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"Are you guys fighting? Did you break up?"
I let out a sigh. "I'll be honest with you, Dean. I don't know how to qualify the relationship I had with Betts. It was complicated because I'm her boss."
He frowned. "Is she suing you or something?"
I shook my head. "No, nothing like that. There's just a lot of things that went unsaid, a lot of misunderstandings. She questions my ability to be a family man. And she doesn't seem to be the woman I thought she was."
"Why not?"
"Because she hasn't been honest with me."
"Are you talking about that thing with the hockey player? Because today, it's all over my feed that it's not true."
I hadn't even checked the newsfeed to find out what, if any, additional news had come out about Mikael and Betts.
"Is that why you're mad? Because people think your baby was his?" Dean asked.
I'm glad I hadn't taken a bite of pizza because I might've choked on it. "You know about that?"
He rolled his eyes and smirked. "She's having a baby, and I know you and her like each other, so I just put two and two together." He leaned forward toward me. "But maybe sometime, I should give you the talk about the birds and the bees."
I barked out a laugh. The situation wasn't funny, and yet my son had just brought levity, breaking the tension that had been coiling to the breaking point in my chest.
"I might take you up on that," I said.
We started to eat again when Dean said, "Betts says that you should share your feelings with people. That you just can't assume that people know how you're feeling."
"She said that?"
"Yeah. So maybe you should tell her how you feel."
The words she'd said to me earlier that day about how she knew I couldn't be a family man made it very clear how she felt about me. "She told me how she felt, and it was clear that my feelings for her wouldn't change that. But I do plan to be involved in the baby's life. How do you feel about that?"
Dean seemed to think about it. "I guess that would be all right. I don't want to change diapers, though."
I smiled. "You got it."
I knew I needed to talk to Betts again. I needed to let her know that in no uncertain terms, I wasn't going to sign away my rights to my child. Whether she believed I was capable of loving or not, I was going to be in my child's life.
We’d just finished eating and were cleaning up when I got an email notification. Checking my phone, I saw it was an email from Betts with the subject line—Resignation.
34
Betts
After my cry in the elevator, I returned to my desk. For a moment, I sat in my chair feeling numb and uncertain as to what to do. I couldn't reconcile the man I had come to love with the one in his office accusing me of trying to trap him with a baby that wasn't his. Just a few nights ago, he had asked me to consider having a relationship with him, and now he'd called me a gold-digger.
The pain was still acute, but the anger was finally giving it a run for its money. The man had accused me of sleeping around and trying to trick him. I couldn't work for somebody who believed I was that sort of person.
I got to work getting all my projects organized and ready to pass on to someone else. By the end of the day, I had everything in place except for one final item. I opened up a blank document and wrote out my resignation letter.
I read it over and for a moment wondered if this was a wise action to take. I was a pregnant woman who couldn’t afford to be out of a job. But in the end, I knew I couldn't continue to come to work and see Todd knowing the things he thought about me. So I copied the letter into an email and sent it off to Todd. I sat back in my chair, wishing I could feel relief, but I'd only just made my life harder. Now I needed to find another job.
I left the office and headed home, feeling lost and alone. Once home, I called Analyn knowing I needed to talk to someone. And being the true friend that she was, she was in my living room within twenty minutes, holding me as I cried on her shoulder and told her everything that happened today.
"I should've known better. I'm not the type to hook up with somebody, especially my boss. I should've stayed with Pete at Naomi's wedding."
"That's just your sadness and anger talking," Analyn said, handing me another tissue.
