Chapter Fifteen #2
I shoved the door open and stepped inside before she could stop me.
She stumbled back, then came at me at once, trying to push me toward the door, one hand braced against my chest. I barely felt it. My body had already crossed the threshold, and so had every ugly truth she thought she could keep buried.
“Get out,” she whispered, furious and terrified at the same time.
I looked down at her hand against my chest, then back at her face.
“No,” I said.
“Hayden, leave.”
“Fuck no.”
“Helena is sleeping.”
That name in her mouth nearly split me open.
“Please,” she said, and the anger in her voice thinned into something desperate. “Please don’t do this here. Not now.”
I looked at her then, really looked at her. The fear in her face. The panic she was trying to force down. The way she stood between me and the hallway as if her body alone could keep me from the truth. Something vicious rose in me.
“You lost that chance.”
She froze. The words landed exactly where I wanted them to.
Her eyes flashed. “You don’t walk into my home and speak to me this way.”
A bitter laugh dragged out of me.
“Your home?” I repeated. “You hide my child from me for years, and now you want to tell me how I’m allowed to speak in this apartment?”
Her whole body went rigid.
“Keep your voice down,” she snapped.
“Why?” I stepped closer. “Afraid she’ll wake up and hear the truth?”
“Stop it.”
“No, you stop it.” My voice dropped into something harder, meaner. “Stop standing there acting like I’m the one who crossed the line tonight.”
Her chin lifted, though it trembled with the effort of holding herself together.
“You need to leave.”
“And you need to start fucking talking.”
For one terrible second, all we did was stare at each other.
The apartment was dim now, stripped of the warmth it had carried earlier.
A few balloons had sunk toward the floor.
Wrapping paper sat abandoned on the coffee table beside half-cleared plates and cups.
My daughter’s birthday was still scattered everywhere, and the sight of it made the ache in my chest rot into something uglier.
I had stood outside my own life, looking in through an open fucking door.
Edwina saw where my eyes went. Her expression shifted. Pain. Guilt. Fear. Maybe all of them at once.
“Hayden,” she said, and my name sounded thin on her tongue, “please.”
That word nearly snapped what little control I had left.
“Please?” I stared at her, disbelief twisting into something harsher. “You want to beg now?” My chest felt too tight, my pulse too heavy, each word scraping its way out of me. “Tell me the truth. Were you ever going to tell me?”
Her lips parted, but no sound came out.
“Answer me.” I took another step closer. “Did you plan to keep this buried forever? Let me spend the rest of my life not knowing I had a daughter?”
“Hayden—”
“No.” The word cut out of me sharp and final. “Don’t say my name with tears in your eyes and think it changes a goddamn thing. Tell me.” My voice roughened until it barely sounded like mine. “Were you really going to keep my daughter—our daughter—from me for the rest of my life?”
Tears rose in her eyes at once. It should have softened me. It didn’t. It only made the hurt turn uglier.
“She is not yours,” she said.
The room went dead. Every muscle in my body locked so hard it hurt.
“What?”
Her breath shook, but she forced the words out again.
“I said she is not yours.”
For a second, I thought I might laugh from the sheer violence of disbelief moving through me. Instead, I stepped into her space so fast she had no choice except to retreat.
“Don’t,” I said. The word came out quiet, which made it worse. “Do I look like a stupid man to you?” I asked, my voice roughening. “Do not stand there and feed me that bullshit.”
Her back nearly touched the wall. “It is the truth.”
“No.” I shook my head once, slow and furious. “The fuck it isn’t.”
“Hayden—”
“I saw her.”
“That does not mean—”
“I looked at her,” I cut in, sharper now. “I looked into her eyes and saw myself staring back. So don’t insult me. Don’t you fucking dare pretend I imagined what I saw.”
Her eyes blurred, tears gathering fast, though she kept shaking her head as if denial could hold the night together.
“You don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.” I moved closer, forcing her to stay with me instead of slipping behind that careful silence she always ran to when the truth became unbearable. “And you will, because I am done standing outside a life that should have been mine too.”
Her mouth trembled.
“Do you have any idea what you did to me tonight?” I asked, and my voice changed then, rougher, more broken, dangerous because of how close I was to losing control.
“Do you know what it felt like to stand there while she looked at me as if I was nobody? Some stranger at her birthday party? Do you know what hearing her call me sir did to me?”
She closed her eyes for one second. When she opened them again, tears clung to her lashes. I wasn’t finished.
“I was a stranger to my own daughter,” I said.
“A stranger, Edwina. You let that happen. You let me lose her birthdays, her first words, her first steps, the small ordinary shit that should have been mine to know.” My jaw tightened until it hurt.
“Tell me the truth. Did you ever plan to let me know her, or were you going to take this secret to your grave?”
“Stop,” she whispered.
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.” My voice dropped into something almost feral. “You do not get to beg for mercy now. Not after this.”
Her shoulders shook with one fractured breath, and her tears slipped free. Still, I kept going, because by then I was bleeding too badly to stop.
“My daughter,” I said, quieter now, and somehow that made it worse. “Our daughter.” The words scraped something raw inside me. “You kept our daughter from me.”
“Hayden—”
“How long?” I demanded. “Another year? Five? Forever?” I took one last step until there was almost no space left between us. “Were you ever going to let me be her father, or was I supposed to stay dead to both of you while you built a whole life without me?”
She broke at that. I saw it.
The lie strained against her mouth. Grief moved through her face. The truth pressed so hard against her silence it looked ready to tear out of her.
When I spoke again, my voice came out raw, shaking with the force of everything inside me.
“She’s mine.”