Chapter 42 Stevie
forty-two
Stevie
Eighteen Months Later
Our house is full in every way that matters.
Steady love with Padraig. Our kids are blended and thriving. I have more business than I can keep up with.
Baby Kellan.
The only thing left is the ring.
Tomorrow I try on wedding gowns with my two daughters by my side. We were supposed to get hitched last year, but my pregnancy surprised us. In a good way. Kellan is soft, sleepy, perfect.
A baby I never thought I’d have. Not with Padraig. Especially at close to forty. The little guy has bound our family together in a way nothing else ever could.
Suddenly, we weren’t two halves of a combined family anymore. Kellen bridges the gap.
The whole gang is here for dinner tonight. Padraig is out grabbing takeout. Kellan’s on my hip, gumming a teething ring while I try to straighten up.
For some reason, Rafferty’s crouched under the dining table whispering into the bottom of a walkie-talkie without batteries.
“Raff,” I lean over, “what are you doing under there?”
He looks up, serious. “Secret practice.”
“For what?”
He whispers in my ear. “Missions.”
Of course.
Kellan and I head back to the kitchen where Lila’s planted at the island with her phone balanced against a jar of peanut butter, watching a red carpet breakdown on TikTok while thumbing through one of my bridal magazines. She’s already got opinions locked and loaded.
“You can’t wear anything with cap sleeves,” she advises without looking up. “They’ll age you.”
“I’m not sure I asked.”
“You don’t have to. I’m here for your protection.” She circles something with a sharpie. “This one’s perfect if we put your hair up and do a deep part.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Whose wedding is this again?”
“Ours.” She scrolls to the next video. “We’re a package deal.”
I’m about to fire back when I hear the front door click open. Jude barrels past us in socks, nearly wipes out.
“Raff!” Jude tears through the kitchen into the living room at full speed, arms flailing. “Mission’s starting!”
“Hey! Slow it down. This isn’t a Marvel stunt reel!” I lean into the hallway.
He crashes into the doorframe and recovers instantly. “I’m not stunting! We’re on a time crunch!”
“For what?”
“Secret ops! I told Raff to stay hidden!”
“He’s under the table.” I gesture toward the dining room.
“Perfect. Sector Safehouse secured.” He crouches and clicks an invisible earpiece. “Raff, come in. We’re go for extraction.”
From beneath the table, Rafferty responds, deadly serious, “Copy that. Time for snacks.”
Kellan coos in agreement, drool sliding down my arm.
“Padraig’s bringing home dinner, boys.” I catch Jude’s arm as he rushes past. “One Go-gurt each and nothing more.”
Somewhere above the chaos, the front door opens.
The door opens behind me. Isla steps inside, her boots landing soft against the tile. She hangs her backpack on the hook, peels off her hoodie, and walks past me to the counter without a word. Phone in one hand, eyes fixed on the floor.
Something’s off.
I set Kellan gently in his rocker and move toward her.
She pulls open the fridge and stares into it without moving. Then the pantry. Then back to the fridge.
I lean on the opposite side of the counter. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Hungry?”
Shrug.
“Rough day?”
Shrug.
“Want to talk about it?”
She exhales through her nose, then opens the cereal cabinet and yanks out the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Pours herself a bowl and eats it dry.
“No milk?” I raise an eyebrow.
“No mood.”
I wait.
She cracks first. “Remember the blood type project?”
“The one for biology?” I nod. “You already turned it in.”
“Yeah, well…” She shifts in her seat, eyes on the cereal box. “Mr. Kwan handed them back today, and I got an incomplete.”
I’m confused. Isla, for whom anything less than an A feels like failure, doesn’t bring home incompletes. Not ever. “Why?”
“He said one of my answers doesn’t work with basic genetics, so I must’ve written something down wrong.” She digs into her backpack and pulls out a crumpled results sheet and the folded poster board we made together at this same counter.
She flattens the paper against the wood and taps the top with her finger. “See? It says I’m O positive. But you’re O negative, right?”
“Right…” My voice feels too careful.
“And Dad was AB negative?”
“Yes.”
She flips the poster open, revealing the neat Punnett squares we’d worked on.
Each box filled in, some marked with red Xs.
She jabs her marker at the one labeled “O child” under “AB × O,” the big red X slashing through it.
“This square’s supposed to be impossible.
AB and O can’t make O. And two negatives can’t make a positive.
Mr. Kwan double-checked the chart himself. ”
Her tone is even, but she’s watching me now, like somehow I’ll be able to tell her what the obvious mistake is.
I can’t. These are our blood types. So I don’t really know what she’s talking about or why her teacher would say such a thing.
Unless…
Mentally I go back in time, calculate quickly and realize…
The floor creaks behind us.
Padraig is there with bags full of food, gaze locked on the poster in her hand. Then on her face. Then on me.
She glances between us, confusion knitting her brow. “What?”
Neither of us answers. And in the space where words should be, the truth is deafening.
At least for Padraig and me.
Now’s not the time, though.
“Let’s go over it later.” I reach for the food. “We should eat while the food’s hot.”
We manage to get through dinner. The kids chatter over cartons of pad Thai and spring rolls while I focus on wiping sweet chili sauce off Rafferty’s chin instead of the silent, seething current running from Padraig toward me.
Isla, thankfully oblivious, disappears upstairs the second she’s finished. Jude insists on reading Raff his favorite dinosaur book before bed. Lila helps me bathe Kellan before heading to her room.
By the time the house is finally quiet, my nerves feel scraped raw.
His back is against the headboard, eyes fixed on me when I set Kellan in the bassinet next to my side of the bed.
I study my son to give me a second to gear up for the conversation I’m about to have with Padraig. His perfect bow of a mouth, the curve of his cheek, faint crease between his brows. His brown eyes. All traits he’s inherited from Padraig.
The thought comes before I can stop it.
Did Isla’s baby face hold the same features of Padraig too? At dinner, it’s all I could think about. They have the same facial features, same demeanor, artistic talent. Isla’s blonde, but there’s no mistaking, her and Padraig have the same brown eyes.
Why didn’t I consider the possibility back then? I’ve never doubted she was Cooper’s. When I got pregnant, he and I were off to the races in creating a perfect family.
Now, with her science project fresh in my mind and Padraig’s gaze burning into me, the question lodges somewhere I can’t reach.
I tuck the blanket around Kellan and decide to face him.
“What’s going on?” I decide to let him broach the subject. “You’re acting strange.”
The heat in his eyes makes me stop. Not desire, or danger. More like extreme, crushing disappointment.
“The chart,” he forces the words out. “The blood type thing. I heard the entire thing and it doesn’t add up, Stevie. If those blood types were correct, she’s not Cooper’s.”
Hearing the words spoken out loud is too much, my instinct is to deflect. “She thinks she wrote it wrong. She said—”
“We both know she didn’t,” he cuts in, sharper now. He gets out of bed and paces a tight line across the room. “I’ve been doing the math all night. Counting back. Thinking about the last time we fucked in New York.” He swallows hard. “I thought we were reuniting and you were breaking it off.”
Memories flood my mind of how intense it was.
The heat of his hands on my skin and the way we’d clung to each other like we could fuse ourselves together if we tried hard enough. It had been desperate and consuming. The kind of night burned into your soul forever.
Walking away after felt like ripping out my own heart.
I’d told myself I was doing the right thing. For him. For me. For the future we both deserved but couldn’t find common ground on back then. I buried my ache under reason, convinced letting him go would give us both a better life.
I married Cooper and forced myself to lock away the past. Bury it under vows I made and took seriously. Immerse myself into the life he and I built and the family we made together.
If Coop hadn’t died, I’d be with him. Kellan wouldn’t exist.
I press my palms to the edge of the bassinet, trying to find the right words amidst the heaviness of all of this. Reconcile how my prior marriage sometimes feels like a ghost, comparatively. Flimsy and fading as Padraig and I navigate toward the future.
Overwhelming.
Padraig takes a step closer, eyes locked on mine. “Tell me what happened after you broke up with me.”
“Um…” My throat works around the truth. “I… I don’t want to hurt you.”
His teeth clench. “For fuck’s sake, Stevie. Too late.”
I close my eyes for a beat, then force it out. “It was four or five days later.”
“Had you fucked him before you fucked me when I was in New York?”
“No!” I sob. “No. I’d never…”
His eyebrow quirks like he doesn’t believe me.
His immediate silence is sharp enough to slice my skin wide open.
Finally, he drags a hand down his face, shaking his head like he can’t resolve the timeline. “You went from what we did to him in less than a week?”
“I wasn’t like… I didn’t plan—”
“You didn’t plan?” He laughs without humor.
I swallow hard. Over these past few years, Padraig and I have told each other everything about our lives without each other. Warts and all. Until tonight, I thought there was nothing we didn’t know about each other.
Except this. I fudged the timeline to spare his feelings. Not because I was trying to hide Isla’s paternity, though I can see how anyone with a brain would think so.
“I was young and confused, Padraig. When he found out we broke up, he shot his shot and it happened. Being without you wasn’t easy for me. Coop was my friend. He felt safe. Familiar. We had so much in common, but I never planned to jump into another serious relationship so soon.”
Padraig’s on the verge of tears. “Did you know you were pregnant when you fucked him?”
“What?”
“Did you know you were pregnant and deliberately not tell me?” His voice cracks, suspicion lacing through every word. “Because if you did—”
“No! I didn’t,” I cut in, firm. “You know my periods were always sporadic until I was on the pill. We broke up and I went off it for a while. I’d started again a few weeks before you and I…
Anyway, I found out I was pregnant a couple of months after Coop and I started dating.
I didn’t even question whose baby it was.
He said we should get married and I told myself it was the right way to move on. I didn’t know, Padraig. I promise.”
He stares at me for a long moment. “I don’t want to say something I can’t take back, Stevie. None of it makes sense.”
“Okay.” It scrapes out of me, thin and unsteady.
“When you didn’t get your period, weren’t you suspicious?” He folds his arms and stares me down.
I mentally think back to the time right before I found out. “I remember spotting. I used pads. I thought it was my body adjusting to the birth control again.”
His gaze flicks to Kellan, then back to me, sharp and unrelenting. “We need to get a DNA test. No more guessing.”
The air between us feels heavy. Every breath loud in my ears. I keep my grip on the edge of the bassinet, holding on like it might keep the ground from shifting beneath me. “Padraig—”
“What if she’s mine?” The words are barely more than a breath, but they slam into me all the same. Splintering through everything I thought was settled, leaving nowhere to hide.
Confusion rattles through me. There was never, ever a question in my mind. Isla was Cooper’s. The math never mattered, because the possibility didn’t exist. Until now.
“Did you tell him?” He winces.
“What?”
“Did you tell him how hard I fucked you when I was in town?” Padraig snarls, sounding more like Liam than himself. “When he ‘shot his shot’ was it because he knew you were thinking how many times I’d made you come?”
“I didn’t tell him. He never knew about our night together,” I whisper.
He scoffs. “This timeline makes me physically sick.”
“We weren’t together,” I bark, shame curling in my stomach. “I was trying to move on.”
The muscle in his cheek ticks. “You realize, if she’s mine, you’ve stolen nearly eleven years with my daughter. You allowed another man to raise my kid.”
Something inside him seems to snap on the last word. I step toward him on instinct. “Padraig—”
“Don’t.” He steps back and holds up a hand. “Don’t touch me right now.”
The rejection cuts deep, but he’s already turning away, crossing the room to the closet. I hear a sharp scrape of a hanger. The thump of a backpack hitting the floor. He yanks clothes from the rod without looking at me, shoving them inside with short, angry motions.
When the zipper rasps closed, the sound rips something open in my chest.
“Please.” Panic tightens my throat. “Don’t leave.”
He whirls on me, eyes flashing. “Taking a night to catch my breath after potentially life-changing news is not fucking leaving, Stevie.” His voice aches with fury and hurt.
“No matter what happens with us, I will never abandon my kids. Or yours. They’re mine now.
Every damn one of them. Don’t you ever think otherwise. ”
The certainty in his words hits as hard as the anger. He slings the strap of the backpack over his shoulder, strides past me down the stairs. I hear the front door close with an echoing click.
I stand frozen for a moment, my heart pounding in my ears. Kellan shifts in the bassinet, making a small, restless sound. I lift him into my arms, his warm weight pressing against my chest, and carry him into bed with me.
Curling around him, I press my face into his soft hair, letting the tears come hot and fast.
My hand strokes his tiny back in slow circles while the rest of me shakes.
I have no idea if Padraig will walk back through the door tonight.
No idea if the truth will tear us apart or bind us closer.
All I know is, in the span of four hours, my life might have imploded.