Chapter 39
Liam
He hadn’t thought he would cry. Not because he believed himself above it, but because he couldn’t have imagined a love so pure until they placed her in his arms—small and warm, fists knotted, her face scrunched and furious.
Her cry tore through the sterile air as if her lungs belonged to something much larger than her fragile body.
The nurse said her name softly: Nora, short for Eleanor, after Emma’s grandmother. In that moment, something shifted inside him. He didn’t know what it was—only that it had—and he knew with absolute clarity that nothing would ever be the same again.
Emma lay pale against the pillows, damp hair plastered to her forehead. She turned her head toward him, eyes heavy with exhaustion, and whispered, “She’s perfect.”
He stayed awake the whole night, sitting at Emma’s side while she drifted in and out. When the nurses brought Nora in from the nursery, he held her close, watching every twitch of her mouth and every flutter of her eyelids, as if memorizing her could make amends for everything else.
He already loved her with a force that frightened him. Emma had given everything to bring their daughter into this world, and he had betrayed her before their child had even drawn her first breath.
By noon he was gone. He told Emma he needed a shower, clean clothes, and a few things from the house. She smiled at him and murmured, “Don’t be long.”
He drove straight to Jacob. The door opened as if he had been waiting. His eyes were shadowed and his jaw carved tight, the look of a man who hadn’t closed his eyes all night.
Liam stepped inside without asking, shut the door, and stood in the silence that swallowed him whole.
The house was unchanged: a mug by the sink, a book abandoned on the table, the faint trace of his own cologne clinging to the air like it had never left.
The punch of it nearly brought him to his knees.
He stopped in the middle of the room, jacket still on, unable to sit or speak. Jacob watched him from a few feet away. For a second Liam thought: Don’t do it. Lie. Say you just needed to see him. Just for a minute. Say nothing at all and let him kiss you like you still belong to him.
But he couldn’t.
Tension tightened Jacob’s features, and Liam saw realization strike in his eyes before he looked away. Jacob already knew what he hadn’t yet spoken aloud. The flicker of pain before he turned cut through Liam like a knife, splitting his heart wide open.
“I just came from the hospital,” he said.
Jacob nodded once. “How’s Emma? The baby?”
“Emma’s okay. Tired. Sore.” His throat closed. “Nora’s… she’s tiny. Healthy. Strong lungs.”
Jacob didn’t smile; he just stood there, braced for the blade to fall.
Liam hated himself for what he was about to do. The words were already carving into him before he could force them out. “I can’t do this anymore.” His voice splintered on the break.
Jacob didn’t move.
“I have to try,” Liam pressed, each syllable scraping his throat raw. “For Nora. I owe her that much.”
Jacob’s body stayed loose, almost casual, but Liam knew better. He had learned to read every flicker of restraint, and saw how rigid he had gone beneath the surface. How stillness had become armor.
Liam’s chest burned. “I love you.” The words tore out of him like something ripped free, shattering in the air between them. Real and so full of grief it almost doubled him over.
Jacob flinched, the force of it flashing raw across his face before he strangled it down.
“Don’t,” he said, voice breaking on the word.
“Don’t say that now.” He turned his head, every muscle trembling with the effort to hold steady.
“You can’t tell me that and still walk away. You don’t get to do both.”
The words hit Liam square in the chest, knocking the breath from his lungs.
He dragged a hand through his hair, desperate for air, for relief.
A tear slipped hot down his cheek, proof of everything breaking inside.
“This isn’t what I want. I need you like I need breath.
Walking out of here will rip something out of me I’ll never get back. ”
Jacob’s eyes followed the tear, his jaw tightening, pain breaking through before he forced himself still again.
Liam snapped, crossing the distance between them and grabbing a fistful of Jacob’s shirt, yanking him close. His mouth crashed against Jacob’s, pouring everything he couldn’t say into that kiss—love, regret, longing so sharp it felt like pain.
Jacob kissed him back with a violence that felt like desperation.
His hands gripped hard at Liam’s hips, dragging him in, slamming him against the wall hard enough to rattle the frames.
His mouth was rough and unforgiving, tongue sweeping deep, demanding everything.
A kiss that said: mine, even if you leave.
Liam made a sound—torn from the depths of his chest—a sound only Jacob could ever wrench out of him. Jacob swallowed it whole, and pulled back just enough to murmur, “As long as you still react like this to me, you’ll never belong to anyone else.”
Liam’s knees almost buckled.
He kissed him again—fast, bruising, frantic—before tearing himself away, chest heaving as though he’d clawed his way back from drowning. He pressed his forehead to Jacob’s, eyes shut, trembling with what he couldn’t allow himself to have.
It took everything not to stay and fall apart in Jacob’s arms, but a newborn lay in a hospital bassinet and Emma was waiting for him to come back. “I have to go,” he whispered. The words tasted like blood. “I’m sorry.”
Jacob didn’t answer. His hands held on, unyielding for one last moment. Then, very slowly, they loosened.
Liam stepped back, turned, and walked to the door on legs that no longer felt like his own.
His lungs seized as the tears came, violent and sudden, racking his whole body.
He felt hollow, as if something essential had already slipped out of him.
His body kept moving, but the rest of him stayed behind.
Jacob didn’t stop him.
The silence that followed screamed.
* * *
Emma sat on the couch with their daughter nestled against her chest, as if she had always belonged there.
They had been home from the hospital a week now, slowly finding their rhythm with a newborn.
Nora’s breaths came soft and steady, the faintest coos breaking the air every so often, coaxing a smile from Emma despite her fatigue.
One tiny hand gripped her mother’s shirt, holding tight as though she already knew where she was safest.
“She’s so calm,” Emma said, her cheek resting against their daughter’s head. “I don’t know how we got this lucky.”
He stood in the doorway longer than he should have, caught by the picture they made together. It was everything he’d once believed he wanted—his beautiful wife, their newborn baby, and a home wrapped in warmth—yet his feet wouldn’t carry him inside. He stayed there, motionless at the threshold.
The quiet perfection of it pressed down on him harder than any noise ever could. The ache in his chest didn’t ease in the presence of all this goodness; it only sharpened. He wanted to feel grateful, but heartbreak bloomed in the space where gratitude should have been.
Eventually he forced himself to cross the room, bending low to kiss the crown of Nora’s head. She smelled of clean cotton and baby powder, impossibly delicate against his lips. He didn’t feel worthy of being her father.
Emma looked up at him, her eyes brimming with quiet wonder. “She’s incredible, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” Liam whispered, because it was the only truth he had. She was perfect.
He sat beside them on the couch, Emma’s head finding his shoulder.
He told himself to let the comfort sink in and to stop reaching for what was already gone.
Yet when he closed his eyes, it wasn’t Emma’s fingers he felt twined with his.
It was Jacob’s hand covering his own, firm and grounding, the rough heat of his palm steadying him in a way nothing else could.
He could almost hear Jacob’s voice against his ear, the kind of murmur that curled straight down his spine: breathe, I’ve got you.
For a moment, the scent of baby powder blurred, replaced by Jacob’s cologne, rich and devastatingly familiar, dragging him somewhere he shouldn’t go.
His eyes flew open, shame hitting hard. He hated himself for carrying a love into this room that had no place here.
Later, when Emma and Nora had drifted upstairs and the house grew still, he stayed behind in the kitchen. The lamp burned low, throwing soft light across the clutter—the bottles drying by the sink, his hoodie on the back of a chair, and a mess of things spread across the table.
All the details of a life he had chosen freely. He should have felt anchored. Instead, all he could do was ache for the man who owned his soul. He hadn’t seen Jacob since the day he slipped out of his arms and walked out the door without looking back. A whole week had passed—it felt so much longer.
He pulled his phone from his pocket, thumb hovering over the name he shouldn’t be looking at.
The letters blurred with tears he couldn’t hold back.
Seven days, and nothing—no messages, no calls, only the silence he had chosen.
Jacob would never ask for what Liam couldn’t give, and he understood why Liam needed to do this.
His throat burned and his heart stung. He set the phone face-down on the counter and gripped the edge until his knuckles hurt, forcing himself to breathe through the tears.
Thank God his family was arriving tomorrow—his parents and sisters, eager to meet the newest member of the family.
He could already picture his mother sweeping through the doorway with flowers and too many bags, her laughter spilling into every quiet corner.
His father would cradle Nora as if she were made of glass.
And his sisters would pass her from arm to arm, each insisting she had their eyes.
Hopefully the noise and the love would fill the hollow spaces for a while. Maybe his mother’s hugs could hold him together, if only for a moment. For now, that would have to be enough.