He Married My Best Friend While I Gave Birth, So I Left novel · Chapter 12 of 48

Chapter 12: Byron's POV

Byron's POV

I got up at four, because I hadn't slept.

Brady had stood in my barn with his court papers and a look I had not seen on him since he was nine and broke Mother's lamp.

He didn't want the baby.

He wanted to know whose she was.

I lit the stove and stood at the kitchen window until the sky went gray.

At five Lacey came out in my gray sweatshirt with Poppy fussing against her shoulder.

"You didn't sleep either," she said.

"No."

"Is it the motion?"

"It's the test," I said. "If they swab me and swab her, they'll know in three days what the letter already says. My mother has run out of time, and she'll do something ugly first."

She sat with Poppy and a cup of the weak tea I had learned to make for her.

"You don't have to do anything about that today," she said.

"I do."

"Byron."

"Can I say something that isn't about the baby?"

She looked at me over the rim of the cup.

"Four years you were my sister-in-law," I said. "You ate Thanksgiving at my table. You brought a pie to every funeral in my family."

"I remember."

"You never asked me one question about myself."

I hadn't meant to say it.

I'd carried it for four years without ever picking it up.

She went very still.

"Not what I did in the winter, or what I wanted," I said. "Not why I didn't marry, or why I lived out here with a barn and two dogs. I was Brady's brother. I was the man who fixed the porch."

"That's true."

"I'm not angry about it."

"You're a little angry."

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