Chapter Thirteen
Hayden
The next day, I went to her class with one thing on my mind.
Edwina.
The whispers meant nothing. The eyes turning in the corridors, the pathetic rumors spreading through the university, the half-formed assumptions people were already chewing on because they had nothing better to do with their empty fucking lives, none of it mattered to me.
She mattered. And she was avoiding me.
I knew it before I even reached her building.Her unanswered messages told me what I needed to know.
So did the silence she kept choosing and how she had walked out of my apartment as if distance could make me disappear. As if stepping outside my door had given her back some control she had already lost the second she let me touch her again.
That was what pissed me off the most. She wanted to take that moment, the kiss she had returned, her body answering mine, the look on her face when she forgot to hate me for half a fucking second, and bury all of it under silence.
No.
Not this time.
People could whisper, stare, invent whatever version of us made their boring lives feel interesting. Gossip had never scared me, and it sure as hell would not make me back away from the woman I had spent years trying to find.
Edwina cared, though. Too much.
She measured consequences before she let herself breathe.
Fear became logic in her hands, polished and practical enough to pass as self-control.
Reputation, judgment, people seeing too much and deciding they knew the whole story, all of it mattered to her.
The world had crawled under her skin and convinced her that wanting me was another mistake she had to survive.
That thought made something ugly twist in my chest.
Because she was still trying to protect herself from me.
From me.
As if rules, offices, titles, and polite distance could erase what had happened between us. As if a closed door or an unanswered message could change her mouth opening for mine, the sound of her breath breaking, the truth flashing across her face before she buried it again.
She could act cold. Ignore my messages. Stand in front of me with that careful face and pretend I had no power left over her.
I knew better. There was nothing left between us now except the lies she kept feeding herself. And I was done letting her hide behind them.
She was no longer my student. That excuse was dead.
Whatever line had once stood between us had lost its meaning years ago.
The university could not be blamed anymore.
Neither could my title, her old place in my class, or the rules we had already broken long before she ran.
We were two grown adults now, standing on equal ground, and I was tired of watching her act as though the past still gave her a reason to keep me at arm’s length.
What happened in Washington had happened under pressure, with eyes everywhere and consequences waiting around every corner.
Wanting her back then had felt as though I was putting my hand into fire and refusing to pull away.
Now the fire was still there, only sharper, because nothing stood between us except the fear she kept feeding.
And she still behaved as though I was a thing she could lock out of her life if she tried hard.
Bullshit.
The lines that once mattered had been crossed a long time ago.
Years had passed, names had changed, lives had been rebuilt, and the hunger between us had survived as a wound that refused to close.
Calling it a mistake would not make it cleaner.
Pretending distance had fixed it would not make it true.
What lived between us had not died. It had waited.
The engagement was gone. Alessia was gone with it, along with that pathetic arrangement that had chained me to a future I never wanted.
That part of my life had rotted long before it ended, and I had no interest in dragging its corpse into anything that still mattered.
Alessia had mistaken obligation for permanence. That was her mistake, not mine.
Edwina was the only thing that had ever felt real.
And still, she avoided me.
That was what got under my skin. Her silence. The way she turned fear into distance and then tried to call it control. Ignoring me would not weaken what was already buried too deep in both of us. Unanswered messages and locked doors would never be enough to keep me out. They wouldn’t.
Her stubborn refusal settled beneath my ribs and twisted into something darker than anger.
I needed the truth from her. Every lie stripped away until she had nothing left to hide behind.
Most of all, I needed her to stop looking at me like I was the danger when she was the one who had walked back into my reach and expected me not to fucking notice.
She was mine once.
A part of her still was.
And I was done pretending I could stand aside while she tried to bury that too.
By the time I reached the classroom, the anger had sharpened into something cold enough to cut. On the surface, I looked composed. Underneath, my thoughts were turning vicious, because I was getting real fucking tired of watching Edwina pretend she could erase me by refusing to look at me.
I stepped inside.
The room was full, the lecture already in progress.
Students sat facing the front, notebooks open, faces turned toward the professor.
Then I entered, and the air changed. Heads lifted.
Voices died. A few students glanced at me before quickly looking away, smart enough to understand that whatever had brought me there had nothing to do with them.
I did not waste my attention on any of it. My gaze went straight to the seat where Edwina should have been.
Empty.
For a moment, I stared at it, my jaw tightening as the absence hit harder than it should have. She had done it again.
A bitter laugh almost crawled up my throat. She still did not understand. Worse, she kept pretending she did.
She could ignore my calls, dodge me in hallways, and run from any conversation that threatened to drag the truth out of her. None of that changed the fact that whatever lived between us had never fucking ended. It had gone quiet, buried itself deep, and waited.
After touching her again, tasting her again, seeing her body betray every lie she tried to hide behind, distance was no longer an option. Polite detachment could go to hell. I was not going to stand aside while she fed me this cold little act and expected me to swallow it.
I stayed near the doorway, staring at the empty chair as my thoughts darkened around everything she had stirred in me. Yesterday had cracked something open, and she knew it. That was why she had run. She felt too fucking much and hated herself for it.
I was finished with her careful little dance. The avoidance, the locked doors, the unanswered messages, all of it had started to piss me off in ways I no longer cared to soften. Edwina was mine to confront. Mine to love. Mine to fuck. Mine to drag back into the truth when she kept running from it.
When the lecture paused, I moved forward.
The professor noticed me first. Then the students did. The room tightened around my presence, curiosity flickering across their faces, but I ignored all of them. Let them watch now and whisper later.I did not give a fuck.
My voice came out even, sharp enough to make the question land harder than it should have.
“Where is Professor Rhodes?”
The lecturer turned toward me, unsuspecting, completely fucking blind to what sat beneath my question. To him, this was ordinary. One colleague asking about another. A harmless exchange in the middle of a lecture. Nothing worth noticing.
“She took the day off,” he said easily.
A day off?
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. Why the hell would she take the day off? Was she sick? Had something happened? The answer gave me nothing, and that only pissed me off more. It left too much space for my mind to fill, and every possibility that entered it scraped hard against my nerves.
“Why?” I asked.
The single word came out sharper than I intended, and this time, the lecturer seemed to notice. His expression shifted, just a little, as if he had finally sensed the pressure behind the question. Still, he gave a small smile, as though the explanation were harmless.
“It’s her daughter’s birthday.”
Everything in me stopped. For a second, I did not understand him. The words reached me, clear as fucking glass, yet my mind refused to take them in.
Her daughter.
The classroom seemed to narrow around that one phrase. Students. Desks. The lecturer standing in front of me. All of it blurred into background noise while those two words carved themselves into my skull.
Her daughter.
Something hard dropped through my chest, cold enough to make my hands curl at my sides.
No.
That couldn’t be right.
Edwina had a daughter?
A child?
What the fuck?
The words kept moving through my head with a dull, punishing force.
I stood there, my body locked in place while the damage spread under my skin.
The phrase cut through the version of Edwina I had carried for years, tearing apart the assumptions, the bitter conclusions, and the answers I had forced myself to live with because there had been nothing else to hold on to.
“Her what?” I heard myself say. The lecturer blinked, as if the question confused him. “She has a daughter?”
Even to my own ears, my voice sounded wrong. Flat at first, then rough around the edges, dragged down by shock before I had time to hide it.
The lecturer nodded, casual as ever, completely unaware of what he had just torn open inside me.
“Yes. Her daughter.”
My jaw tightened. The words hit harder the second time.
A daughter. Edwina had a daughter. She had carried an entire life forward while I had been left outside it, blind to its existence.
Somewhere inside those missing years, there had been a life I knew nothing about, hidden beneath the goddamn emptiness I had been choking on.