“So I’m meeting your family?” The pieces of my heart slowly meld back together as it pounds against my chest and my palms begin to sweat. The way he is presenting this doesn’t bode well for me. I feel like meeting the family should not contain this much dread.

“Yeah.” He pulls to a stop in front of a ranch house with a white sedan parked in the driveway. The small tree in the grass is bare, its leaves long gone. It’s every average house. “I . . . It’s just . . . I need you to promise me that you will not share any of this with anyone.”

Oh fuck.

He has a kid, doesn’t he? He’s taking me to meet his secret love child.

“I promise.” I will a smile onto my face, hoping it looks more convincing than it feels.

It must work, because he takes a deep breath and I watch as the muscles in his body finally relax. “Alright then.” He leans over and when he kisses me this time, it’s more than the peck we had when I first got in the car. This one is deep and slow. It’s him saying something that he couldn’t quite put into words. I’m just still not sure what it is. When he pulls away, relief shines bright in his eyes. “Let’s go.”

I meet him on the sidewalk and he grabs my hand as we walk side by side to the front door. Quinton lifts his hand to knock on the blue-painted door, but it swings open before he can. And at the sight of the person on the other side, my stomach falls to my feet and my vision blurs.

“Hey!” Angela says. “Happy Thanksgiving!”

Unlike the first time we met, and the times since, her hair isn’t down in perfect waves and her slim hips aren’t wrapped in a pencil skirt. Instead, her long blonde hair is up in a bun that I think is supposed to look messy but instead looks high fashion, and her legs are encased in jeans that make them look even longer than they already are. Like a person would dress at home.

“Elliot, right?” she asks before leaning in and giving me a quick hug that I’m too shocked to reciprocate. “Nice to see you again.”

“Um, yeah, you too,” I say to the woman I’m beginning to suspect is the mother of his child. I look at Quinton with wide eyes that hopefully say “What in the entire fuck is going on here?” when she steps to the side and gestures us inside.

Quinton doesn’t say anything, but his fingers tighten around my hand as I try to pull it away. I freaking asked him if anything was going on between them and he said no!