Chapter 32 Rafael
RAFAEL
I know the second the words leave Aisling’s mouth that I’ve stumbled upon something I wasn’t meant to know.
There’s a hitch in her breath, a fraction of a second where her eyes go wide and her face drains of color, like I’ve reached inside her and touched something raw and alive.
The warmth between us collapses. The bed feels too big. The air turns thin.
I sit up slowly, sheets pooling around my waist as my heart starts to pound. “Aisling. What did you mean?” I press.
She shakes her head too quickly. “Nothing. I didn’t mean anything. I just meant hypothetically.” Her hands clutch the sheet to her chest like armor. She won’t meet my eyes.
“You said there’s no better feeling than becoming a mother,” I say carefully. “Not that you imagine it. Not that you want it someday. You said it like you already know.”
Silence presses down on me until my chest tightens.
“Aisling,” I repeat, sharper now. “Look at me.”
She does, and the fear in her eyes hits me like a blow—there’s no guilt, no calculation there, just pure, unfiltered terror.
My pulse spikes. “Tell me the truth.”
“I am,” she says, voice trembling. “I didn’t mean it the way you think.”
But I can see the wobble in her chin. She’s lying—it’s the same tell that gave her away on the night I learned her last name.
God damn it, she’s doing it again.
And the chaos of emotion that rises inside me is enough to choke the air from my lungs.
“You’re lying,” I say, the word bitter on my tongue. “And you’re bad at it.”
Her breath stutters. She shakes her head again, eyes shining. “Please don’t do this.”
The plea snaps something in me.
“Don’t do this? Like I’m the one responsible for bringing us back to the same damn place we were five years ago?” I say, anger rising fast and hot. “You don’t get to say something like that and expect me to pretend I didn’t hear it. Tell me what you’re hiding.”
She presses her lips together, shaking now, her skin beneath her freckles as white as a sheet. I’ve never seen her like this. Not when we were younger. Not even when I walked away.
My chest aches with a terrible, creeping dread. Then the truth hits me like a club upside the dead. “Is Riley your daughter?”
The words feel insane the moment they leave my mouth. I almost laugh at myself.
Riley couldn’t be.
She’s Aisling’s sister, the Murray family’s youngest whoopsie child.
Everyone knows that.
But slowly, the ugly truth sinks in when Aisling doesn’t laugh. Her face crumples, and the world tilts.
“Yes,” she whispers.
Blood roars in my ears. I stare at her, my mind scrambling for footing. “That’s not possible.”
“She’s mine,” Aisling says, tears spilling now. “She’s my daughter.”
I drag a hand through my hair, trying to put the pieces together. “Why does she call you her sister?”
“My parents raised her as theirs,” she says. “To protect me. To protect her.”
My heart hammers harder, a sick, relentless rhythm. A memory flashes unbidden—Riley’s laugh, her stubborn streak, the way she watches me with that familiar intensity. My stomach drops.
“Who’s the father?” I ask.
Aisling looks at me like I already know. Like I’m forcing her to carve it into air. The room goes silent.
“Aisling, who did you sleep with after me?” I know I was her first, but clearly, I wasn’t her only.
“There was no one else. Only you,” she breathes, as if the confession will destroy her completely.
No. No. She wouldn’t do that to me. She couldn’t…
Her voice is barely audible. “She’s yours, Raf. Riley’s our daughter.”
I feel it then—a hollowing out, a violent rush of heat and cold colliding in my chest. Mine. My daughter. Riley is my daughter. How is that even possible? Sure, we didn’t use a condom every time we had sex, but I always pulled out…
The walls close in.
“You’re saying,” I say hoarsely, “that I have a child. That we have a child. And you never told me.”
She flinches. “I couldn’t.”
“You didn’t even try,” I snarl. Anger surges, sharp and uncontrollable.
Her own anger sparks, cutting through her fear. “You broke up with me.”
“I walked away to protect you!” I shout. “To keep exactly this from happening.”
“To protect me?” she fires back. “You told me you didn’t want me. You told me there was no future for us. You sent me away because you didn’t want my family to come after you for it.”
Fury pounds through my veins. “I would have stayed.”
“You don’t get to rewrite history,” she says, tears streaking her face. “You had the opportunity and you didn’t stay.”
“You think I wouldn’t have taken care of you?”
Her laugh is broken, sharp with pain. “You didn’t want me.”
The words hit like a slap to the face.
“You walked away,” she continues, voice rising. “I was young, pregnant, unmarried. Do you have any idea what that would have done to me? To my family?”
My jaw clenches. “I would have married you.”
“Oh, please. You could have when you found out who I was. But you didn’t. You ended it,” she says fiercely. “You made that decision for both of us. So don’t stand there and pretend you would have swooped in and saved me like some knight in shining armor.”
The truth of it stings because she isn’t entirely wrong. At the time, it felt like an impossible decision to make. Follow my heart or protect my family. Do the easy thing or the right thing. Only what I thought was right couldn’t have been more wrong.
“My family took me back to Ireland,” she says, wiping her face with shaking hands. “They protected me. They protected Riley. And after I gave birth, they told everyone she was theirs, that she was my little sister.”
I can picture it, Aisling alone, scared, carrying my child while I was halfway across the world, convincing myself that cutting her from my life was for the best. My stomach churns.
“I didn’t have time or space for another man,” she says. “I didn’t want one. My parents let me raise Riley in the privacy of our family home—as her sister, not her mother, yes, but I built my life around her.”
She looks at me then, eyes blazing. “I never married because it would have meant leaving Riley, giving her up. And I’m fortunate enough to have a family that loves me.
That would never cast me out. I only agreed to marry you because I knew it would be temporary.
Because my family needed this alliance. I never planned to leave her for long—only until we both got what we wanted from the deal. ”
I rake a hand over my face, breathing hard. “So you married me,” I say bitterly, “without any intention of ever letting me know my own child.”
Her voice breaks. “I didn’t think you’d look at her the way you do.”
Something cracks open in my chest at that.
“I didn’t think this would happen,” she whispers. “I never dreamed that you would care about her. Never dreamed that I could care about you again.”
The room feels too small. The anger burns hot and reckless, drowning out reason.
“You stole four years from me,” I say. “Four years I can never get back.”
Her eyes flash. “You threw them away when you said you wanted nothing to do with me.”
I turn away, fists clenched, breathing hard. Grabbing my clothes, I pull them on with shaking hands, unable to stay here another second. “I need air.”
“Raf, wait,” Aisling says, panic creeping into her voice. “Please don’t go like this.”
I don’t trust myself to answer. I leave the room and shut the door behind me, the sound echoing too loudly in the hall. I walk until I’m outside, the night air slamming into me like a wall.
Silence surrounds me. And in it, the dark, ugly truth finally lands.
Aisling’s right. I did do this.
I walked out on her when she was young and innocent and needed me. I broke her heart, convinced myself it was for the right reasons, and it cost me everything.
It cost me four years of bedtime stories and scraped knees and first words. It cost me my daughter.
The anger drains, leaving something worse in its wake.
Regret.
I stand there alone with it, knowing I’ll have to live with the knowledge that I ruined our chances of being happy together—probably more thoroughly than Aisling ever could.