All I Wanted Was to Call Him Daddy on My Birthday

All I Wanted Was to Call Him Daddy on My Birthday.

NOVEL STATUS: COMPLETED

PUBLISHED CHAPTERS: 40 CHAPTERS

All I Wanted Was to Call Him Daddy on My Birthday – Sneak Peek

In five years of marriage, Darcy Whitmore had memorized every version of Grant Ashford. The one who wouldn’t look at her across the breakfast table. The one who left a room the moment their daughter entered it. The one who signed checks for Nell’s school with the mechanical detachment of a man paying a parking fine.

But tonight there was a version she’d never met: the one holding their daughter in the air.

Nell squealed, legs kicking against nothing, five years old and airborne for the first time in her father’s hands. “Mommy, the man is making me fly!”

The man. Not daddy—Nell had learned that word was off-limits, the way other children learn not to touch the stove. Darcy watched from the doorway and felt the specific kind of pain that comes from seeing your child receive something you know will be taken away.

Grant was drunk. That was the only explanation. His tie hung loose, his collar was undone, and he wore a wide, reckless grin that had nothing to do with the girl in his arms and everything to do with Brooke Tate, who had landed in the country that afternoon after six years abroad. Darcy had seen the notification on his phone before he had. She’d watched his face transform—watched something dead come alive behind his eyes—and understood.

Their history was simple, as love stories go. Grant and Brooke had been inseparable. Then Brooke left—no warning, no explanation—and Grant, chasing her to the airport in a rainstorm, crashed his car into a median and lost the use of his legs.

Darcy had been his assistant. She stayed. She endured his fury, his silence, the coffee mugs hurled at walls. She wheeled him to physical therapy and learned to read his pain in the set of his jaw. The night he stood on his own for the first time, he was so overwhelmed he drank an entire bottle of scotch and mistook her for the woman he actually wanted. Six times. She’d counted, though she wished she hadn’t.

W𝘦 u𝗉𝖽𝘢𝘁𝗲 𝗲𝗏𝖾𝗋𝘺 𝘸𝖾е𝗸 о𝗇 𝗀𝗮𝘭𝗇𝗈𝗏еl𝗌.co𝗆

Nell came from that night. And Grant married her—not out of love, not even guilt. Darcy found out later it was because Brooke had announced a new relationship overseas. She was a consolation prize dressed up in a marriage certificate.

After the wedding, he became a ghost who paid the mortgage. The day Nell was born, he was on a flight to another city. When Nell started talking, he forbade her from calling him daddy. When she lost control skating and called out the forbidden word, he watched her fall and split her forehead open, his face perfectly still.

Now he placed Nell on the sofa and grinned at her. “I’m going to be a good father.”

“Okay, I trust you, Daddy.”

-Continue in All I Wanted Was to Call Him Daddy on My Birthday chapter 1 –