Chapter Nineteen
Hayden
By the time the clock slipped past ten, Helena had fallen asleep in my arms.
It happened slowly. One minute she was still fighting sleep with everything she had, talking in broken little pieces about Snowy, Christmas lights, and whether reindeer ever got tired of flying.
Then her words thinned out, her lashes lowered, and her cheek settled against my chest as if she had done it a hundred times before.
I sat there longer than I needed to, holding her and trying to breathe through the weight of it.
My daughter was asleep in my arms. She was small, warm, trusting in a way that made my chest feel torn open.
Her weight should have been nothing, yet it carried every absence I had only just begun to understand.
Every night I had not been there. Every moment some other person had watched her grow while I knew nothing.
Edwina noticed when I shifted.
“She’s asleep,” she said softly.
I lifted my eyes to hers and nodded, because if I tried to speak too soon, something in me might break in a way I could not hide.
“Do you want me to—”
“No,” I said, too quickly. Then I forced my voice down, rougher now. “I’ve got her.”
As if she had heard me somewhere inside her sleep, Helena stirred against my chest. Her fingers curled weakly in my shirt, and then she murmured, barely there, “Uncle Hayden.”
Fuck.
That nearly finished me.
I looked down at her, at the soft weight of her in my arms, and had to swallow hard before I could move.
Uncle Hayden still cut. It still wasn’t what I wanted.
But hearing it from her in sleep, hearing my name held there in whatever small, safe place she had made for me, felt like more than I had any right to ask for.
I carried Helena down the hallway, careful with every step, though my hands knew exactly where to hold her. I pushed her bedroom door with my shoulder and crossed to the bed. When I bent to lay her down, her hand caught at my shirt again.
I eased her onto the mattress and stayed there a second longer, one hand braced near her pillow, the other hovering uselessly because I did not know if I was allowed to touch her hair, her cheek, any part of the life I had already missed too much of.
Then Helena sighed in her sleep and turned toward Snowy, who waited near the pillow. I placed the rabbit beside her.
“There you go, little star,” I whispered.
Edwina stood in the doorway, watching me with an expression I could not name. I did not look at her for long. If I did, I might hate her again. Or want her. Or thank her. Or ask her how the fuck she had survived doing this alone while I was somewhere else, furious at the wrong ghosts.
I pulled the blanket over Helena instead and made myself step back.
Jesus.
I had carried my daughter to bed for the first time.
She had not spoken. She had only watched me with one shoulder against the frame, her face hard to read in the dim light. For a second, neither of us moved. Then I stepped past her, and she followed me back down the hall.
The living room felt different now. Helena’s warmth was gone from it, and what remained was quieter, heavier, meant for us. Edwina crossed to the kitchen counter where the wine I had brought still waited unopened. She picked it up, turned it once in her hands, then glanced at me over her shoulder.
“Well,” she said, “now it’s time for us.”
She opened the wine.
Neither of us said much at first. She poured, handed me a glass, took one for herself, then moved to the sofa.
I stayed standing for a moment, watching her under the Christmas lights, the glass between her fingers, her face calm in a way that made my chest tighten for reasons I did not trust. Then I sat across from her.
The wine was good. Dark and dry, too smooth for the shape of the night. Edwina drank first, only a little, then lowered the glass into her lap and looked at it instead of at me.
“There’s something I should have told you a long time ago,” she said.
Every part of me went still. My grip tightened around the glass.
“Say it.”
She let out a breath. “The day I saw you with Alessia in the café…” She stopped, swallowed, then forced herself on. “Later that day, she came to me.”
I did not move.
For one second, I thought I had heard her wrong.
“Came where?”
“To my apartment,” she said, lifting her eyes to mine.
There was no softness in them now, only tired truth.
“When I heard the door, I thought it might be you. I opened it expecting…” Her mouth tightened.
“I don’t even know what I expected. An explanation, maybe.
Something. But it was her. Alessia was standing there, and I was so surprised I couldn’t even speak at first. I had no idea how she’d found my address. ”
Something black moved under my skin. The air in my lungs turned heavy.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Edwina nodded once, though it took her a moment to speak again.
“She was calm at first,” she said. “That was what made it worse. She came in acting as if she had every right to be there, as if I was the one who should feel ashamed for what had happened between you and me.”
My jaw locked.
“Then she started insulting me,” Edwina continued, her voice flatter now, as if she had to strip the emotion out just to get through it.
“She said I was humiliating myself over a man who was never going to choose me. She wanted me to understant that in her eyes I was not a real threat, only a stupid girl. Then she told me you would return to the life already waiting for you, and I would be left with nothing except the embarrassment of believing I mattered.”
My hand tightened so hard around the glass I was surprised it did not crack.
Fuck.
“Edwina—”
“No.” She shook her head once. “You wanted answers. Let me finish.”
It took effort to keep myself in the chair.
Her gaze dropped to the glass in her hands, though I knew she was looking somewhere far behind the wine. “She told me you hated me.”
The words hit hard enough to steal the air from my lungs.
“She said what happened between us only happened because you were bored. That men like you always needed something to pass the time with before going back to the life waiting for them.” Her mouth tightened, yet she kept going. “Then she showed me a photo.”
Every muscle in my body locked. “What photo?”
For a moment, she did not answer. When she finally did, her voice was quiet enough to make it worse. “You and me. Kissing. In the rain.”
The room went out of focus around me.
I remembered it instantly. The rain, her mouth, the way wanting her had torn through every excuse I had tried to hold between us. And as soon as I wondered how the fuck Alessia had gotten that photo, the answer came with it. Money could buy eyes.
I dragged a hand over my mouth, my voice coming out too quiet. “She blackmailed you with it.”
Edwina lifted her eyes to mine. “Yes. She said if I didn’t leave quietly, that photo wouldn’t be the only one people saw.
She said she could ruin you if she wanted to, and if that happened, it would be my fault for being selfish enough to stay.
” Her mouth twisted faintly. “The worst part was that I was already leaving after your betrayal, Hayden. After what I saw at the café, I had no desire to stay and fight for a place beside you when I believed you had chosen her. Alessia didn’t make me want to leave.
She only made it feel urgent, as if staying one more minute would cost me whatever dignity I had left. ”
Everything in me went cold.
Edwina looked down at her glass again. “She said I was a distraction. A toy. Someone you picked up when it suited you and put away when it didn’t. She said I had made myself convenient to hide, willing to be touched in secret, foolish enough to confuse desire with love.”
My hands curled into fists against my knees.
Then her voice dropped. “She called me your fucktoy. Your plaything.”
Red moved across my vision so fast I had to grip the glass harder to keep myself in the room.I had heard uglier language and used worse myself, yet hearing those words attached to Edwina, knowing Alessia had thrown them in her face while she stood alone in her own home, made violence stop feeling like rage and start feeling reasonable.
I looked at her and saw the woman sitting in front of me, along with the girl she had been then, trapped in her own home while another woman turned my failures into a weapon.
Alessia had found every wound I had left exposed and pressed until Edwina bled from places I had no right to ask forgiveness for.
My silence had helped make that possible.
Cowardice had helped too. So had the life I had let stand between us until it became useful to someone cruel.
Under the rage, guilt opened in me with nowhere clean to go. This was the kind of guilt that arrived late, settled deep, and made a home out of everything you should have done differently.
“She came into your apartment,” I said, and my voice barely sounded like mine.“She showed you a photo of us.”
“Yes.”
“And then she called you that.”
She nodded again.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands clasped so tightly my knuckles hurt. I stared at the floor because if I looked at her too directly, I did not trust what my face would do.
“I’m going to kill her,” I said.
I looked up at her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her eyes searched mine, and whatever she found there made her set her glass down.
“I didn’t tell you because by then it didn’t matter,” she said. “As I said, I was already leaving. Alessia didn’t create that decision. She only pushed me out the door faster.”
I got up because I could not stay sitting.
The need to move hit hard. I crossed to the window and stood with the rain on the glass and the dark city beyond it, my hands at my sides, my whole body pulled tight with the effort of not breaking something just to hear it shatter.
Behind me, Edwina stayed quiet.
Finally I said, “I never hated you.”
My voice sounded raw enough to bleed.