Best Friend's Daddy (A Single Dad Romance)

by Naomi Niles

  “How do you feel about him?” Doctor Moira asked.

  I hesitated a moment, trying not to blush as I spoke. “I feel very strongly about him,” I admitted. “He’s a great guy. I’ve never met anyone like him before.”

  Doctor Moira nodded. Then she turned to Haley. “And what about you, Haley?”

  “What about me?” she asked in confusion.

  “What do you think about John?” Doctor Moira prompted. “Do you like him? Do you approve?”

  “Yes,” she said immediately. “Of course, I do. He’s a great guy.”

  “Is there anything else you would like to add? Or share?”

  I looked from Haley to doctor Moira and I felt as though I were missing something important here. “Haley?” I said softly. “Is there something more?”

  Haley hesitated for a moment. “I do really like John,” she said at last. “It’s just that… I suppose it’s a little daunting, knowing that I could lose you.”

  “Lose me?” I repeated in shock. “How could that possibly happen?”

  “Think about it, Kami,” Haley said. “If you and John get more serious, things will happen. First, you’ll move in with him, then you’ll get married, and then you’ll have kids.”

  “I don’t see the point?”

  “There won’t be room in your life for me.”

  I stared at Haley for a moment. She was looking at me imploringly, as though silently begging me not to hate her. I took a moment to digest what she had just said. Then I took a deep breath.

  “Haley,” I started. “You could never lose me. Remember what I told you – I’ll always have your back.”

  “I know that you will,” she nodded. “But it won’t be the same. Your life will revolve around JJ. And the bubble we’ve created for ourselves will…disappear.”

  “Haley,” Doctor Moira said gently. “Perhaps you need to stop thinking about this bubble you’ve created for yourselves as a good thing. It might be a safe option, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best one. When was the last time you had a serious relationship?”

  “I… I’ve never had a serious relationship,” Haley admitted.

  “You’re a thirty-three-year-old woman,” doctor Moira said, without judgment. “Don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

  “I never really thought about it like that,” Haley said in a small voice.

  “The two of you have relied on each other for a long time,” Doctor Moira said. “It’s created an inter-dependent relationship. The problem with that is it doesn’t allow much room for other relationships to flourish.

  “Haley, it’s important that you try to develop other friendships outside of the one you have with your sister. It’s important that you both cultivate separate lives. I’m not telling you to break the bubble – I’m telling you to expand the bubble.”

  I glanced at Haley, who was biting her lip. “What if I don’t want a long-term relationship?” she asked. “What if I want to be independent?”

  “If that is truly how you feel, then that’s your prerogative,” Doctor Moira nodded. “But you need to identify the reason you prefer meaningless one-night stands to the alternative. Is it because you truly enjoy your independence, or is it because you’re afraid of getting hurt…like your mother did?”

  I reached out and took Haley’s hand. She flinched a little, but she returned pressure. When she looked up, her eyes looked a little watery.

  “I don’t want to end up like my mother,” Haley whispered, and my heart broke for her.

  “Think about what you’re saying, Haley,” Doctor Moira said, leaning in a little. “You say you don’t want to end up like your mother, but you tried to kill yourself the same way she did. You have to know that your method of coping is not working. By trying so hard to avoid her mistakes, you inevitably make the same ones.”

  A tear slipped from Haley’s eye. “What can I do to change that?”

  “Hard work. You need to expand your life. You need to make an effort to expose yourself to new people and new experiences. You need to do the things that scare you. And you need to do them separate from your sister.”

  Haley nodded and took that in.

  “Kami,” Doctor Moira said, and I looked up at her, startled.

  “Yes?”

  “At Haley’s last appointment with me, she mentioned that she’s wanted to expand your business for a while now. But you’ve been resistant to the idea.”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “That’s true.”

  “Can you explain to me why?”

  “I suppose it’s because I wanted it to be just the two of us,” I said. “We have complete control over everything now. I didn’t want to ruin everything by getting third parties involved.”

  Doctor Moira looked at me pointedly and I heard myself – maybe for the first time. “That’s the unhealthy bubble you’ve been talking about, huh?”

  She smiled. “Maybe it’s time you both stepped out of your comfort zones a little. Maybe it’s time to try something different.”

  Haley and I exchanged a glance. “I’m willing to give it a shot,” I said, with my heart in my chest.

  Haley looked as scared as I felt, but she nodded, too. “I am, too.”

  “Good,” Doctor Moira smiled. “Then we’ve made progress. I don’t expect you to change your lives too drastically too soon. But I would like you both to take baby steps when the opportunity arises. Your relationship is a special one, and it should be protected and appreciated. But don’t use each other as an excuse to avoid the things that scare you. That method can’t sustain itself for long.”

  Haley and I exchanged another glance. We nodded at each at the same time, and I felt our bond grow a little stronger. It was a strength that came from honesty, from reflection, and above all, from a newfound awareness.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  JJ

  She was wearing a long, old-fashioned blue dress with a pattern of birds on the front. Her hair was tied back behind her head, and her hazel eyes were on full display. If you focused on her eyes alone, she could have been as young as twenty. It was only when you panned out and you saw the lines on her face that gave her away and placed her in middle age.

  Her smile faltered slightly when she saw me, but she managed to hold it in place. “You came,” she whispered, as though she were talking to herself.

  “I came?” I repeated in shock.

  “It is you, isn’t it, John?”

  I sucked in my breath when she said my name. “You… You know who I am?”

  “Yes, I knew,” I said. “ How could I not know? You’re my son.”

  It was the way she said it. The way she said the word “son,” it send a tidal wave of emotion through me. And just like that, I was twelve again, and she was my mom.

  “You didn’t say anything the day I ran into you at the diner.”

  “I was shocked to see you,” she replied. “I wasn’t sure how to react, and I didn’t want to say anything in public. Also, I wasn’t sure if you wanted to reveal yourself to me. I decided to wait and see.”

  “You knew I’d come here looking for you?”

  “I suspected,” Alice nodded. “I hoped… But I wasn’t sure.”

  I just stared at her. She was somewhat different from what I remembered. It had nothing to do with her looks. It had more to do with her manner. It was the way she spoke, the way she held herself. There was a confidence about her that I had never seen before. Or maybe I just hadn’t noticed.

  “Why don’t you come in and sit down,” she said. “I’ll make you something to eat.”

  She spoke as though we were old friends, as though I constantly dropped by her house and she constantly welcomed me in and made me food. I didn’t question it. I just followed her inside. Her house was small, but she didn’t have much furniture and that opened up the space. She led me into her kitchen, whose windows overlooked her garden.

  “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing me to the round table in the center of
the space. “I can whip up some chicken wraps for you. It’s simple, but delicious.”

  “Sure,” I nodded, feeling a little like I was in the Twilight Zone.

  She opened the fridge and poured me a tall glass of juice. Then she handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled, like the child I felt I was in that moment.

  She gave me a soft, maternal smile and then got back to making her wraps. Every now and again, she would turn back and glance at me as though to make sure I was really there.

  I knew how she felt. I couldn’t stop looking at her, either. And each time I did, I was hit with another memory, some tiny detail that had been hidden in the recesses of my mind but had no opportunity to come to light until now.

  “You’ll be thirty-two now… Am I right?” she asked.

  I nodded silently.

  “And, you’re a doctor?”

  I looked at her with a start. “How do you know?”

  She smiled. “I hope you don’t think this is an intrusion, but… I’ve been following your lives, as far as I could manage. It was easy to do given the professions you chose. You became a plastic surgeon who has worked on some prominent cases. Peter’s a decorated police officer, Sam’s a firefighter, and Alan’s an Olympic swimmer. The one person I’m a little in the dark about is…”

  “Talen,” I nodded. “I know.”

  “How is he?” Alice asked, almost greedily.

  I saw the need in her eyes when she asked about Talen, as though she were desperate for news about him. I felt a little irrational spark of jealousy, but I forced it down.

  “Talen is…good,” I said shortly. I didn’t feel like getting into Talen’s story just now. I wanted to know about her. All this time, I had let her take the lead because my shock had prevented me from asking questions. But now I wanted to know about her.

  “Where have you been all this time?” The question came out more forcefully than I had intended. “Have you just been holed up here in California for sixteen years?”

  “I’ve lived in California for the last seven years,” she replied. “Before that, it was Arizona. Before Arizona, it was Kentucky.”

  My brows wrinkled and I gazed at her questioningly. “You’ve moved around a lot.”

  “I have,” Alice nodded. “Unwilling, but it was necessary at the time.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She put two wraps on a plate and brought it to the table. Then she sat down next to me and slid the plate across to me. “I want to tell you the whole story, John,” Alice replied. “It sounds crazy, but it was the reality behind why I left you boys in the first place.”

  “Crazy,” I said, repeating the word she used. “Okay… I’m listening.”

  She smiled. I saw her hand inch towards mine, as though she wanted to touch me, but she stopped the action before she could go through with it.

  “I grew up in a bad neighborhood in Harlem,” Alice started. “I lost my mother young and my father did everything he could to support me.”

  “You never spoke about your family.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she nodded. “My past was mired with…complications. I didn’t want to have to explain everything to you boys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had already made the mistake of getting one person I cared about deeply involved in my mess. I didn’t want to involve innocent children.”

  “What mess?” I asked, in confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  Alice sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m talking in circles, aren’t I? I should be clearer, especially after you’ve come all this way. Let me start from the beginning.”

  She took a moment. Her eyes were a little nervous, as though she were scared about sharing her story, as though she were afraid of judgment. I found myself holding my breath, too, as though this story could change the course of my life.

  “As I said, I lived in a bad neighborhood with my father. I had just celebrated my seventeenth birthday, and I was walking back home after school. Usually I would have been walking with Marcia. She was my best friend at the time. But she had missed school that day. I decided to take a shortcut back home since I was alone.

  “I had to cut across old Simon’s abandoned backyard and then walk through an alleyway to get to Conway Street. Dad had warned me against this particular shortcut a dozen times after he caught me using it one day, but I decided to ignore his warning this time. I thought he was just being paranoid.”

  I felt a sudden draft and I wondered if it was the cool air coming through from the open window or if it was my mother’s strange story. I still had no idea why she was telling me this, but I was willing to keep an open mind until the end.

  “It was getting dark, and I heard voices on the periphery of Old Simon’s land. Instinct made me duck down low and hide. I knew immediately that I shouldn’t have been there. My neighborhood was crawling with shady drug deals, and I knew that I had unknowingly stumbled upon one. I was hiding behind a beat up old Chevy. Two men were facing me, and I recognized one of them.

  “His name was Dustin Hacker, and he was one of the more notorious drug lords in my neighborhood. Apparently, even the police were afraid of him. But at the time, I didn’t know much about him. I did know he was dangerous, though.

  “I couldn’t move, because if I did, they’d see me. I was sure that I’d stumbled into something no one was meant to see. I was trying to backtrack, retrace my steps so that I could go back the way I’d come. And that’s when it happened.

  “The man standing next to Dustin Hacker pulled out a gun. He didn’t miss a beat. He pointed and shot, straight at the man facing him. All I saw was a body hit the ground. I don’t know if I screamed or not, but they definitely heard something. All four men in the lot turned their heads in my direction. I didn’t think, I was so scared; I did the first thing that seemed sensible at the time: I ran.”

  I let out a low whistle. “This really happened to you?”

  Alice smiled. “I know, it seems like something from a movie. But yes, it actually happened to me. I ran and they followed. I managed to slip past them in the dark, but it was a narrow escape. But in the chaos of running from them, I’d left behind my backpack. They knew who I was and where to find me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I was terrified, but I knew I needed help. I went straight to my father and told him what had happened. He took me to the police station, but I couldn’t give them anything concrete. I gave them basic descriptions of the two men I had seen, but they told me I could be describing anyone.

  “After what seemed like hours at the station, Dad and I went home. He told me we couldn’t rely on the police. He got me to pack a bag and then drove me across town, where we checked into a cheap motel.”

  Alice stumbled a little as she tried to find the words to best explain her story. “I woke up with a fever the next day, so Dad told me to stay in the motel. He had to go into work, but he would be back in the evening. I stayed inside all day, watching old re-runs and bad commercials. I expected him back at five-thirty, but I started looking out the window for him at half past four.

  “When five-thirty came and went, I started panicking. By seven o’clock, I was downright hysterical. I knew my father. If he was going to be late, he would have called.

  “I called the police, and the officer I had spoken to the night before came to get me. He was kind and patient, and he would become a central figure in my life for a long time. His name was Officer Jones Carlton. He told me not to worry, that he would find my father.”

  “And, did he?”

  Alice looked towards her pretty garden. “They found his body. A few blocks away from where he worked. He had been coming back home when they’d caught him.”

  “They…murdered him?” I asked in shock.

  “It was obvious he had tried to fight,” she explained, without inflection in her tone. “But obviously, he had been overpowered. He had a blow to his head and internal bleeding, but the autopsy
showed that he had died from strangulation.”

  “Oh God,” I breathed, amazed at how calmly Alice narrated her gruesome story.

  “That was when the police finally took me seriously. They realized whoever had killed my father would be after me, too. Killing him had been a warning, a message that told me to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Did they start an investigation?”

  “They did,” she nodded. “The man who had been murdered in old Simon’s backyard… His body was found in an old creek by a bridge. They wanted me to give my testimony.”

  “Did they find out who the killer was?” I asked.

  Alice smiled sadly. “Dustin Hacker hadn’t become one of the most powerful drug lords in the state for nothing. They never even managed to bring him up on charges. Which meant I was a sitting duck. The officer I told you about, Jones Carlton, he was the one that helped me get out of Harlem. With his help, I moved to Colorado. And that was where…”

  “You met Dad,” I finished for her.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “I was eighteen and alone in the world. He was almost ten years older, pragmatic, sensible, and patient. He made me feel safe. So when he asked me to marry him, it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me at that point. In any case, I was already pregnant with you. It made sense for us to be a family.”

  She blushed a little as she spoke. But then she managed to gain her bearings. “What I didn’t know was that Dustin Hacker was still looking for me. The noose was tightening around his neck, and he needed to make sure I couldn’t identify him or testify against him if more evidence was found.

  “I had lived my whole life looking over one shoulder. And it was just when I was starting to feel safe that I realized I was being followed.”

  I sighed. “That’s why you left us.”

  “If I stayed, I was putting you all in danger. What happened to my father would have happened to you and your brothers, and I couldn’t bear to live with that guilt. So I made a decision, and a week later, I left.”

  “Did Dad know that was the reason you left?” I asked her.

  “He knew,” she nodded. The way she replied, I knew she was holding something back, but I could tell it was personal and I didn’t want to pry. Her issues with Dad were her own business.