“Did he?” His tone was mechanical, monotonous—soulless.
“Yes.” I took a few more steps into the room. “Aiden, what’s going on?”
“I kept hearing your voice,” he said. “I kept hearing you cry, and then I’d see you running away. I knew I’d fucked it all up so bad. I didn’t mean to, but I did.”
He looked at me again.
“I lost you,” he said flatly. “I fucked it up, and I lost you.”
I had no idea what to say. If this all came down to Redeye convincing me to come here because Aiden was pining over me…well, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I wasn’t prepared to tell him I’d come back to make up with him. The strange thing was, in the past I probably would have. I would have made up with him and played along just to keep him from being sad, but Aiden had changed me—I wasn’t that person anymore. I wasn’t going to tell him everything was all right between us, because it wasn’t.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was hoping to accomplish.
“Redeye said you were in bad shape,” I said. “He thought maybe you’d talk to me.”
Aiden was looking at his hands again, twirling the stuffed horse around with his fingers. I wasn’t sure if he had heard me.
“This was his favorite,” Aiden said quietly. “It wasn’t even his. He went to this daycare for a while when Megan was working. He was two years old then. He
’d walk around with this horse every day and throw a fit when it was time to go home because he had to leave it behind. They started letting him take it home at night, and eventually I just bought a new horse and traded with the daycare so he could keep this one.”
He chuckled dryly.
“Megan was so pissed I had spent money on the replacement. It was only ten bucks, but we were having trouble paying the bills. He loved this thing so much, though. I didn’t want to ask the daycare to just give it to him. That didn’t seem right.”
I took the last few steps across the room and knelt beside Aiden. The muscles in his arm flexed as I reached out to lay my hand on his shoulder. He stopped spinning the toy.
“You didn’t tell me you had a son,” I said quietly.
“I know.” Aiden’s shoulders rose and fell as he breathed. “I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Why not?” I ran my hand down his arm before lacing our fingers together. He stared at our interlocked hands for a long moment before he spoke.
“Because if I tell you, then I also have to tell you why he’s not here.”
I’d considered a few different possibilities and wasn’t surprised to hear Aiden’s reasoning. The most logical conclusion I had drawn was that Cayden had been taken away from Aiden after Megan had died. I figured whatever illegal activity Aiden was involved in had caused him to lose custody.
“Don’t you think maybe I deserved to know about it?” I asked.
“Yeah, probably,” he agreed.
“Probably?”
“It’s not that easy.” He sat back and bumped his head against the wall a couple of times before he looked in my direction again. He didn’t meet my eyes. “I liked you…I really liked you. I was…I was afraid if you knew everything that was going on, you would run.”
He shook his head.
“I fucked it up. I should have told you.”
I wasn’t sure whether it would have mattered. If he had told me he was into illegal activity…if he had told me there was a gun in the jeep, I wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t have just run anyway. Aiden’s having a child from a previous relationship didn’t seem as big a deal as it might have been otherwise.
There was more to it, though—Redeye had said as much. I was missing something important.
“Redeye said I didn’t know the whole story.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No.”