Angel's Peak by Robyn Carr Read Free Book Online Page B

several weeks there hadn’t been any more contact from him so, to save herself, she had the cell shut off and got herself a new number. She changed her e-mail address. Then she started looking for a new job and a path out of Santa Rosa.
    She had always known, from the time she’d said goodbye to Sean four years ago, that she would have to deal with him eventually. She wasn’t sure exactly when or how, but she’d thought she would have a little more time.
    Her daughter, Rosie, three and a half and as precocious as an only child can be, had just recently asked, “Where is our daddy?” Funny she would say our daddy, but then the whole concept was new to her as she had just noticed that they didn’t have one. Preschool had its share of separated families, but almost all the other kids seemed to know where both their parents were. Most were being picked up alternately by their moms and their dads.
    And Rosie hadn’t asked who is our daddy, but where.
    “He’s flying a very fast, very high jet in the air force,” Franci answered. “It goes all over the world and he’s busy doing a very important job.”
    Rosie had said, “Oh.” She probably didn’t understand much beyond the important fact that Franci knew where Rosie’s daddy was. But what Franci knew was that in a few months, maybe a year, maybe two, as her world became larger, Rosie would ask things like, “What’s his name?” “Why doesn’t he come to see us?” And eventually, “Why aren’t you married?” These would be increasingly difficult questions to answer. And those questions formed the primary reason Franci had not wanted to face this—she couldn’t imagine how she would tell Rosie that her daddy just didn’t want anything to do with her because he absolutely, positively did not want to be a father.
    Franci didn’t tell her mom about Rosie’s question because her mother had asked her so many times how she intended to handle her situation. From the beginning Vivian had disapproved of this approach. “Fine, don’t marry him,” she had said. “Don’t have expectations of him. Don’t be disappointed in his behavior. But he deserves to know he has a child.”
    Under any other circumstances, Franci would agree. “Mom, he was adamant! He did not want children. He didn’t want marriage, either.”
    “All that has a way of changing when there’s a child actually on the way,” Vivian had said.
    “Exactly,” Franci argued. “That’s why I want to handle this on my own, at least for now. Because I’m only interested in marrying and having a child with a man who loves me as much as I love him, who wants our child as much as I do. Don’t you get that?”
    “Of course I get it. But, like it or not, when you accidentally get pregnant, you have a responsibility to tell the other parent and let the cards fall where they may. Deal with his response however you must, but you have to at least tell him.”
    “I will. Eventually,” Franci had said. The problem wasn’t that she found the concept of informing him so unreasonable. It had just been that when she found out she was pregnant, and then when Rosie was a new baby, she wasn’t emotionally strong enough to have Sean in her life. She’d thought that, in time—time that so quickly stretched into four years—she would be ready to confront the reality without it completely disrupting her very existence. She knew what it could mean—Sean rejecting Rosie altogether, and that would hurt too much to contemplate. Or, best-case scenario, an arrangement of his visits and, too soon, of Rosie going to spend time with him. Ultimately it could be Rosie spending time with Sean’s new family, because eventually he would find the woman he could commit to. Being separated from Rosie was going to be so hard, and seeing Sean regularly? Seeing Sean happy with another woman would be sheer torture.
    When she’d seen him in Arcata, she should have made a date for coffee; she shouldn’t have shut him down