After They Stole My Life, Reborn I Called Another Man Dad Chapter 03

After They Stole My Life, Reborn I Called Another Man Dad Chapter 03

It took Ethan three whole months to figure out how to be a dad.

During the first month, every time I cried, he would pull out the parenting manual Sarah had left behind and flip through it from cover to cover.

Was I hungry? Sleepy? Gassy? Did I need a diaper change?

He tried everything the book suggested. When none of it worked, he would pace around the living room with me in his arms, looking completely defeated.

“Zoe, what do you want from me?”

That only made me cry harder.

In the end, it was the woman from downstairs who came up to take a look.

“She’s overheating.”

Apparently, I had been crying because it was the middle of a scorching August summer, and Ethan was so terrified I would catch a cold that he had wrapped me in three layers of blankets.

After that day, he added a crooked note in giant handwriting to the first page of the parenting manual:

[Babies get hot.]

Sarah had prepared all kinds of things for the baby she thought she would have someday.

There were little dresses I could wear at around three months old, a sippy cup meant for when I turned six months, a tiny crown for my first birthday photos, and even a little backpack for my first day of preschool.

This house was supposed to have another adult in it.

But Sarah had never gotten the chance to meet me.

And I wasn’t really her daughter.

Still, the things she had left behind stayed with me as I grew up, one by one.

When I was five, I asked Ethan for the first time, “What was Mom like?”

He had just finished frying eggs in the kitchen. At my question, he froze so completely that he even forgot to turn off the stove.

“She had a bigger temper than I did. She was an even worse cook than me. And no matter how hard she tried, she could never figure out how to knit.”

He placed the badly burned egg on his own plate before adding, “But she loved you. A lot.”

I stared at him.

“She never even met me.”

Ethan’s hand paused halfway to his mouth.

“She didn’t know what you looked like,” he said quietly. “But she spent months waiting for you. Every day, she’d rub her belly and try to guess whether the baby kicking her was a hand or a foot.”

“She used to wake me up in the middle of the night because you were moving again.”

He lowered his head and took another bite.

“I’d say that counts as meeting you.”

I didn’t ask anything else.

Because what I really wanted to know was this:

If you found out someday that I wasn’t the baby Mom had carried inside her, would you still want me?

But I never had the courage to ask.

In my previous life, my own biological family had already thrown me away once.

In this life, I was terrified it would happen again.

…

I was seven when I saw Chloe for the first time.

The school was holding a Family Portrait Day, and Ethan was running late because a customer’s camera needed emergency repairs.

He ended up being thirty minutes late.

I sat alone in the very back row of the auditorium, waiting for him.

That was when Chloe walked in.

She was wearing a beautiful white dress.

My biological brother was carrying her backpack, while my biological mother walked beside them with a box of freshly cut fruit in her hands.

Seven years had passed.

They had barely changed at all.