Chapter Twenty-one
Hayden
For a few dangerous days, I learned what happiness felt like.
It came late, long past the damage and the years I had spent convincing myself that wanting a life only gave the world another place to cut.
Helena’s laugh carried part of it. So did the way she reached for me without thinking, the New Year evenings in Edwina’s apartment, the strange warmth of standing somewhere that had stopped feeling borrowed.
Edwina carried the rest, the looks she gave me when she forgot to protect herself, the silence between us when it no longer came armed for war, the fragile peace trying to grow over all the shit we had ruined.
We had decided to tell Helena the truth.
Carefully. In words she could understand.
I was done standing at the edge of my daughter’s life as Uncle Hayden while every fucking part of me knew what I was.
I wanted her to know I was here now. I wanted her to know I was her father, that the empty place she had never been able to name belonged to me.
Things with Edwina were wounded and dangerous, full of old blood and old mistakes, yet somehow better than they had been.
Then the news came.
My father was dead.
After that, everything moved too fast. Calls started.
Arrangements followed. A flight was booked before I had even caught my breath, and New York was waiting whether I wanted it or not.
Grief did not arrive cleanly. It came tangled with duty, family, lawyers, the company, my mother’s broken voice, and every old obligation I had spent years trying to escape.
So I left.
I walked out without giving Edwina any information at all, not even one fucking sentence she could hold on to.
My mind was not clear enough for a decent choice.
Death had reached in and dragged me back before I could make sense of anything, and by the time I understood the damage I was doing, I was already gone.
All the way to New York, London stayed in my head.
Edwina.
Helena.
The life I had only just begun to touch.
For the first time in years, I had something dangerously close to happiness, and life, cruel as ever, put a knife through it before I had learned how to hold it.
I had to stay in New York for a few days.
There was no real way around it. Funeral arrangements swallowed whole hours.
The apartment had fallen into chaos, the company was worse, and my mother looked as though one wrong word might break whatever was keeping her upright.
Each room came with its own demand, decisions to make, people waiting for answers, faces turning toward me as if grief had thrown me into a place I had never fucking wanted.
I did not want the company. I never wanted that life.
I had no desire to inherit a throne built from pressure, silence, and other people’s expectations.
The board could handle the machinery of it, the long-term decisions, the polished performance of continuity my father had worshipped until the day he died.
I was there because someone had to keep the apartment from cracking open.
Someone had to keep my mother from being left alone in the first brutal days of mourning.
And through the meetings, the calls, the hands on my shoulder offering sympathy I did not know what the hell to do with, all I could think about was the apartment in London. Helena waiting. Edwina thinking the worst of me, probably with every right.
New York no longer felt like home. Maybe it never had.
Home had stopped being New York.
It was not the city where I had been born, or the apartment heavy with family legacy, money, grief, and all the old expectations that had spent years trying to choke the life out of me.
Home had become a warm apartment in London, a little girl laughing on the floor with a rabbit in her arms, and a woman with tired, wounded eyes who could still make the ruined parts of me feel less dead.
Edwina and Helena were my home.
There was no cleaner way to say it. The truth sat in me, raw and ugly, impossible to make gentler than it was.
When I saw the disappointment in Edwina’s eyes, when I stood in front of her after days of silence and watched hurt sharpen her face, I had no idea what the fuck to do with it.
Apologies had been spent too many times between us.
Explanations, even real ones, could not erase the fact that I had vanished again.
I had done the exact thing I swore I would never do.
Life dragged me away, and I handed her silence in return.
Now I was standing there with grief still stuck to me, looking at the woman I loved, wondering how the hell I was supposed to make her forgive me for this.
I wanted her forgiveness badly enough to hate myself for needing it.
I wanted her voice, her mouth, her nearness, and the rare softness she gave me when her anger slipped for a second.
New York had been death, black coats, rooms full of flowers that smelled more expensive than sincere, and family bullshit waiting to drag me under.
By the time I got back to London, all I wanted was Edwina’s arms around me, her hands on me, her warmth pulling me out of that cold place and reminding me I was still alive.
That was the ugliest part. Guilt sat in my throat, her disappointment cut me open, and some selfish, broken part of me still wanted to bury my face against her neck and let her make the worst of it quiet.
I had failed her. Her anger was justified.
I knew that. Edwina had still become the only place in the world where my ache met anything other than emptiness.
We were tangled together in the corner of the sofa, the blanket half fallen over us, her legs tucked beneath her, my arm around her while my fingers moved through her hair.
I was exhausted, and touching her was the only thing keeping me from feeling as though I had left half of myself in New York.
Helena was already asleep in her room, and Mrs. Graham had left hours ago.
She held a mug of green tea between both hands, steam curling into the soft light of the room.
Seeing her there, warm and alive beside me after all the chaos I had crawled through, nearly fucking hurt.
I had wanted this so badly while I was away, the quiet of her body close to mine, this couch, this room, the stupid hope that getting back here might make me feel less hollow.
My hand slowed in her hair.
The words had been sitting in my throat since I arrived. I looked down at the tea in her hands, at the life I had almost broken again while trying to return to it, and forced them out.
“He’s dead.”
Edwina turned so quickly the blanket slipped from her shoulder. The softness left her face, replaced first by shock, then concern. She sat upright beside me, no longer tucked against my side, her fingers tightening around the mug.
“Who?” she asked.
I swallowed, my throat scraped raw.
“My father,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Her face changed again, and that almost made it worse. She stared at me for a second, lips parted, eyes searching my face as the missing days took on a shape neither of us had expected.
“Hayden…”
“He’s dead,” I repeated, rougher this time, as if the words still did not fit right in my mouth. “And I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to feel.”
That was the worst part. The death was bad enough. The shock too. Underneath both sat a blank place I did not know what to do with.
I dragged a hand over my jaw, then through my hair, trying to make sense of something that refused to settle. “There’s just emptiness.”
Edwina didn’t interrupt.
“Our relationship was fucked after my sister died,” I said.
“Maybe it had been fucked before that. Her death only made it impossible to ignore.” My mouth tightened.
“Something changed in him after the funeral. He got colder. Harder. Or maybe I finally started seeing what had always been there. We couldn’t speak without tearing into each other.
He wanted me to become the man he had built in his head, and I wanted…
” I stopped, a bitter breath leaving me.
“Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. One honest conversation in a apartment where everyone was performing all the damn time. ”
The tea trembled faintly in Edwina’s hands, and she set the mug down before it could slip.
A humorless laugh left me. “Now he’s gone, and I’m sitting here trying to understand this emptiness. Part of me wonders if I’m heartless for not breaking the way a son is supposed to break. Another part thinks the place where grief should have been was hollowed out years before he died.”
“You’re not heartless,” she said.
Her hand came to my jaw, warm against my skin, and the certainty in her voice nearly pulled something loose inside me.
I looked at her then.
Her face was open in a way that made it dangerous. If pity had been there, I would have hated it. But Edwina was not pitying me. She was simply present, hand on my face, eyes fixed on mine, offering the sort of care she could never fake.
“He wasn’t a good father after that,” I said.
“Not to me. He either didn’t know how to be one, or grief gave him permission to stop trying.
I don’t know which is worse.” My voice scraped on the next words.
“I kept waiting for things to get better between us, for some version of him to come back, someone I could speak to without feeling as if I was talking to a wall. It never happened.”
The silence stretched, but it didn’t feel empty.
“I went back because I had to,” I said. “The apartment was chaos. The company was worse. My mother was barely standing. And the whole time I was there, all I could think was that none of it felt like home anymore. The city, the apartment, the name, that fucking company—none of it.”
Edwina’s eyes stayed on mine.
After a moment, she asked, “What is home now?”
“You,” I said. “And Helena.”