“Hey, buddy, are you almost ready to go?” I asked, waiting by the door for Hunter to come downstairs so I could drop him off at school. He had been a little lethargic lately, as though he was coming down with something, but I had a feeling it had more to do with the fact that Autumn wasn’t in our lives anymore. He hadn’t had any explanation for it, and he must have questions about what happened between the two of us, questions I had no idea how to answer. I didn’t even have those answers myself. How was I meant to articulate them to my son?

“Yeah.” He emerged from the top of the stairs and headed down to join me. He looked tired like he’d struggled to sleep the night before. I knew how he felt. I had been up most of the night wondering if I was doing the right thing today in meeting with Karla.

“Let’s get going, shall we?” I opened the door for him, and he headed outside to the car. I watched him as he went. Once in a while, it struck me how little he was, how delicate and small this entire boy’s existence seemed. I wanted to take care of him, to protect him from the world at large, but I had no idea how to do that anymore. I had been sure Autumn was a way to help with that, but these days, I wasn’t so sure.

I climbed into the car next to him, and we pulled away. Normally, Hunter took these opportunities to chat away to me about what he was doing that day and about everything he was looking forward to, but that morning, he was curiously silent.

“You okay?” I asked him, and he shrugged. “What are you thinking about?”

He turned to me with a long sigh, as though even letting himself linger in this place in his mind was painful to him.

“When will Autumn be coming back?” he asked me, and my heart dropped. It had been the one question I had hoped to God he would never ask of me. I swallowed heavily, knowing I had to come up with something.

“I don’t know, Hunter,” I admitted.

“Did I do something wrong?” He frowned.

“No!” I exclaimed at once. “No, buddy, you didn’t do anything wrong. Things have just changed a bit. But Autumn still cares about you a lot and so do I. You know that, right?”

“I guess,” he agreed, but I could hear the doubt in his voice, the second-guessing. I hated that he felt that way, hated that it had been my choice to bring Autumn into our lives that had caused him this kind of pain. If I could have gone back in time, knowing what I did now, perhaps I wouldn’t have gone through with any of it.

I dropped him off at school and frowned as I watched him make his way into the building. He was clearly unhappy at the moment, and I would have done anything to make it right. Maybe this meeting with Karla would be what I needed to get things moving again? Maybe Hunter needed a mother in his life more than I had known. Now that Autumn had opted out, perhaps his real mother was my best choice.

I headed home to change and prepare myself for this meeting with Karla. I was nervous beyond belief, my hands shaking as I went to button up my shirt. I had shared so much with this woman, and she had walked away from me when times had been hard. How could I look her in the eye again and find any sort of kindness when she had failed to do the same for me?

I drove out to the diner where we’d agreed to meet, and I felt a flicker of guilt for not letting Hunter know about any of this. She was his mother, after all. Perhaps I owed him that much. But the thought of inflicting more hope on him only to drag it away after what he had already been through—no, I couldn’t do that to him, not again. I had to handle this myself, as his father.

I arrived outside the diner and brought the car to a halt, closing my eyes and trying to swallow the last vestiges of my nerves. I felt like I was going to throw up. For a moment, I considered turning around and getting out of there, forgetting this whole thing had ever happened and rewinding time to before she had turned up at my house. But I had to face this. Once and for all.

Forcing myself out of the car, I headed up to the diner. I could already see her sitting in a booth on the far side, looking out over the street beyond. I pushed open the door, and she looked up into my eyes, and I felt a jolt as though I had been knocked backward through time.

I headed over to join her, taking my time, and took in Karla properly for the first time since her reappearance in my life. I had been so shocked the first time she had come by that I hadn’t had much of a chance to really get my head around her again, but now I was a little calmer and could take her in.

She was still beautiful, still had that long, thick dark hair that fell in waves over her shoulders. Her eyes were a sharp and piercing gray, always looking fascinated by everything that was going on around her. She didn’t miss a thing, for better or for worse, though sometimes I felt like it was the latter. But her beauty wasn’t enough to distract me from the memory of everything she had done, from the snake she really was beneath that flower. She had abandoned me to raise our son alone, and she had to have a good reason for wanting back into his life after all this time.

“Holden.” She smiled at me as I took a seat opposite her. She was sipping on a coffee and seemed totally at ease, in direct contrast to me. “You want something to eat?”

“No, I’m fine.” I shook my head. I couldn’t even think about food at that moment. My stomach was churning with nerves.

“How are you doing?” she asked conversationally. I couldn’t believe she was approaching this with such casualness like we were a couple of old friends meeting for breakfast.

“I’d rather skip the niceties and get straight to the point,” I told her, and her eyes flickered with irritation. She never liked feeling out of control of any situation, so this had to be frustrating her. But I wasn’t here to indulge her anymore.

“Fine,” she snapped back at me. “If you want to do it like that, so be it. I want to see my son again. I want to be part of his life.”

“Why do you feel that way now?” I demanded. “After everything that happened?”

“Because I can’t live without seeing him anymore,” she told me, her eyes wide and playing at sincere. “I miss him so much, Holden. You don’t even know—”

“No, you don’t know.” I stopped her in her tracks. “You don’t know him. How can you miss someone you don’t know?”

“You couldn’t possibly understand.” She shook her head and gestured to her belly. “I carried him for all that time, and I’ve never stopped missing him since, never stopped wondering how he was—”

“But you never bothered to check in on him until now,” I finished up for her. “And what exactly brought you here this time? Why now?”

“Can’t I just want to see my son again?” she demanded, her voice rising a little so that it attracted the attention of a couple of people sitting in the booths around us.

“I’ve been raising Hunter by myself for nearly ten years,” I reminded her. “I’m not letting you walk back in and play at being this perfect mother.”

“I know things will be hard at first,” she confessed, and she reached across the table to grab my hands as she spoke. I let them lay there in her grasp, not having the energy to pull them away and have her make a scene about my rejection.

“I don’t think they’re going to stop being hard,” I pointed out to her. “I mean, you don’t think Hunter’s going to want to know why you weren’t there for most of his life?”

“Then we tell him the truth,” she replied as though it should have been obvious. I raised my eyebrows.

“Let me get this straight.” I leaned toward her. “You want me to tell my son that you left him when he was a baby and never came back because you couldn’t be bothered with him?”

“Tell him that people change,” she protested desperately. “Things don’t always stay the same. Holden, I’ve changed so much in the last few years. You don’t even know.”

“And let me guess, something happened to push you all the way back here?” I demanded, pulling my hands away from her.

“Holden, my life has been a wreck these last few months,” she confessed, as though I hadn’t put those pieces together already. I had assumed something had to have happened to drive her to do something as extreme as this, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what it might have been.

“What happened?” I sighed. I figured I had to find out the truth if I had any hope of understanding what it was she was doing here and what she really wanted from me.

“I was with this man,” she admitted. “We were together for a long time, Holden. You would have liked him. He took care of me, he made my life so easy for a while, and we were so happy together…”

Actual sadness filled her eyes—not a play at it but some real pain. I would have felt bad for her if I didn’t know she was using this to get something out of me.

“He told me he would support me doing anything I wanted,” she continued, her eyes snapping to anger instead. “But he left me. He dumped me. With nothing. No money and no job and no notice. I don’t have anything, Holden, and I thought… I thought maybe the three of us could have something.”

So this was a rebound. That made a lot of sense to me. She was coming here in the hopes of putting back together the pieces of her life she felt she had lost control of.

“I’ll give you money,” I told her bluntly. “Is that what you want? Call it child support. I don’t mind.”

“It’s not about that.” She shook her head, but there was a hint of something in her eyes—greed maybe—as though she was edging toward something she really did want.

“I’m not letting you into his life just like that,” I told her firmly. “I’m sorry things have been hard for you, but they’ve been hard for us, too, and I think you coming back is only going to make things harder.”

“I’ll take you to court over this,” she threatened me, flattening her palm on the table. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“I’ll be happy to see you there,” I told her, trying to keep my voice steady. “But you can’t walk back into Hunter’s life and act like everything’s going to be fine. I can’t have that. I’ve worked too hard to make things secure for him.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Her face twisted up into a mask of anger. “You have no idea how hard it is for a boy to be raised without his mother.”

“You’re the one who made that choice,” I reminded her. “You had all this time to make things right, and you never did. You can’t undo the past, Karla.”

Before she could say another word, I got to my feet.

“You’re not even going to hear me out?” she exclaimed, sounding pissed. I closed my eyes for a moment, gathered myself, and then looked her dead in the eye.

“I’ve given you the chance,” I told her. “If you want to work out something more long-term and stable for Hunter, I’d be willing to talk about it. But you can’t expect both of us to drop everything and let you act like you were never away. That’s too much of an upset for Hunter.”

“And what about me?” she demanded. “Don’t you care that you’re keeping a mother away from her son?”

“About as much as you cared about it when you left us ten years ago,” I told her. Her jaw dropped, and she had nothing else to say. Before she could come up with something, I turned to walk out of the diner.

As soon as the cool air hit me, I felt a wave of relief. It was over. I had known she was doing this to make a point, to grab our lives and insert herself into them so she could finagle some form of stability from somewhere. But I wasn’t going to let her do that to my son. Or to me. Things had been wild enough as it was without her, and I wasn’t going to put either of us through any more. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to let her manipulate her way back into my life. Not without a fight.