Connor hadn’t been home in years. Over seven, if he was forced to count. He hadn’t returned for a variety of reasons, but the main one was now standing in front of him with eyes so wide he could get lost in their emerald pools. She was beautiful, just as beautiful as the day he had first asked her to tutor him in high school English. He hadn’t known what to expect when he’d decided to show up on the sidewalk in front of her parents’ old house – but the last thing he had expected was for her to be standing there.

He was forced to return to Mannington when his father called about his younger brother causing problems at school. His younger brother, Cyrus, was facing expulsion due to fighting, and Connor’s father had thought Connor coming to speak with him would help him get back in line. But as Connor found himself traveling down these familiar asphalt streets, he kept getting flashes of Neve in her cheerleading uniform, running towards him after school all those years ago.

He had fallen so in love with her so fast. He had been worse than Cyrus with the fighting and the trouble making. His family was poor and lived on the east side of town in a trailer park. He had seen Neve in his English class, her auburn hair falling down her back and her green eyes shining bright. In his teen years, her tall athletic frame was almost too much for him to handle. He called upon this memory regularly when thinking of her.

She was so intelligent and sweet, and her soft features and the gentle nature which she had carried herself with all drew him to her. She had offered such a steep contrast to the difficult upbringing he had endured. In his reckless confidence, he’d asked her to tutor him after class in English, never really believing she’d accept.

She shouldn’t have accepted, not really. He was the bad boy, from the ‘wrong side of the tracks’. No one would have been surprised if she had turned and run from him.

It was the light that shone in her eyes when he asked her to tutor him that had told him this would be the love of his life. The attraction between them was instant and hot, and sure, it was sexual, but it was really everything about her that drew him.

Her intelligence, her wit, her surprisingly sharp sense of humor. She was one of the only people in his life that had the nerve to knock him down – verbally, at least. They had loved each other deeply and intensely, and on their last night together he had asked her to marry him. Her answer was given when they made love for the first time together.

But it was a short-lived euphoria.

When he returned home that night, it was to the realization that his whole life would never be the same. His circumstances and the neighborhood he grew up in dimmed the bright future he dreamed of. Something had happened that night, something he didn’t like to acknowledge or muse on too often. Something that he’d never told Neve was responsible for his abrupt leaving. Something he felt a sharp pain in his chest just thinking about.

He wouldn’t think about it right now either. Not now, with Neve standing in front of him, the only woman he had ever loved…he couldn’t believe that he had ever been able to disappear from her life.

“Neve, I didn’t think you would be here—,“ he started, returning his thoughts back to the moment. The reality of her actually standing in front of him all these years later made his heart ache with loss.

“Then why are you here?” she shot back, deadpan. She looked like she was in shock, pale, but stony featured.

Connor could only imagine what it was like for her to see him now. And looking at the little girl staring up at him with wide eyes, he felt guilty that he had come and interrupted the life she had managed to make without him. It was a picturesque moment, mother and child, playing in the snow. Suddenly, he hoped that the husband wouldn’t join this postcard moment.

He looked down at the beautiful child that Neve had created with another man. But for some reason, when his gaze landed upon the child, Neve tensed, reaching her hand out to grasp the child’s shoulder. It was this movement that caused him to take a closer look at the young girl.

She had her mother’s heart-shaped face and elegant frame, but the child’s hair and eyes reminded him sharply of looking into a mirror. In an instant, the reality of who this child was hit him like a freight train. All of the pieces fell together in his mind.

As he stood with his eyes locked upon those of the child, so strikingly familiar to him, it was now her expression that seemed overwhelmed. He began to see her young eyes light with hope as she rushed towards him.

“Are you my daddy?” the child asked, bounding to stand in front of him.

Connor was stunned. A myriad of emotions wracked his mind. Standing on the sidewalk, he couldn’t believe how an impulse decision was going to alter his life forever. The impulse had been to see the tree, and the house where he and Neve had fallen in love. This was why he had shown up to Neve’s parents’ house in the first place. A sadistic part of himself seemed to want to reminisce over the love he had lost.

He had assumed that Neve had moved on with her life, used her intelligent mind to leave this small Illinois town and find a worthy husband.

In fact, that’s why he had left her alone all these years. He wanted her to do better than end up with a man like himself, and he never returned for fear of preventing her from moving on with her life. She didn’t need a man with secrets. Not the kind he carried around.

His desire to see the tree and the house, and conjure her memory was a far more sentimental act than he usually would participate in, but when he found himself driving past the old gas station where they had kissed for the first time, or the high school where he had first seen her, the impulse had taken control and before he knew it, he was headed down her old, familiar street before he realized how crazy he was being.

Now, he knew why he had been drawn to this place. The beautiful little girl standing in front of him couldn’t possibly be anyone other than his daughter. Even her bold nature reminded him of himself. Many times he had gotten into trouble because he said what he thought and fuck the consequences.

“Mommy lets me see you on TV sometimes! She says you put color in the world and make dreams real! I think so too, I love your pictures. I’ve waited my whole life to tell you that.”

Connor was stunned. He had so many thoughts in his head. She knew? Even the child knew who he was? And no one had ever tried to contact him? Had Neve meet someone new who had been raising his child the past seven years? Why hadn’t Neve tried harder to contact him about this? And she let his child know about him?? And watch him on TV?

The pain of never being told was suddenly tempered by the strength it must have taken to speak well of him to their daughter, after he had abandoned her. God, he couldn’t come to terms with that – it was bad enough when he thought he had simply broken her heart, but that she would recover and meet someone new to fall in love with.

But now, knowing that he had left her pregnant. Alone. The pain was almost enough to fell him.

And she had taught their daughter about him – without bitterness, it seemed.

Without pause, he reached out for the little girl, scooping her into his long, tattooed arms. It was an embrace that he hadn’t realized he’d needed for the past seven years.