He Raised the Cup With His Mistress, But the Boy Was Mine novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Midnight at Pete's

Lena sleeps above her brother's bar, Ty arrives with champagne on his jersey and admits the boy is his five-year-old son, then asks for a paternity test on her baby.

My brother Pete pulled his pickup into the garage twelve minutes after I called him.

He didn't ask a single question, because he had watched the whole thing on the bar's big TV with forty customers.

"Get in," he said. "Seat heater's on."

He drove me to Sobczak's Tap on the west side, and the whole way he gripped the wheel with both hands.

Pete played six seasons of minor-league hockey and has been hit in the face by professionals.

"I never saw a hit like that one," he said at a red light.

Sobczak's Tap was open when we pulled up, and it was full of Ironmen fans in navy jerseys.

Every head turned to me when I walked in.

Pete stepped in front of me and unplugged the TV from the wall.

"Bar's closed," he said. "Everybody finish your beer, and the next round is on me, because you're leaving."

"It's Cup night, Pete," a man called from the back.

Pete took the Ironmen pennant off the wall above the register, folded it twice and dropped it into the trash can behind the bar.

Then he took down the signed Ty Dolan stick and set it in the trash can beside it.

Nobody argued with him after that.

When the last customer had gone, he sent me upstairs to his apartment, and I lay down on his couch in my maternity dress.

The baby kicked me twice, hard, under the ribs.

"I know," I told her. "I know."

My phone had forty-one missed calls.

I turned it off and slept for about an hour.

At midnight, someone pounded on the bar's back door so hard that the glass rattled.

Pete went down in his socks, carrying a bat.

I listened from the top of the stairs.

"Not tonight, Ty," Pete said.

"I'm not here to fight you, Pete. I just need five minutes with my wife."

"She's not your wife in a courtroom, and she's not your wife in my bar."

"Let him in," I called down.

Pete swore, and unlocked the door.

Ty came in with champagne still drying on his white dress shirt and the Ironmen captain's patch on his chest.

He had been crying, and he had been drinking.

He looked at me, then at my stomach, and he stopped halfway across the floor.

"Lena."

"How old is he?" I asked.

Ty rubbed his eyebrow, where the old scar is.

"Five."

"You did the math on that stage in front of eighteen thousand people. You did it three months ago when you filed. Do it for me now."

"Eli was born the same year," he said slowly. "The same month."

The same month.

The same March I had lost our first baby.

"You were with her while I was pregnant."

"It was a few weeks. Before you knew. It was over before you ever suspected."

"Before I ever suspected," I said. "How kind of you to finish before I found out."

Pete set the bat on the bar and cracked his knuckles one at a time.

"Pete," Ty said. "Please."

"I'm just warming up," Pete said.

Ty turned back to me.

"I didn't know about Eli until the day he was born. My mother told me that morning, and Shelby was already in the delivery room."

"You didn't know," I said. "You found out the morning I was in the hospital losing our son, and you kept it from me for five years."

"I couldn't tell you. You'd just lost him. Mom said it would break you."

"Your mother decided what would break me."

"She was trying to help."

"And tonight? Was she helping then?"

He didn't answer.

Instead he took a thick envelope out of his jacket and laid it on the bar.

"My lawyers drew up terms. You'd be taken care of. Support, a place to live, everything for the baby."

He swallowed.

"After she's born, we'll need a paternity test."

The bar went quiet, except for the cooler humming.

"A test," I said.

"It's standard, Lena. Mom's lawyers said with the timing and the, with everything in the news, we have to."

"Whose baby do you think she is?"

"I don't think anything. I just need to be sure."

I pulled my wedding ring off my finger.

It left a pale groove where it had been for ten years.

The champagne bucket sat on the bar from the Cup party Pete had planned for forty people.

I dropped the ring into the ice water and heard it hit the bottom.

"Congratulations on your championship," I said. "Go home to your family."

Ty stared into the bucket and didn't move.

Pete walked him out with a hand between his shoulder blades, not gently.

When the door shut, I opened the envelope.

The first page of the terms listed the house on Lakeview Drive, and under "Owner of record" it didn't say Tyler Dolan.

It said Bernadette Dolan.

The house I had put thirty thousand dollars of my grandmother's money into belonged to his mother, and it always had.

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