The Daughter He Wanted. Kristina Knight

held up his hands. “No accusations. I’m not sure today is the day to drop all this on her, either.”

      Paige took a moment to breathe before answering. “Good. I didn’t send her away. It’s her swim-lesson afternoon. She swims at the rec center during the winter months and at the public pool during the summer. My best friend, Alison, took her because I had a meeting after school.” She pointed to the partially finished canvas in the family room. “Then I decided to work on a project I’m painting for her. She’ll be home—” Paige swallowed the lump in her throat but still didn’t invite him to meet Kaylie. She couldn’t. “She’ll be home later.”

      Alex blew out a breath. “Would it be okay if I met her?”

      “Okay,” she said after a moment. “But not today. Not yet.” Paige finished her tea and started to pace. She waved her hands at him like she was spreading oil over a canvas with her hands. “You seem completely normal, have a legitimate job. There’s not a neck tattoo under your collar. But she is still very young. I can’t just tell her you’re her dad over Cheerios—that’s her favorite cereal, by the way—tomorrow morning and send you two on a playdate after lunch.”

      She watched him intently for a moment and finally Alex nodded. “So how do we approach this? I could give you references that note my stellar work reputation, the fact that I play in the rec leagues during the summer and that I haven’t had more than a speeding ticket in my adult life.”

      “No references. I want a promise from you.”

      “I could quote you the oath I took when I joined the rangers.”

      “Don’t do that. Don’t be flippant. This isn’t wanting a lobster dinner and then changing your order to steak. She’s a person and she deserves your best. If you aren’t willing to give her that then you can turn around, get in your truck and go back to Park Hills.”

      Alex was quiet for a long moment. His eyes were fixed on her but it was as if he wasn’t seeing her so much as... Paige wasn’t sure. Something else.

      “I swear to you I’ll do my best not to hurt our daughter. I just need to see her.” There was a sincere edge to his voice that Paige couldn’t ignore. She nodded.

      “Okay.” She took a breath. “Could we meet for coffee? I have a meeting at the clinic tomorrow, so Friday? Before you meet Kaylie, you and I need to get to know one another better.”

      “Kaylie.” He breathed the word like a prayer and Paige realized he hadn’t known his daughter’s name. “My daughter’s name is Kaylie.” Her heart melted a little at the breathy way he said Kaylie’s name, the mistiness in his eyes.

      Paige swallowed. “Kaylie Ann Kenner.”

      Alex stood quickly, the high chair squealing across her tiled floor and making them both wince. He whipped a card from his wallet and handed it across the counter. “Coffee would be great. My numbers are there, and my email. Just text me when and where and I’ll be there.”

      He hurried from her kitchen and the screen door slammed behind him. Paige watched from the little hallway as the man she never thought she would meet got into his big truck and pulled away from her house.

      He was coming back and she had no idea if she should be happy or sad about that.

       CHAPTER TWO

      AS SOON AS the truck turned the corner from Paige’s house, Alex pulled to the side of the road. Took a couple of deep breaths and tried to make sense of the jittery feeling in his stomach. He’d been fine talking to Paige about the clinic, been fine seeing his daughter’s face for the first time covered in cake icing. Sure, when she brought up Dee his hands got sweaty, but that was normal. No one liked talking about dead spouses, did they?

      Everything was fine until Paige said Kaylie’s name.

      Then he couldn’t get out of the little white house with the pink door and wicker porch furniture fast enough. He hit his head lightly against the steering wheel. It was just a name. An innocuous name.

      A name that changed everything one more time.

      The call from the lawyer had him taking a day off work just to make sure the little girl’s life was ordered. He never took off work. Not since the funeral. Work was real and the reality was that his world imploded when Dee got sick. He’d made sense of what was left and built a decent life again. Sure, he avoided places like the Low Bar and no, he didn’t really like the summer and winter rec leagues, but it kept his friends off his back and distracted him from the big, empty house in Park Hills.

      Maybe he should have moved. He got as far as donating most of Dee’s things, but moving out of the house she loved had felt...wrong on some level. So he stayed.

      Kaylie Ann Kenner. Paige’s voice echoed in his ear. The plan had been to knock on the door, make sure everything was in place and go back to work. Put the little girl in a box in his mind, but leave her and the mother alone. He had needed to know and now he knew.

      And the plan was out the window. He couldn’t see her picture and know her name and not know her, too. Alex swallowed.

      Kaylie was real. Paige was totally and completely real from her paint-dribbled feet to the freckles over her nose. Why did he have to take her hand? That little jolt of electricity he’d felt in the truck was nothing compared to the full-on sizzle that’d raced through his fingertips at her kitchen counter.

      For the first time in three years he wanted real. Tangible. Not the memories that floated around the big house. Not the too-loud laughter that sometimes escaped him when everyone watched to make sure he got the joke, that he was really there with them, in the moment. Paige hadn’t looked at him like that, not once. And not once had he mentally escaped the pretty white kitchen with the hardwood floors and black granite countertops. He couldn’t remember a single time in the past few years when he’d been as present as he’d been from the moment he parked the truck at Paige’s curb.

      A low-slung convertible swerved around his truck, honking, and Alex shook himself. He pulled back onto the highway and started for Park Hills, and as usual took a right at the light rather than the left that would take him home. The wrought-iron gates were still open, the tree-lined lane shaded from the afternoon sun. Alex pulled through the gates and drove past the statue of the floating angel, turned at the mausoleum that always looked haunted. Stopped the truck before a gray headstone with Dee’s name and dates.

      And didn’t open the door. He sat there for a long time with his hand on the door handle, unable to move. What was he going to say to her? Hey, honey, you know how I didn’t want to do IVF? Well, thanks to your insistence now I have a daughter. He could imagine the back-of-the-head slap Dee would give him with that one.

      Don’t be so flip, she’d say and demand all the details. Not that he had that many. He had a meeting scheduled tomorrow with the head of the clinic, but for now he only knew what the lawyer had told him on the phone: his sample was mislabeled and used as donor sperm instead of being destroyed. She’d turned four in the spring, according to the picture on Paige’s windowsill, so Kaylie would have been conceived sometime in the three-month window between when they learned about the cancer and when they learned it was terminal. Before he sent in the paperwork to have his samples destroyed. And he definitely couldn’t tell Dee that for the first time in three years he felt alive and it was because of another woman.

      No, he couldn’t tell her that, not any of it. Because he had a daughter, thanks to her, and he had a life, such as it was. All she had was nothing. No babies to hold. No more laughter when he burned the steaks on the grill. No more life to grab on to.

      Alex restarted the truck and pulled past her marker, down the shaded lane and back onto the main road. He grabbed dinner at a drive-through window and continued to his big, empty house. The forest-green shutters needed to be repainted, he realized when he pulled into the drive, and this weekend he should probably do a final mowing of the grass. In the kitchen he