Chapter 12
Jake
Later that morning I’m at my desk with my laptop open and coffee going cold and donor files stacked in three neat columns that have nothing to do with Emilia Hart or the way she looked sleeping in my bed a few hours ago.
I pull up the Hale Futures projections and stare at them for eleven minutes without reading a single number.
Fuck.
The problem with trying to outwork a feeling is that the feeling follows you to the office.
Four donor calls. Two media briefings. A foundation board summary. Everything checked off, every response sent. On paper, I’m completely functional.
In my head I keep replaying the sound Emilia made when I kissed her forehead.
I don’t do that. I’ve never done that.
I did it without thinking and I’d do it again, and that is exactly the issue.
Helen sends four texts before nine. The last one says do not speak to anyone from the press today and I respond to that one, because ignoring Helen entirely only makes her more persistent.
By the time I get to Pacific Edge for the eleven o’clock strategy meeting, I’ve convinced myself that I have everything under control.
I don’t.
I sit through forty minutes of Hale Futures projections and a media strategy deck Helen built around the engagement narrative. My name is on every third slide. My face is in half the press photos.
Next to Emilia’s.
There’s one shot from the gala corridor of her looking up at me. Charged doesn’t cover it.
Dane sees my face and sets down his pen.
He waits until the room clears. Closes the door. Turns around with the expression he reserves for conversations I’m not going to enjoy.
“You’re distracted.”
I lean back. “I multitask beautifully.”
“You stared at your phone six times in forty minutes.”
“That’s called parenting.”
He looks at me for a long moment. Not annoyed, just waiting.
“No,” he says. “That’s fear.”
I don’t answer.
Which is basically an answer.
Dane pulls out the chair across from me, sits, and sets his hands flat on the table. “I looked exactly like you right now before I stopped lying to myself. Couldn’t focus. Checked my phone constantly. Thought it was stress.”
“Was it?”
“It was her.”
He holds my gaze. Waits.
“She’s not temporary,” I say.
“I know.”
“Poppy isn’t, either.” I look at the window. “I keep trying to find the moment it shifted, and I can’t. It’s just done. They’re already…” I stop. Run a hand over my jaw. “Hell.”
Dane lets the silence sit exactly as long as it needs to. “Then don’t ask her to trust you unless you’re ready to deserve it.”
Not a warning. Not a lecture. Just the truth, straight, the way Dane always delivers it.
I nod once.
He stands. Smooths his jacket. Nearly has the door open before he stops.
“You’re already different with them,” he says, and he doesn’t wait for a response.
The door closes, and I sit there thinking that might be the most useful thing my brother has ever said to me.
The media situation gets worse by afternoon.
The narrative the press has landed on: Honolulu’s most reliably reckless billionaire unexpectedly becomes a father, gets engaged, and is apparently having a full redemption arc.
Donors love it. Hale Futures numbers are up.
I hate every damn word of it.
Then it turns fucking ugly.
Reformed Playboy or Damage Control? runs first. Then a tabloid I won’t name: Jake Hale’s Instant Family: Real Romance or Custody Optics?
The piece speculates, in print, that I got engaged to manufacture a stable home for a daughter I’m “rumored to have only just discovered.” Another asks whether Emilia is “a fiancée or a hire.” One of them runs a sidebar, an actual sidebar, titled Does a Bad Boy Make a Good Dad?
They’re guessing. None of them have the custody case, the timeline, the truth. But the guesses are close, and that’s the part that gets under my skin because the damn engagement did start as damage control.
And every one of these gets read in California.
Diane sends me a link to the custody-optics piece with three words: Is this true?
It takes me two calls and an hour to walk her and Robert back from it.
They’re not attacking me. They’re scared.
They handed me a grieving four-year-old on faith, and now the internet is telling them they handed her to a publicity stunt.
Because Poppy’s age is in those articles, alongside speculation about her mother. Photographers sit outside school district offices trying to figure out which preschool I enrolled her in.
That’s the part that pisses me off in a way I don’t have a professional outlet for.
I get the legal team on three cease and desist letters before noon, add security to the preschool route, and call Helen to tell her to issue a privacy statement sharp enough to function as a threat.
“I was going to draft that anyway,” Helen says.
“Draft it faster.”
“Jake—”
“She’s four years old, Helen.”
A pause. When she speaks again, the edge is gone. “It’ll go out this afternoon.”
“While I have you. The sixty days are almost up. I need to know what you want the exit statement to say.”
“There isn’t one.”
“There isn’t a statement, or there isn’t an exit?”
I don’t answer that.
“Jake.”
“Things are working. Poppy’s good. I’m not ending something that’s working because of a deadline.”
“Does Emilia know that?”
I hang up and sit with the fact that I spent my entire adult life not giving a damn what the press wrote about me, and now I care more than I know how to manage.
Because it’s not about me anymore.
I’m back at the penthouse by three.
Emilia picks Poppy up on Tuesdays.
We built the schedule together on a Sunday night at the kitchen island while Poppy drew shark portraits on my foundation paperwork. It made sense. Emilia passes the school on her way from Ala Moana, and I have back-to-back calls until four.
What I don’t plan for is watching them come through the doors that afternoon and feeling something in my chest settle so fast it almost costs me my train of thought mid-sentence.
I wrap the call in under two minutes.
Poppy hits me at full speed. “Dad. Dad. Dolphins aren’t fish. Sophie said she knew first, but I knew first.”
“I believe you.”
“I need you to look it up.”
“Dolphins are mammals.”
She pulls back and stares at me with full suspicion. “How do you know that?”
“I’m smart.”
She considers this like she’s revising a thesis. Then she glances back toward Emilia, who’s already set her bag on the counter, shoes off, moving through the kitchen like she’s been doing it for years.
“Emilia knew, too,” Poppy says. “She told Sophie’s mom.”
I look up.
Emilia catches my eye over Poppy’s head and raises an eyebrow.
Don’t.
But I hold her gaze a beat too long.
She looks away first.
She used to do that immediately. She doesn’t anymore.
Dinner is leftover pasta and a thirty-five minute argument about whether seahorses are also not fish, which they are not, which Poppy accepts only after Emilia pulls up photographic evidence on her phone.
Emilia sits across from me with her reading glasses on and her hair loose, frowning at her work email because she got distracted mid-fact check. I’ve watched this happen every night this week.
“Bad news?” I ask.
She looks up. “Paparazzi got a shot of us at the Ala Moana parking structure Tuesday. It’s trending.”
I keep my expression even. “How bad?”
“Helen already flagged it.” She sets the phone face down. “We’re fine.”
Poppy looks between us. “What’s trending?”
“Something boring,” I say.
She nods like that’s a satisfying answer and goes back to her pasta.
I watch her for a second, four years old and completely unfazed by the fact that her father’s face is apparently all over the internet tonight.
Then I watch Emilia watching her.
And I feel it again: that thing in my chest I’ve stopped pretending isn’t there.
Richard Yuen’s office smells like old carpet and money.
He’s handled Hale legal matters for eleven years. He delivered the news about Poppy without flinching. He doesn’t flinch now, either.
“The grandparents haven’t filed formally.” He sets a folder on the desk. “But their attorney made contact yesterday. They want to discuss long-term custody arrangements.”
“Define ‘discuss.’”
“They’re concerned about stability. The media coverage, your prior public reputation—”
“She’s enrolled in preschool. She has her own room. She has the entire Hale family looking out for her.”
“Jake.” Steady. “They’re not doing this to be difficult. They lost their daughter. They raised Poppy on grief and exhaustion for months. They don’t know you. They know what’s been printed about you.”
I don’t say anything.
My decade of not giving a shit about my public image is right here, pointed directly at my daughter.
“What do they need?” I say.
“Evidence of stability. Consistent home environment. Proof that Poppy is emotionally settled and that your current situation reflects long-term intent.”
The fake engagement sits in the center of those terms like a live wire.
“This isn’t temporary,” I say.
Yuen studies me for a moment, then nods once. “Then make sure that’s visible.”
I walk out of his office with a tight chest and a full afternoon of donor calls I have to sound calm for.
By the time I get home, it’s past six.
Poppy launches herself at me before I’m fully through the door.
I catch her and hold on longer than usual while she tells me about school and a caterpillar she found on the playground that she named Bob.
“Can Bob live here?”
“Bob lives outside.”
“But what if he’s lonely?”
“Bob has friends.”
She leans back and looks at me with complete skepticism. “How do you know?”
“Caterpillars travel in groups.”
“That’s not true.”
“You don’t know that.”
She squints. “I’m going to ask Emilia.”
My phone buzzes.
I shift her to one arm and pull it out, expecting Helen. Expecting a donor update. Expecting literally anything except the subject line sitting in the middle of my screen.
Formal Notice: Custody Reconsideration Filing — Hale/Donovan.
Poppy presses her palm flat against my jaw and turns my face toward her. “Dad. Pasta or not pasta?”
I look at the document preview. Legal header. Filed. Official.
Formal.
“Not pasta,” I say.
She sighs and drops her head to my shoulder.
I close the email and slide the phone into my pocket.
I stand in the middle of my own penthouse, holding my daughter while something cold locks hard in my chest.
They want to make this a fight?
Fine.
They made a hell of a mistake picking one with me.