Chapter Thirteen #2
The years she disappeared came back to me in a different shape.
The scar. The panic in her eyes. The way she shut down whenever I got too close.
Those details no longer felt separate. They locked together in my mind, ugly and sharp, forming a truth I could almost see.
Something had happened to her, big enough to change her life from the inside out.
I could feel the edge of it, and the fact that I still did not know the whole thing made a bitter pressure build in my throat.
“Fuck,” I muttered. The word scraped out of me before I could stop it.
A child.
Her child.
A life with birthdays, memories, bedtime stories, scraped knees, laughter, sickness, fear. A whole existence carried in secret while I had been left with fragments and ghosts.
The realization tore through me without sound, leaving something colder than anger behind. Then the need to know rose through the shock, hard and unstoppable, until it became the only clear thing left in my head.
I was going to find out.
Every fucking piece of it.
The address was already in my head before I reached my car. By the time I got behind the wheel, there was nothing left in me that resembled patience. Only one brutal fact kept tearing through my head.
Her daughter.
The words felt like glass in my throat. My hands closed around the steering wheel until my knuckles ached, yet the pain did nothing to stop the shit storm inside my skull. Edwina had a child.
I started the engine, and my phone rang before I could pull out.
Elias.
I answered through the car speakers, my jaw already tight. “Tell me you found something.”
A pause came through the line. Too fucking long.
“Hayden,” he said carefully, “you need to listen before you react.”
“I’m not in the mood for warnings.”
“I found records connected to Edwina Rhodes,” he said. “Her current address, employment history, university files. Most of it is clean. Too clean, honestly.”
My grip tightened. “And?”
Another pause.
“She has a kid,” Elias said. “A daughter. Her name is Helena Rhodes. Four years old. Birthday is December fifteenth.”
The air seemed to leave the car.
Four.
Helena.
Her name was Helena.
So that was who Helena was.
My mind went straight back to Edwina’s face when I had said the name. The panic in her eyes. The way her whole body had gone still, as though I had stepped too close to a door she had spent years keeping locked.
“Say that again,” I said.
“She’s four, Hayden.”
My blood turned to ice, then fire.
Four years old.
The age lined up too well with the years Edwina had disappeared. Suddenly the scar, the silence, and that terrified look in her eyes began fitting together in a way that made something violent crawl up my spine.
“Who’s the father?” I asked.
“I couldn’t find one listed.”
The words hit like a spark dropped into gasoline. “What do you mean you couldn’t find one?”
“There isn’t a father attached to the records I accessed,” Elias said. “No name connected to the birth certificate in anything I could reach. I also checked for marriage records under Rhodes and Carter. Nothing came up.”
My laugh came out sharp and humorless. “So she has a daughter, no husband in the records, and the father is a fucking ghost?”
“I’m telling you someone kept it quiet,” he replied. “Either by choice or with help. The trail is thin.”
“Thin,” I repeated, the word bitter on my tongue.
“I’m still digging.”
“Dig harder.”
“I am.”
“No,” I snapped. “You’re moving too slow. Find the hospital. Pull the birth records. Check who signed the documents, who helped her disappear, and who knew about that child while I was left in the dark.”
“Hayden—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, my voice turning rougher. “Do not tell me to calm down.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
Silence stretched between us. Then Elias said, “You think she’s yours.”
I stared through the windshield, my pulse pounding at the base of my throat. “I think Edwina has been hiding something from me for years,” I said. “And if that little girl is mine…”
I stopped because the rest of it was too big to say. Ugly enough to split me open in the middle of my own fucking car.
Elias did not speak for a moment. “I’ll keep looking.”
“You’ll call me the second you find anything.”
“I will.”
I ended the call and threw the phone onto the passenger seat. For a few seconds, I did not move. The engine hummed beneath me, the city shifted outside the windshield, and all I could hear was that number.
Four years old. My daughter?
The thought hit hard enough to drag the air from my lungs. I did not know enough yet. I had no proof. Dates, silence, and Edwina’s terrified eyes when I said Helena’s name should not have been all I had.
I drove to her place with fury burning through every nerve.
By the time I got there, instinct had taken over. I got out, shut the car door harder than necessary, and crossed the distance to her apartment. Her door was open just enough for warm light to spill through the gap.
Then the sounds reached me all at once, music, laughter, children’s voices spilling from inside.
I stopped outside the half-open door while a sick weight spread through my chest. I stepped closer and looked inside. The apartment was decorated for a party.