Tangled Web

“Slow down…Baby, I can’t understand you!” I say for the second time, trying my best to figure out what Mila was saying between her sobbing.

“It’s out… he knows…”

“What’s out? I don’t understand?” I say shaking my head.

A fresh batch of tears fall as she screams; “Leland!”

Laughing, I say; “He’s out… Out of what, the closet, his mind?”

“This is not the time to be funny, damn it!” I straightened up as she hits me lightly in the arm; “Our secret about Dylan. Olivia told Leland and now he knows that Dylan is our son.”

“Oh.” I whisper, rather shortly. “What did he say?” I ask, already knowing the answer. At least I knew what I might say if I were in that position.

“He called me a whore and a few other choice words and I ran out the door.”

My eyes went wide, “Excuse me? He called you what?” I questioned her, as my blood started to boil. No one called my fiancé a whore and lived to tell the tale.

“Leland said I should have known you were a whore when I married you.”

“Fuck him! I'm going over there.”

“No!” she yells, grabbing my arm. “Please… I don’t want to start anymore fights. This is enough for now; we have to deal with this Duane Lee.

I sighed and sat down next to her on the bed. “I guess now we need to explain ourselves to everyone.”

“Where’s Amy to steal the spotlight when you need her?” Mila looks up at me and asks, finally able to smile instead of cry.

I pulled her into my arms; squeezing her tightly to let her know everything would be alright when I heard a knock at the front door. We looked at each other, both shrugging our shoulders and walked downstairs.

“Oh great, it’s Leland.’ Mila tells me as she reaches the bottom of the stairs. Without saying a word, she calmly opens the door, letting him into our house.

“Brah, of all the people in the world you couldn’t tell me?” were the first words out of his mouth.

“We didn’t tell anyone Leland…not even mom.”

“This is such bullshit. I mean… pure fucking bullshit!” he screams to no one in particular. “Well congrats on keeping it a secret.”

"I know that you're hurt... But you have to realize that it’s not all about you! It wasn’t like we were out to get you or cause you any pain. It was a decision we made as Dylan's parents." I tell him as I gesture between Mila and myself. "Believe it or not, Mila did have a life before she married you."

Leland sits down in the chair; running a hand across his forehead. I hoped that he was trying to calm down.

We sit down on the couch and after a few minutes of silence he speaks up. “How could you be married to me for that long and never once tell me? How could you wake up every single day knowing that you had another child that you weren’t raising?”

“Leland, I –“

“Let me finish please.” He says interrupting Mila. “When Dylan was born that would have made you sixteen years old and my brother was what, nineteen or twenty. Brah, that’s sick.

I started to open my mouth to respond but Mila placed her hand on my thigh, stopping me from getting too angry with my brother.

Leland falls silent for a moment, no doubt trying to sort things out in his mind. “If you would have just told me all those years ago we wouldn’t be going through this right now.”

Mila looks up and calmly says, “There are a lot of things we wouldn’t be going through right now if you or I had said or done something different all those years ago. Leland, I can’t change the past and I can’t change what happened between us; it is what it is… Dylan is my son. And more than anything it breaks my heart that I tried to hide that for so long. It wasn’t fair to him or Duane Lee.”

“Or yourself.” I whisper, putting my arm around her.

“I just don’t know if I can ever forgive you Mila.” Leland tells her.

She leans into me as she starts to cry; “I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself.”