He Called Our Night a Mistake, So I Raised His Daughter Without Him novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: A List of Four

"Don't open it," Sullivan said.

I had my thumb over the thumbnail.

"She wants me to," I said. "She's been waiting seven years to send this to somebody."

"Then let her wait."

"Tell me what's on it."

He rubbed his bandaged hand over his jaw.

"Me," he said. "On a floor. Her voice, maybe. I don't remember it, Carina. I only remember being told afterward."

"Told by her."

"Told by her."

I put the phone face down on the porch step.

Behind us, through the screen door, my mother ran the tap and my father said something low in Italian.

"I want you to know what I did after Nico told me," I said. "Not what I wanted. What I did."

"All right."

"I hung up the phone in that motel room, and I sat on the bed for an hour, looking at what little money I had left."

He didn't move.

"Four hundred and twelve dollars. That was all I had in the world. I thought, he's married, or he's about to be, and the man I'm going to tell is a SEAL who has a wife and a career and an admiral for a father-in-law."

"Carina."

"I thought you'd offer to pay and I'd have to say yes, and Whitney would find out, and my baby would be a problem you solved."

"I would have found a way to be there."

"I know that now."

I looked at the street.

"I got a job at a diner in Knoxville. I was sick every morning in the walk-in cooler. One of the waitresses let me sleep in her spare room until I could rent my own."

"I owe her," he said quietly.

"The night Rosetta was born, nobody was in the room but a nurse. She asked who the father was for the form. I said, put nobody."

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