On September seventh, less than a week before I was due to fly back to Little Falls, Barry called. I was sitting out in my yard enjoying a single beer - we'd been told to cut out alcohol consumption entirely by that close to the season beginning - as the sun set, thinking to myself that maybe, maybe I could get used to life in Texas.

"Hey, Barry."

"Kaden."

I sat up a little straighter, taking note of the sharp tone in Barry's voice. "Is something wrong?"

"You tell me, Barlow."

I looked out across the park-like backyard and mentally ran through my to-do list, which as far as I knew I'd been keeping up with. "Nothing wrong here, Barry. Just relaxing with a beer. Only one beer, don't freak out."

"Maybe I should have had Hal Johnson call you."

"Who's Hal Johnson?" I asked, surmising that this call was probably just another small matter that Barry the control-freak was blowing up into a big deal.

"Your lawyer, Kaden. The head of your legal team. Remember him, the big guy with the crazy hair?"

I did not remember Hal Johnson, although apparently, we'd met before. "Nope," I told Barry. "I'm always meeting new people in suits, I can't keep track of them all. Why, what's the problem?"

"Seems you're not such a choirboy after all, Kaden. I wish you'd mentioned this to someone. This has the potential to become a rather large headache. For me, for the lawyers, but mostly, my man, for you."

"Jesus, Barry, can we not speak in riddles? Just tell me what's going on."

I heard Barry sigh on the other end. "Look, nothing's confirmed yet, Kaden, so don't...don't lose your mind just yet, OK?"

"If nothing's confirmed, why the fuck are you even calling me?" I snapped, annoyed by that point. Barry's idea of earth-shattering news always turned out to be something like a website saying a slightly critical thing about me. Small potatoes.

"Because if this does get confirmed, you're in very deep shit, Kaden."

"I am going to hang up in ten seconds if you don't just spill it," I replied. "Come on, man. I'm trying to have a relaxing evening here."

"One of those shitty tabloids has a story that some girl had your baby. They intend to publish it."

I shook my head and laughed. "Fuuuuck, Barry. I didn't knock anyone up, OK? I haven't so much as laid a finger on a woman since I got here. Just, I don't know, get the lawyers to threaten to sue or something. Can I go now?"

"It's not someone here, Kaden."

"It's not someone at Brooks, either," I said, just wanting to get back to the sunset and the sense of peace that Barry's grating voice was draining out of me. "Seriously, this is just-"

"You're right," he cut me off. "It's not someone at Brooks. It's someone back in Little River or Little Falls or wherever it is you went to high school. Natasha Greeley? That ring any bells?"

Everything suddenly became dreamlike. I dropped my phone in what felt like slow-motion and sat there for a few minutes, staring at it as Barry's irritated voice came out of it, seemingly from a long distance away. The dots were there, but my brain had decided to take a few minutes off from connecting them and I was struggling with what I'd just heard. Eventually, the feeling of being in a dream started to fade and I reached down to pick the phone back up. I put it to my ear and said one word:

"What?"

"So you do know this girl? I can tell from your voice. Kaden, you absolute moron. What part of you thought it was a bad idea to go barebacking randoms?"

When I answered, my voice seemed to be coming from someone else. "She's not a random."

"I don't care what she is. I mean, we need to get Hal involved, OK? Let me get him on the call, give me a sec."

"No."

"What?"

"No."

"No what, Kaden? Do you realize how much trouble you're in if this is true? We need Hal on this right now, do you hear me? Right now."

"Why?" I asked, my voice sounding much, much calmer than the whirling storm of confusion in my head.

"Because this can't be published! We need to pay this girl off, that's why! And first, we need to get a court order to have the baby DNA tested. I'll get Hal to send one of his attack dogs out there and deal with that, then we-"

"No."

"JESUS CHRIST, KADEN!" Barry yelled, loud enough to make me jerk the phone away from my ear. "Are you even listening to me? What the fuck do you even mean 'no'? This is happening, OK? This is happening and we need to deal with it. The way we do that it is by informing this girl that her life is going to be a living fucking hell if she so much as whispers-"

"NO!" I bellowed, suddenly enraged. "No, Barry. Listen to what I'm telling you: no. Do not call Hal. Do not call anyone. I'm serious right now, man. If you set your dogs on this girl without my permission, you are fired. All of you are fired."

"Now, Kaden, we can talk about-"

I looked at the phone. I didn't have a single clue what was going on but I knew I couldn't talk to Barry for one more second. I clicked the screen to end the call and then turned the phone off. The I lay back in my chair and put my hands over my face, hoping I could force the thoughts in my mind to slow down enough to get a grip on them.

A baby. Natasha had a baby!? My baby?

I tried to do the math but I couldn't concentrate for long enough. But I knew more than nine months had passed since the night we spent together at my parent's house. I stayed out there in the yard for over two hours, literally disbelieving. It couldn't be true. Tasha would have told me. Wouldn't she? Did she think so little of me that she would have my baby without saying a word?

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I almost wanted to call Barry back for more details but I knew he'd just try to suck me into letting Hal sic the lawyers onto her, which I definitely didn't want. My flight to Little Falls was in three days. I was going to get on that flight and I was going to insist Tasha saw me. And then I was going to ask her what the hell was going on. There was still a small chance it was all just a huge misunderstanding. Mostly because no matter how hard I tried to figure it out it just did not seem possible that she would have neglected to tell me. Family was everything to her. If she had my baby, then I was family.

And the tabloid angle? That I knew wouldn't have been her doing. I've never met a human being more diffident than Tasha Greeley. If someone was trying to sell a story to the tabloids, it wasn't her, that I knew with one-hundred percent certainty. She also didn't want money - not from me and not from the media. Little Falls was a small town and I was its most famous former resident - if what Barry said was true and Tasha had given birth to my baby, it wasn't too hard to believe that someone would have seen an angle there to be exploited.

I spent the next three days in torment, going back and forth on whether or not I believed that Tasha had really had my child and struggling with the thought that if she had, she hadn't seen fit to tell me. By the time I was sitting on the plane, looking down as the dusty flatlands of Texas turned into the greener pastures of the Midwest, I was almost relieved. Either way, I would know soon.