Mom, Don't Cry! Here comes a new Daddy! novel Chapter 104

Chapter 98-1

(Dustin’s POV)

I feel like a creep.

Hiding behind a tree at the park, watching my ex–wife laugh, at something Ethan Hale says to her. Watching my son run toward the playground equipment without a care in the world.

Should get in my car and drive away and stop torturing myself with images of what I lost.

But I can’t.

Because seeing them together–seeing Sabrina smile in a way she never smiled with me, seeitig Jake look at Ethan with pure adoration, seeing the ease between the three of them–it’s like pressing on a bruise.

It hurts. But like a masochist, I keep watching, unable to walk away.

I never considered myself a good man. Growing up in an orphanage does that to you. Teaches you the hard way that the world doesn’t give a shit about you, that love is conditional, and survival means putting yourself first.

No mother to tuck me in at night. No father to teach me how to be a man. Just a revolving door of social workers and foster families who couldn’t quite commit, who always found a reason to send me back.

So I learned to be self–absorbed. Self–serving. To grab what I wanted and hold on tight because nobody

was going to give me anything for free.

And then Jessica appeared.

Beautiful, confident Jessica who looked at me like I was worth something. Who kissed me like I mattered. Who made me feel, for the first time in my life, like maybe I deserved to be loved.

She was my first love. My first taste of what it felt like to be loved.

So when she left for New York, it broke something in me. Made me believe that even when someone loved

Г you, they’d eventually leave.

That’s why I married Sabrina so fast after Jessica left. Because Sabrina was safe. Available. Easy to be

with.

She didn’t challenge me the way Jessica did. Didn’t make me work for her affection. She just… loved me. Consistently. Quietly. Without conditions.

And I took it for granted.

Every day for seven years, I compared her to Jessica. Made Jessica into this perfect, unreachable ideal in my head. Magnified every good memory until Jessica became a fantasy instead of a real person.

Because the truth? I never actually lived with Jessica. Never saw her in the morning with bed hair and bad breath. Never fought with her about bills or whose turn it was to do dishes. Never experienced the

Chapter 98+

mundane, everyday reality of sharing a life.

Cam

Tnever got to know her the way it mattered, so how could i te!! if she’s really better than Sabrina in reality?

With Sabrina, I had the good and the bad and the boring in–between.

But I was too stupid to see it as valuable. Too caught up in my fantasy of Jessica to recognize the real

love right in front of me.

And now it’s too late.

My vision blurs as I watch Ethan pull Sabrina closer, his hand gentle on her back. The way he looks at her- protective, possessive, smitten–that’s how I should have looked at her.

How I should have loved her.

But I didn’t. And now she’s his.

I need to leave. Need to stop watching this like some pathetic stalker.

I turn away, my chest aching with a pain I can’t name. Jealousy would’ve been easier to bear than this hollow ache in my chest.

The park is eerily quiet despite the afternoon sunshine with families scattered across the grass.

Ethan, seeing a rock below the slide, lets go of Sabrina and races towards Jake, picking him up before he trips himself against the rock.

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