking a seat on the stairs.
“I want to give us another shot.”
“No.” I shake my head. “Daisy, I don’t love you anymore. I stopped being in love with you before you left and we both know that. You didn’t love me either. We had issues from the start and should never have gotten married to begin with.”
She folds her arms over her chest and I look at her, really look at her for the first time. We were freshmen in high school when we met. She was a cheerleader and I was a football player. She went to Greendale, another small town in this county, and Eastwood’s rival when it comes to high school sports. We dated on and off throughout high school, and I proposed before I left for my first tour overseas. We got married shortly after that, and she moved around from base to base with me until my time in the army ended.
We should have broken things off then, but we wanted to give it one last shot. Daisy’s mother was the one who put the idea in her mind that we’d magically fix things if we had a baby, and neither of us expected it to happen the first time we tried.
The moment we knew we were having a baby, things changed. For me. Daisy didn’t want a kid, and I’m sure the resentment started there. I hoped things would change when she gave birth and held our sweet, tiny son in her arms, but it didn’t.
Not everyone is cut out for motherhood, she told me just a few days after Jackson was born. I chalked it up to pain and exhaustion. It was a red flag of a warning. Several weeks later, I came home from work to find Jackson screaming and crying in his crib and Daisy nowhere to be seen. Judging by how dirty his diaper was, we guessed she’d been gone at least half my shift, having left poor little Jackson alone in his crib.
The raw, painful emotions come back with a vengeance, and I remember it all too well: sitting in this living room, holding my crying baby to my chest and having no idea what the fuck I was going to do. I didn’t know anything about babies. How was I going to raise one alone?
“You left us,” I say slowly. “And now we’ve started a life. A good life. Why do you want to take that away?”
“I don’t, Weston. We were happy once. We can be again.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“It can be.” She walks through the living room, going to the photos hanging on the wall. She stops before one of Jackson, and her face pulls down with emotion. “He looks just like you.”
“Luckily.”
She turns, eyes brimming with tears. “Wes,” she pleads.
“Don’t.”
Sniffling, she wipes her eyes and looks back at the photos. “Whose baby is this? One of your brothers’?” She’s looking at a family photo we took over the summer, and Jackson is sitting front and center with Emma on his lap.