Now I was moving, all right.

Back and forth, pacing on the sidewalk by the busy road like a bloody moron. She hadn’t seen me yet, but she would, soon, and what was I going to say? Cheers for letting me know I’m a father? Then again, she had a very good reason to be mad at me…

Fuck. Fuck.

We’d deal with it, I decided. We’d deal with the baby. He or she was so small, anyway. They wouldn’t even remember I hadn’t been present in their lives for the first few months or so. It was fine. We could pick up from where we left things off. If anything, wasn’t it an incentive for Indie to give me another chance? I was sober, richer than God, and desperately in love with her. Plus, I’d change diapers and do all the messy shite a lot of blokes shied away from. Hell, I hated that I saw the baby as a way to have leverage over her. I was thinking like high, manipulative Alex again, and I really wanted to leave that bastard behind, in rehab, when I left it.

I took a step into the park at the same time someone else did. But he was faster, not slowed down by the shock and horror at finding out what I just had.

He breezed past me.

Walked over to her.

Wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

Kissed her cheek…

It is scientifically impossible to die of a broken heart. I discovered it in that moment. Because if it was, I’d already be dead. Done. Over. That’s how much it had hurt to see them together. I watched them. She smiled at him as he sat down.

She was so beautiful.

He was so…not.

Normal brown hair. Normal clothes. Normal height. Normal weight. Just normal. What the hell did he think? Walking into her life with his normalcy and picking up the pieces—my pieces—playing daddy to this baby—my baby. I wanted to walk over there and beat the shit out of him. I didn’t even care that I had a criminal record, and the last time I got bailed for DUI and insinuating I’d wanted to shag an officer, my lawyer had warned me that the United States of America had just about had enough of my sorry arse, and the next time I got into trouble, I could get deported.

You can’t allow yourself to get deported, idiot. You have a baby to think about now.

Fine. I wasn’t going to beat the shit out of him. But I was going to do something.

I wish I had the virtue of patience. Then, maybe, I would have thought things through. Taken a few steps away, made a phone call, to Blake or Jenna or even Lucas, and asked them how does one react to the news that his ex—Indie was my ex, for the sake of this argument—had his baby, and moved on with some useless prat. I would maybe even go as far as asking them how—despite all the progress I’d shown—they still couldn’t trust my judgment, and had therefore hidden the existence of my baby from me. Because they absolutely knew. They had to know. Blake, Hudson, and Lucas were all in touch with Stardust. I knew that.

But I didn’t have anything other than a thousand burning suns in the pit of my stomach, suns that told me I’d be burned alive if I didn’t approach them, and so I did.

I light-jogged to them, feeling angry and relieved at the same time.

Indie’s head snapped up when I was about three feet away from her, and she dragged her eyes from the baby she cradled and fed, staring back at me.

I stopped, unable to make the rest of the journey. Her eyes paralyzed me, but it was her expression that undid me. She looked like she was…sorry. Like she’d missed me. Like she, too, had a lot of things to say. But she didn’t move, either, so we just looked like we were in an old movie that had frozen on a scene. The bastard beside her dragged his gaze up, every muscle in his face lax and happy.

“What’s going on? Do you know this guy, Indie?”

This guy?

This guy?

The fucker better not have touched my baby, or I would have to kill him, deportation or not. Besides, what the hell did he mean, ‘this guy’? Had she not told him she’d had Alex Winslow’s baby? I wasn’t some arsehole from the street. Even if he didn’t know who I was—fat chance, but some people just have bad taste in music—she still ought to have mentioned I was, in fact, a famous musician of some sort.

“Yeah, I…” she said slowly, still clasping the baby to her chest.

“Don’t.” I took a step forward, shaking my shock off. “Don’t downplay us. Not right now, and especially not after what I’m seeing here.”

“And what, exactly, are you seeing here?” She held my gaze. How could she say that? While holding the product of what we were to each other. Did I turn the women in my life into cold bitches, or was I naturally attracted to them and Indie had just been incredibly good at hiding it so far?

“We need to talk.” I breathed through my nose slowly, slowly, so fucking slowly, trying to incorporate every single piece of advice I’d been given in rehab. No one had warned me that the outside world I was being sent to had turned upside down while I was sitting in a circle clapping for people who bragged about not drinking their mouthwash to get high when their mother-in-law was in town.

“Maybe it’s not a good idea.” She sighed. Jesus, what the fuck? She didn’t even want to talk about it?

“No.” Another step forward. “Stardust, you listen to me. I’ve been through hell the last few months. For you. I’m not asking for a medal, or even for forgiveness—though that’d be really fucking grand, mind you—I’m just asking you kindly, respectfully, pleadingly , to listen to me.”

She put the formula bottle down on the bench and hugged the baby to her chest. He was cute. Cute, but he did not resemble her, and I was starting to grow incredibly confused. For one thing, he looked closer to a year old than a newborn. Secondly, I wasn’t much of a gene expert, but little guy had a head full of raven hair, and both Indie and I had brown hair in different shades. Mine was more chestnut; her original hair color was honey-ish, flirting with blond. I knew that because sometimes she forgot to wax the hair off her p—actually, it didn’t really matter how I knew that. I just did.

“Now’s not a good time.”

Her voice was quiet and guarded, and why in the world had the guy beside her not punched me yet? If this were me sitting beside her, the first fist would have been thrown the moment someone had even approached my girl. My girl. Was she his girl? I was going to be sick.

“When’s a good time?” I asked, still standing too closely and staring at her too eagerly. She looked left and right, blowing a lock of hair that fell from her braid aside.