Chapter 6
Jake
Ihave a daughter.
I’ve said it to myself four times since that phone call, and it still doesn’t sound real.
Fuck.
The cliffs behind my mom’s house are quiet. Honolulu glows in the distance. The air smells like salt and plumeria and the remnants of a family dinner that feels like it happened three years ago.
Emilia is beside me, close enough that I can hear her breathe.
“Her name is Poppy.” My voice comes out flat.
Controlled. I’ve been doing that, keeping the words organized, like if I say them in the right order they’ll make sense.
“Four years old. Her mother passed six weeks ago. The grandparents have been caring for her, but they’re in their seventies and…
” I stop. Start again. “The attorney said she’s been asking about Hawaii. ”
Emilia doesn’t say anything. She just watches me like she’s waiting to see what I do next. No pity. No judgment. I almost wish there was.
“DNA confirmation came back before they made contact.” The wind moves through her hair. I focus on the water instead. “It’s not a question.”
“Okay.”
“She has…” I laugh, and it comes out wrong, rough at the edges. “The attorney sent a photo. She has my eyes.”
Silence.
“I didn’t know.” That’s the part I keep coming back to, the part that feels like a splinter I can’t locate. “I need you to know that. I didn’t know she existed. Her mother and I were…it wasn’t…” I exhale hard. “I wasn’t careless on purpose.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Emilia turns to face me fully. “Yes.”
I look at her then. Really look, which is a mistake I keep making tonight. There’s no argument in her expression. No sharp edge waiting to cut me down to size. Just Emilia, standing on a cliff in the dark, watching me fall apart in slow motion.
Shit. I can’t even be annoyed at her right now. That’s how far gone I am.
“I don’t even know what she’s supposed to call me.”
That one gets me. I hate that she’s here to see it.
Emilia is quiet for a moment. “You don’t have to know how to do this tonight.”
“Feels like I should.”
“No.” She holds my gaze. “You just have to show up.”
I don’t examine what that does to me. Not right now. I’m barely holding it the fuck together as it is.
She means it practically. I know that. But it doesn’t matter.
Show up.
Like that’s the whole damn answer.
Maybe it is.
We go back inside ten minutes later.
I don’t announce anything. I don’t have to. Four brothers raised by Maggie Hale don’t miss much. It’s basically a survival skill at this point.
I watch it hit them one by one.
Noah clocks me first. His eyes go flat and assessing. That quiet-danger thing he does when he’s processing that something is off. He doesn’t say a word, just files away whatever he sees somewhere. Bastard sees everything.
Maggie stops watching me and looks straight at Emilia. She doesn’t know what happened yet, but she knows something did.
Sienna sits up straighter, but says nothing.
Mason goes completely still at the end of the room. His eyes cut to Emilia, track her posture and the fact that she’s standing right beside me. Something tense crosses his face. I’ll deal with that later.
I don’t have the goddamn bandwidth right now.
“Can everyone stay for a few minutes.”
It doesn’t come out as a question. Lucas puts his drink down. Leah shifts in her seat. Dane sets his phone face down on the table and if I wasn’t already destabilized, that would’ve done it. Dane doesn’t put his phone down for anything.
I stay standing. It’ll be easier to say this on my feet.
“I got a call last night.” I look at the table instead of any of them. “From a family attorney in California. A woman I knew five years ago passed away six weeks ago. She had a daughter.” A breath. “My daughter. She’s four. Her name is Poppy.”
Dead silence.
Fuck. Saying it out loud again still doesn’t make it feel real.
Dane goes first. “Are you certain?”
“DNA confirmed paternity before they initiated contact.” I meet his eyes. “She’s mine. I don’t need a test to tell me that.”
Dane nods once.
“She arrives in forty-eight hours,” I say. “Her grandparents are in their seventies. They’ve been caring for her since the mother passed, but they can’t continue long-term. They’re not…” I pause. “They’re not bad people. They’re just overwhelmed.”
Lucas doesn’t say anything for a long beat.
I watch him. My brother who has an answer for everything, who fills every silence with analysis, is just sitting there, staring at me like the words have knocked him sideways.
When he finally speaks, it’s quiet. “You’re not doing this alone.”
Not a joke. Not a deflection. Just the truth, said plainly, like it’s obvious.
I have to look away. Goddamn it, Lucas.
Noah goes straight to logistics: travel arrangements, medical records, preschool paperwork.
His voice is even and clipped and completely devoid of its usual edge, and I realize after a second that this is Noah being careful with me.
Noah, who handles everything through precision and control, is consciously keeping his tone soft.
That nearly fucking undoes me.
Leah catches my hand before I can move away. She doesn’t say anything at first. Then, quietly: “That little girl is going to have so many people who love her.”
She’s pregnant and exhausted and still managed to say the exact right thing. Damn.
Mom reaches me last.
She comes to me. Takes my hand in both of hers. No panic or shock. Just my mom looking at me the way she always does when she knows I’m carrying something heavy.
“We’ll be ready for her.”
Five words.
Shit. Five words and I nearly lose everything I’ve been holding together since that phone call right there at my mom’s dining room table.
I don’t. But it’s close.
Emilia rode here with Mason. She tells him she’s leaving with me, and the look she gives him is enough to stop whatever protective older-brother speech was already loading.
Mason doesn’t argue. I file that away.
The Diamond Head road winds through the dark. Neither of us talks for a while.
“What was she like?” Emilia says it quietly. “Her mother?”
I keep my eyes on the road. “Bright. Restless. We weren’t in love. I want to be honest about that. We had something real for a few months and then we didn’t, and it ended the way those things end. No drama. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I would have—”
“I know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it’s true.”
I glance at her. She’s looking out the window at the city below, her profile clear in the dark.
“I’m terrified she’s going to hate me someday,” I say. “For not being there for the first four years. She’s going to look back and there’s just…nothing. No version of me existed in her life.” And that’s something I can never fix. No matter what I do.
“She’s four.”
“Four eventually becomes fourteen.”
Emilia is quiet for a moment. “You can’t undo the first four years. But you can be there for every year after them.”
It shouldn’t make me feel better. It’s not a solution. But something in my chest loosens anyway, sitting in the dark of the car with the city sliding past below us.
She already gives a damn about this kid. She doesn’t know her. She has no reason to. But I can hear it. The same practicality she applies to everything, only this time it’s not driving me insane. This time it holds something together inside me that I don’t realize is coming loose.
Goddamn it. When did Emilia Hart become the person I call when things fall apart?
The attorney’s office is on the fourteenth floor of a downtown building with a view of Honolulu Harbor.
Emilia and I arrive together.
Neither of us acknowledges what that looks like. The two of us walking in, sitting side by side, her pulling a notepad out like she’s already prepared to run point on logistics. Richard Yuen has been the Hale family attorney for fifteen years, and he’s professional enough not to react to any of it.
He lays it out cleanly.
Poppy’s grandparents are seventy-one and seventy-three. Her grandmother has a heart condition. The strain of the past six weeks has been significant. They love her, that’s the first thing he says, and he means it. They love her, and they’ve only called because they can’t keep doing it alone.
Poppy is shy initially with strangers, but she eventually warms up. She loves to draw, especially ocean animals, mostly sea turtles, he says. She’s been asking questions about Hawaii since her mother mentioned it once.
She’s been struggling emotionally. She understands her mother is gone in the way a four-year-old understands it, which means she asks for her sometimes, without warning, and there’s no good answer.
Hell. I keep my face neutral and my hands flat on the table.
Yuen lays a folder in front of me. “Given the circumstances, I did want to mention that the paternity confirmation through the estate is thorough and well-documented. However, if you wanted independent verification for your own peace of mind, or for legal—”
“No.” The word comes out before he finishes the sentence. “If Rachel said she’s mine, she’s mine.”
After the meeting, I stand on the sidewalk outside the building and stare at the harbor.
Emilia steps up beside me, and within thirty seconds she’s already moving, phone out, running the whole damn thing from the sidewalk.
“There’s a preschool two blocks from your penthouse with a good record and mid-month enrollment flexibility.
I’m sending you the details.” She’s scrolling fast. “The guest bedroom needs a mattress, you ordered a frame last night but no mattress, which is a problem. I’ll handle that.
You need a car seat before tomorrow afternoon. That’s non-negotiable, obviously.”
I look at her.
“She’ll need clothes for the first few days until you can shop properly. I can have basics delivered by tonight.” She glances up. “Are you writing any of this down?”
“No.”
“Jake.”
“I’m watching you do it. That’s better.”
She’s already three steps into the problem, green eyes sharp, working it faster than anyone I know. I’ve always found that more attractive than I should. Hell of a time to notice.
She gives me a look like I’m already testing her patience, then goes back to her phone.
Damn. I keep looking at her anyway.
She’s the calmest thing in my life right now. That sentence would have been hilarious forty-eight hours ago. Emilia Hart, chaos deterrent. Emilia Hart, the one steady point in the disaster I’m currently standing inside.
And yet here we are.
The penthouse is too quiet.
It’s always been quiet. That was the point. Fourteen floors up, clean lines, city view, no clutter. I built a life that looked exactly how I wanted it to look.
Standing in the guest bedroom doorway at ten o’clock at night, I understand for the first time that I had no idea what I wanted.
The room is wrong, glass surfaces and sharp angles and a throw pillow situation that would terrify a small child. Emilia has already moved past me, reorganized the closet, stacked the delivered clothes into folded piles, and pushed the desk to the corner to make room near the window.
She moves through this like it’s nothing. Meanwhile, I can barely breathe.
“The turtle night light is still in the box,” she says, not looking up.
“I’ll get it.”
But I don’t move.
I’m looking at a pair of tiny shoes on the floor beside the dresser.
I ordered them off the list Emilia sent me, clicked the size, and didn’t think about it until right now, until they’re just sitting there, small and impossibly real, and tomorrow afternoon there will be a person small enough to fill them walking through my front door.
Shit. I can’t breathe around that thought.
“Hey.” Emilia appears in my peripheral vision. “What is it?”
“I don’t know how to be somebody’s father.”
It comes out quiet. Honest. Both things that cost me more than she knows.
She looks at me for a long moment. No judgment. No sharp response. No filing it away to use against me later.
“Good fathers usually worry about that.”
I look at her.
She’s completely serious.
Something loosens in my chest. Not enough, not completely, but enough to breathe around. Damn her for knowing exactly what to say.
My phone buzzes.
It’s the flight confirmation. Poppy lands tomorrow at 6:00 a.m.
I’m standing in the bedroom doorway again. I don’t remember walking back here. Emilia is somewhere behind me in the main room. I can hear her moving, the quiet sounds of someone with a list of things to do.
I stare at the tiny shoes.
Forty-eight hours ago I was running donor numbers and thinking about the fact that Emilia Hart drives me insane and I can’t stop thinking about her. Now there’s a sea turtle night light on the floor and tomorrow morning a four-year-old girl with my eyes is going to step off a plane and look at me.
What the hell am I doing?
No, that’s wrong. I know what I’m doing. I’m just terrified I’ll do it badly.
“Go to sleep, Jake.” Emilia’s voice reaches me from across the penthouse. Quiet. Even.
“Not tired.”
“I know.” A pause. “Sleep anyway.”
I finally turn around.
She’s standing near the kitchen island with her arms crossed, watching me with something careful and steady in equal measure. She looks like she has no intention of leaving until I step away from that doorway.
I don’t know what I did to deserve this version of her tonight.
I’m not asking, in case it disappears.
“Tomorrow,” she says, softer, “you just have to show up.”
In less than twenty-four hours, my entire life is going to change.
I finally believe I might actually be ready for it.