Chapter Twenty
Edwina
The days passed quietly after Christmas, and before I fully realized it, the year had turned.
London softened during that in-between time, when the city still wore its winter lights and the university remained closed for the New Year break.
Mornings moved slowly. Afternoons stretched without urgency.
Evenings carried that suspended feeling that came when one year had ended and the next had not yet properly begun.
Helena filled those days with warmth and noise, moving through the apartment with Snowy tucked beneath one arm, asking questions, making demands, and treating the world with the fearless certainty only children possessed.
Within that small routine, I began to loosen.
After five years, it was the first time I had truly felt happy.
The happiness was not bright or careless.
It came quietly, almost shy after so much pain, and that made it feel fragile.
I found it in ordinary things, Helena’s laughter drifting through the apartment, the comfort of familiar rooms, the relief of waking without dread already sitting in my chest. The days no longer felt like something I had to survive. I could live inside them again.
And whether I wanted to admit it or not, Hayden had become part of that.
He had begun to settle into our days with a patience I had not expected from him, or from myself.
He came by often, never behaving as if the door automatically belonged to him, yet no longer standing on the edge of our lives as a stranger.
Helena took to him so naturally that sometimes I caught myself watching them in silence.
I was not afraid exactly. The sight simply gave me more than I knew what to do with.
She laughed louder when he was there. She reached for him without thinking. His face changed whenever he looked at her, as if fatherhood had found him late and still hit with full force. Each small moment settled somewhere tender in me, a place I could no longer pretend he had not touched.
That was what made everything more dangerous.
Was I ready to forgive him?
I did not know.
Perhaps that was no longer entirely true. The harder truth was that I could no longer tell when the shift had begun. Anger still lived in me, yet it no longer stood alone. It had made room for tenderness, fear, and the fragile beginning of forgiveness.
Maybe I was ready to forgive him.
Maybe part of me already had.
There was one truth I could not escape. I could not stay away from him anymore.
The certainty grew with every passing day, quiet and impossible to deny.
For years, distance had been the only way I knew how to survive him.
I had shaped my life around it, convinced myself that enough space would keep me standing.
Then Hayden came back as more than a memory I could argue with in silence.
He became the man at my door, the presence in Helena’s laughter, the voice that shifted my pulse every time it filled the room.
Losing him once had nearly destroyed me. Losing him again would leave nothing in me strong enough to rebuild.
That terrified me.
Letting him close again meant trusting him with more than these careful days.
It meant hoping, and hope was dangerous when the person holding it had already broken you once.
If Hayden hurt me again, I did not know what would be left of me.
The first time, I had survived by becoming someone else.
I changed my name, my hair, my habits, my whole life, until Edwina Carter felt less real than the woman I had forced myself to become.
After this, there would be nowhere else to go.
Another name could never save me. Another version of myself would never be waiting if everything fell apart again.
Today, we had decided to tell Helena the truth.
Even thinking it made my chest tighten. Some truths could be rehearsed a hundred times in silence and still feel impossible to say out loud, especially when they belonged to a child with dark eyes, a trusting heart, and no idea that one sentence could change the shape of her world.
Hayden and I had spoken about it carefully. We both knew this was not something to rush through or mishandle, so we agreed to tell her in a place she loved, where everything around her felt familiar enough to hold her if the moment became too heavy.
That afternoon, I took Helena to her favorite burger place, a small family café called Maple & Bun, tucked into a bright corner of London. Warm yellow lights glowed in the windows, and the smell of grilled bread and fries reached us before the door had fully closed behind us.
Helena loved this place.
She loved the paper menus with cartoon milkshakes printed along the edges, the red booths, the little jars of ketchup on every table, and the staff who already knew she liked extra pickles.
The moment we stepped inside, she brightened completely, and for one brief second the weight of what we had come here to do eased enough for me to smile.
We slid into a booth near the window.
Outside, the sky was gray, the pavement still damp from earlier rain. Inside, everything felt warm and ordinary. Helena placed Snowy beside her on the seat with great care, then opened her menu even though she already knew what she wanted.
“Cheeseburger,” she announced, as if this were a new choice.
“Really?” I asked. “I never would have guessed.”
She gave me a serious look. “And fries.”
“That changes everything.”
Her mouth twitched. Then she leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “Do you think Uncle Hayden will get fries too?”
Helena loved him already. Sometimes that still startled me.
She looked for him now. His name brought light into her face before she even saw him.
Somehow, without effort or fear, she had made room for him in her world.
Helena adored him with the easy certainty children had, as if choosing him had been the simplest thing in the world.
“I think,” I said, reaching for my menu, “Uncle Hayden might steal yours if you’re not careful.”
Helena gasped, delighted. “No.”
“Yes.”
“He can’t. They’ll be mine.”
“Then you should eat them first.”
“I will.”
Today, her world would change. The truth might reach her slowly, in pieces she could only understand with time, but once we said it aloud, none of us could put it back where it had been.
By the time the food came, Hayden still had not arrived. I told myself there was nothing strange about it. London traffic was awful. The roads were wet. He could be late for a dozen ordinary reasons, and ordinary reasons were easier to hold on to while I sat there waiting for him.
Helena had less patience for that.
She looked at the door, then at me. “Is Uncle Hayden coming?”
“Yes,” I said, though my own eyes moved toward the entrance before I could stop them. “He’s probably just running late.”
She accepted that long enough to dip a fry into ketchup. “How late?”
I laughed softly. “Not very, I hope.”
She chewed for a moment, thinking hard. “Maybe he got lost.”
“In a place he’s been before?”
Her brows pulled together. “Maybe he forgot the way.”
“I don’t think so.”
She did not look convinced.
A few more minutes passed. The café moved on around us, full of voices, clinking glasses, and plates being carried past our table, but my attention kept returning to the door. I tried to make it casual. Helena saw through me at once.
“You looked again,” she said.
“I did not.”
“You did, mommy.”
I smiled and took a sip of my drink, buying myself a second. “Maybe I’m making sure he doesn’t sneak in and steal your fries.”
That made her grin.
And still, Hayden did not come.
In the middle of all that waiting, I became painfully aware of the green sweater I had chosen that morning.
It had been five years since I last wore that color for him, long enough for green to stop being a choice and become a memory.
And yet, while standing in front of my wardrobe that morning, I had reached for it before I could talk myself out of it.
A soft green sweater, fitted jeans, nothing special to anyone else. To me, it was stupidly intimate.
I had wanted to surprise him.
Now I sat there in his favorite color, with my daughter asking every few minutes whether her favorite uncle was coming, and felt exposed in a way that made me angry with myself. I had arrived carrying hope I had no business carrying, and there was nowhere to put it down.
Helena leaned over the table and lowered her voice, serious again. “Mommy.”
“Yes, baby?”
“What if he forgot us?”
The question was so small it went straight through me.
“He didn’t forget us,” I said at once, reaching across the table to touch her hand. “Uncle Hayden would never forget you.”
She studied my face for a moment. Then, because children always found the tenderest place without meaning to, she asked, “And you?”
The words caught me.
For a second, I could not answer. I knew too well how many things Hayden had ruined between us, how much damage still sat in the spaces we had not healed, but forgetting me had never been his way. He remembered. That was part of the problem.
“No,” I said quietly. “He wouldn’t forget me either.”
Helena seemed satisfied and went back to her burger, but I stayed still, my hand near my untouched fries, my heart moving in that old uneasy rhythm Hayden always dragged out of me.
Then the bell above the café door rang. I looked up too quickly. It was not him. Just a woman stepping in from the cold, shaking rain from her coat while someone behind the counter greeted her. I lowered my eyes before Helena could see too much on my face.
After that, I called him again.
Then again.