Ev stared at the piece of well preserved paper for a long moment, rereading it at least twice before she finally glanced up.
It was a lot to take in- one of those moments that felt like the world was spinning around her, but she was stuck in place.
Frozen for a long second, before Lindsey pulled her back into reality.
"This came after she left you in the middle of the night when you were just two weeks old..." He could tell that her mind was racing, but that didn't stop him from sharing his thoughts. "You cried too much... that's what she said." He added. "And Stevie was the only one that could get you to calm down, which made her more insecure than it did anything else." He wasn't holding anything back- he didn't care anymore.
He knew, even back then that if Everleigh loved anyone else that way, Lucy wouldn't have cared. But it was Stevie that she was so drawn to, which was the problem from the very beginning.
"She wouldn't even let your mom hold you in the hospital, or see you after you had come home..." His eyes slowly traveled over to Stevie, who was staring down at the floor as she leaned into the wall with her shoulder.
She was still holding her shawl close, tears lingering in the brims of her eyes as she went back to that place... That was such an awful time.
She could suddenly remember exactly what it felt like that morning that she'd left the hospital,
without Ev... the girl that had captured her heart long before she'd looked into her eyes.
Lucy and Crosby had already taken the baby back to Levy's tiny apartment, where they had planned to stay for a few weeks before going back to Chicago.
It was dreadful- that entire day. It was that long walk to the car, and the never ending drive to an empty house that made it all so devastating. Stevie was lonely, even though she wasn't alone.
That was when it became obvious to her that Everleigh was the piece to their puzzle that they didn't know they were missing, until she had arrived.
"Then she showed up four years later..." Levy scoffed, having stayed pretty quiet for as long as he could.
He wasn't sure if he should have sat in on that conversation- his presence didn't seem all that fitting, but since he'd sort of made himself present, he wanted to kind of be involved.
Lindsey sighed softly, nodding his head in agreement. "Showed up out of the blue," he repeated Levy's words, just to emphasize how odd it was. "And by then, after four years, you were our daughter." He motioned towards Stevie, not having it in himself to look over at her again. "We were all you knew at that point in your life." His voice grew much softer and a lot more sympathetic. "We were your parents by then, and giving you up wasn't an option." He admitted with a faint shrug.
At that point, Everleigh had tears streaming down her cheeks as she stared at her dad. She didn't know what to say, so she just listened... carefully.
"They were going to take you all the way across the country to a place you'd never been, with people you didn't know..." he could feel himself getting a little sad as well, but he could hide it better. "For a long time, you were scared to even meet them at the park." He recalled. "We weren't going to let that happen." He lingered, creasing a brow gently as he thought about what he was going to say next.
He was doing a pretty good job for coming up with all of that right off the top of his head... All the things he thought he would end up saying went out the window and the real feelings surfaced, which didn't happen too often.
"So we did what we thought was best, and what was right." Lindsey's eyes fell to the floor, using his hand to run across his face to try to hide whatever he was starting to feel. "We fought for our family..." he finally looked back over at the blonde, but only for a brief moment because the look on her face was enough to break his heart. "And then, just like she did the first time, she gave up." Lindsey wasn't going to sugarcoat that... He didn't have to and he didn't want to. "She runs when things get too difficult."
He wasn't saying anything bad about Lucy- he was just telling the truth and like he said before... sometimes the truth hurts.
"So," he shrugged, shifting all of his weight from one foot to the other. "There you go, there's the truth." Lindsey couldn't look any of them in the eye, even though he knew all three of them were staring in his direction.
There was this long moment of silence that washed over the room- all of them just taking a second to let all of those words sink in.
And then, without saying a thing, Evee pushed herself up off the couch. She could hardly see from the tears blurring her vision, but she still trailed towards the doorway, handing Stevie the letter before she slipped upstairs.
That was heavy. There was a lot of baggage in that conversation that had weighed them all down, and she needed a moment to process it.
Levy was the first to break that silence as he let out a deep sigh. "I'll just crash here tonight." He motioned towards the couch, also at a real loss for words.
Lindsey nodded, one hand in his sweatpants pocket as the other scratched the back of his head, awkwardly.
He wasn't sure if Stevie was going to be okay with them spending the night, especially after that... It was a lot, and he probably should have talked with her about it before he said all of those things, but he was tired of it.
It felt like they were constantly running in circles and after seeing Stevie so upset for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last couple of months, he had decided that he'd had enough.
He wasn't going to let that continue... He just wasn't.
With the softest set of brown eyes, she slipped her arm through her husbands as her head met his shoulder. "Thank you..."
