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But even as I stepped through the hallway and his assistant buzzed me in, the smallest glimmer of hope remained that I wasn’t about to walk into what could be the second-worst conversation I would have to have in my life.
Three steps.
Two steps.
One.
Pushing open the door of David’s office, I came face to face with the man I’d considered one of my best friends for nearly fifteen years, his face made of stone and his bloodshot eyes trained on me.
I could feel the blood drain from my face.
He didn’t move as I shut the door behind me. He didn’t move as I took a breath in, still as a statue, for once feeling small under his gaze—and he was a full foot shorter than me.
His mouth opened, and before the angry, spiteful, seething words came out, I knew. I knew it in my gut. “What the fuck is wrong with ‘ya, Adrian?”
Spittle flew from his mouth as he took a single step toward me.
“I trusted ‘ya. Wrongfully, apparently. You lied to my face, ‘ya took my daughter to the goddamn fuckin’ Hamptons at my request, you pranced around telling me about all these women you’re seein’,” he scolded, one fat finger pointed in my direction. “Meanwhile, you’re fuckin’ her behind my back. She’s twenty-fuckin’-five, Adrian. She’s my kid!”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if there was anything to say. I’d fucked up, horribly, and I knew I would pay the price for it at some point, but at least when I envisioned thishappening Ava had been beside me. She was supposed to be here for this.
But she wasn’t. She was somewhere else, nearly twelve weeks pregnant.
Oh, God, did he know about that, too?
“David,” I gulped. “I need you to calm down.”
“Calm down?” he laughed, that pointed finger flying in my direction. “You expect me to calm the fuck down when you’ve been fuckin’ my goddamn kid? Is it that hard for ‘ya to find something to get your dick wet that it had to my own flesh and blood?”
My pulse thundered in my ears as he took another step toward me. Had anyone asked me before today, I would have confidently told them that David Riley was not the type to lay hands on someone else—but what I’d done might have changed that. “That’s not it…”
“Don’t fuckin’ tell me what it is or isn’t,” he barked.
“Just let me explain.” I took a hesitant step toward him, trying to remain hopeful he wouldn’t swing at me. “I didn’t mean…”
“I didn’t mean to,” he parodied, putting on the most average accent he could instead of his usual half-Boston and half-New Yorker twang. Bile rose up my throat, burning the dry flesh. “What, ‘ya tripped and fell and landed cock first in my goddamn daughter? Were ‘ya ever actually goin’ on dates, Adrian, or was that all just a dramatic show for me?”
“I was,” I insisted. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my suit jacket to conceal the shaking. “Genuinely, I was.”
He scoffed as he spun on his heel, sauntering over to his desk with his freshly polished black loafers clacking on the ground. “As if I can believe ‘ya after all this,” he barked.
He watched me from across the room, his hands closing into shaking fists. I didn’t understand how this had happened, howwe’d gotten to this point, how everything had seemed to fall apart in a matter of days. This felt like psychological torture.
“Is that why ‘ya didn’t call me when she went to the hospital?” he said, a hollow laugh creeping up his throat. “I saw ‘ya chatting to her at that event. Looked back five minutes later and both of ‘ya had fucked off. Didn’t want me to know you’d snuck off together, huh?”
I steeled my jaw. Fuck. At least, from that, I could make the assumption that he probably didn’t know she was pregnant, but it felt like shit to be called out for doing the one thing she’d insisted I not do. Part of me wished I hadn’t forgotten my phone in that stairwell and had called him while we were in the ambulance. At least then this all would have come out at the same time, with both of us in attendance.
But she’d done this without me.
She’d left me to deal with the consequences, and a single text of “Can we please talk?” would never have fixed this.
“Fuckin’ disgusting,” he said, leveling a glare at me. “Stay the hell away from my kid, Adrian. And stay away from me, too, while you’re at it.”
“You’re just going to throw away fifteen years of…”
“Oh, don’t fuckin’ fifteen years me. Clearly, those meant fuckin’ nothin’ to ‘ya,” he spat. The veins across his bald head protruded, one of them coming all the way down to his eye and making it look as if it were bulging. “You said yourself that ‘ya have enemies on your board, did you not?”
I blinked. What the fuck did that mean?
