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Ava: I’ve been in with him all morning sorting out stuff for my business and he isn’t in the best of moods.
Ava: I don’t understand why you want to try with him.
The last messages she sent me played over and over in my mind in her voice, circling, spinning. She met my gaze from across the room, her worried eyes tearing me apart just like her father but for far different reasons.
“You got a reason for bein’ here besides staring at my kid?”
“Dad, stop,” Ava groaned, her head tipping back into the seat. “We talked about this.”
“I’m not bein’ fighty, Aves, I’m just…askin’ him a question,” David grunted, but his eyes still shot daggers at me.
“I’m here for a few reasons,” I explained. Letting my laptop bag slip from my shoulder, I deposited it on the side table, holding David’s stare as I pulled out a few printed-off pieces of paper. “I figured you’d want to know why someone was taking indecent photographs of your daughter.”
David’s brows rose, and behind him, a silently curious Ava peeked around him.
My feet clacked against the dark wood flooring as I stepped across the office hesitantly, holding the papers outstretched. David practically ripped them from my hand.
“Dad,” Ava hissed.
“I’m not gonna see somethin’ I shouldn’t in here, am I?” David asked, eyeing me warily before starting to scan the page. “Don’t need that happenin’ again.”
“No, I’ve blacked everything out for both of you,” I said.
“Dad, can I see…”
“Hold on, Aves,” Dave grunted. He finished the first page before handing it back to Ava and starting on the second, and she took it gently from his grasp, her bump nearly knocking against the desk.
They both read in silence. I could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall behind me, each second passing painfully slowly as I stood and watched them. My hands turned clammy as a bead of sweat dripped down the back of my neck. Everything that had torn my life apart was in those pages. Proof that the scandal wasn’t our fault. Proof that it had never been about Ava at all.
“A member of my board of directors hired a private investigator. He was trying to catch me out in a scandal,” I explained, desperate to fill the suffocating silence.
“Ah, so he succeeded,” David snorted.
I tried not to grind my teeth. “He succeeded in nothing but exposing your daughter in a way she shouldn’t have been and getting me to pull the plug on that conference upstate. He knew I’d take the fall for it and was hoping this would be the cherry on top to get the board to unanimously kick me off.”
David passed Ava another sheet of paper as he kept reading through. “So you’re tellin’ me that my pregnant daughter had to suffer ‘cause you made an enemy on your fuckin’ board?”
Ava glanced up at me from behind the desk, her face unreadable.
I cleared my throat. “He has since removed himself once this came to light, but unfortunately, yes. I apologize that this happened because of me and that Ava got wrapped up in this. It never should have touched her.”
He passed the rest of the papers to Ava with a slow, deliberate motion, his fingers tightening on the edges briefly before letting her take them. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with that same wary, guarded expression I’d seen before.
Fuck.
Behind him, Ava tore through the pages, reading each one in its entirety.
I’d never handled silence well from David, but I was cracking under the mounting pressure that seemed to be going nowhere. Against my better judgment, I spoke again, purely to try and move the conversation along. “I’m sure Ava has already told you, but I wanted to make it clear that we intended to tell you together. We’d been trying to figure out the best way to do it.”
“The best way to do it would have been to never fuckin’ touch her in the first place,” David grumbled.
“I’m not some porcelain doll, Dad,” Ava said, her tone irritated as she went onto the next page.
“I know I broke your trust because of that. And I know that I can’t expect to receive that back,” I sighed, pushing a hand through my hair to get it out of my face. “I know I’ve made a mess of everything, for both of you. But we were trying to take things slow after the chaos that unfolded because of that event cancelation, and we’d decided together to tell you once the time was right.”
Ava pursed her lips together as she looked toward me. Sitting there with one leg propped up on the chair, her knee bent up toward her chest, in a set of leggings and a paint-stained oversized band shirt that just barely gave a hint of her bump, I couldn’t help but feel like everything was slipping away.
Because it was.
