Mehar
I hadn’t slept all night. I was worried about him but also that damn test.
The paternity test box was on the counter where I’d left it and I’d spent the entire night staring at it from the bed, replaying every moment of distance Quest had given me over the last two weeks.
The deflections, the vague answers, the door behind his eyes that I kept knocking on and he kept locking.
I thought it was the war. I thought it was stress.
I thought it was a man carrying too much on his back and not knowing how to put it down.
It was none of those things. My fiancé looked at our daughter and wasn’t sure she was his.
I didn’t cry anymore. I’d done all my crying between midnight and four in the morning while the hotel room sat dark around me.
His key card beeped at 6:47 AM. The door opened and Quest walked in looking like war.
His clothes were different from when he’d left, darker, tactical, and there was a tiredness on him that went deeper than sleep.
His eyes found me on the edge of the bed and his whole body moved toward me like gravity, like coming home to me was the only thing keeping him vertical.
He leaned down to kiss me and I turned my face.
He pulled back. His brow creased. “What’s wrong?”
I stood up and walked to the counter and picked up the box and held it in front of him. His eyes dropped to it and I watched the recognition move across his face.
“How could you?” My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.
I wanted to be strong about this, wanted to be firm and measured, but the pain underneath it kept pulling my voice down to a whisper.
“After everything we’ve been through. After I almost died having her.
After they cut my uterus out of me so she could live.
You looked at our daughter and thought I lied about who her father is? ”
“Mehar…”
“I lost the ability to ever have another child, Quest. I will never carry another baby. Aziza is it for me. She is the only child I will ever bring into this world and you ordered a test because you think I was out here sleeping with somebody else? When exactly did I have time to cheat on you?”
“That’s not what the test is for.”
“It’s a paternity test, Quest! It’s literally called a paternity test! What else could it possibly be for?”
He moved toward me and I stepped back because I didn’t want him close right now. I wanted answers. But he didn’t stop. He closed the distance between us in two steps and his hand came up and wrapped around the back of my neck, firm and warm and deliberate, and he pulled me into him and kissed me.
I tried to resist it. For about two seconds I tried to hold onto the anger because the anger was protecting me from the hurt and without it I was just a woman falling apart in a hotel room at six in the morning.
But his mouth was on mine and his hand was cradling my neck and his other arm pulled me against his chest and my body responded to him before my brain gave it permission.
My hands grabbed his shirt and I kissed him back because even when I was furious with this man, even when he’d wounded me deeper than I thought he could, my body knew him better than my pride did.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His forehead pressed against mine, his hand still on my neck, his breath warm on my lips.
“That test is not for Aziza,” he said quietly. “It’s for me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I need to test my DNA against Prime’s or Justice. I need to know if Alexander Banks is my biological father or if Vivica was lying when she said he wasn’t.”
The anger in my chest shifted. Not gone, but moving, making room for something else. Confusion first. Then understanding creeping in slow.
“When I saw Aziza’s eyes,” he continued, his voice low and rough, “those blue-green eyes that look exactly like Rita’s, I knew something didn’t add up. If Vivica was telling the truth and Rashid is my father, then I have no genetic connection to Rita. Those eyes shouldn’t be on my daughter’s face.”
“So you think Vivica lied.”
“I think that woman lied about everything her entire life and I don’t know why I believed her about this.
She dropped that bomb at Rita’s birthday to hurt me.
To destabilize me. To make me question everything I’d built.
And it worked. It’s been working for years.
” He paused and I could feel his pulse through his hand on my neck.
“But when Aziza opened her eyes and I saw my grandmother staring back at me, I started thinking maybe the one thing I accepted as truth from Vivica was the biggest lie she ever told.”
I looked at him. Really looked at him. I looked at the man underneath all of it and saw something I hadn’t seen before.
He wasn’t hiding from me. He was hiding from himself.
From the possibility that his entire identity had been built on a dead woman’s lie and that his daughter’s eyes were the proof.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked. My voice was softer now. The anger was dissolving into something tender and aching because this man had been carrying this alone while I was thinking he didn’t trust me. “I spent all night thinking you doubted me, Quest.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I should’ve told you the second I ordered it but I was ashamed that it even crossed my mind.
Janelle lied to me about Quindon. Camille lied to me about her pregnancy.
My own mother lied about who my father was.
” He held my face in both hands now. “Except you. You’ve never lied to me.
Not once. And I knew, Mehar. I knew in my gut that Aziza is mine.
The test was never about doubting you. It was about proving that Vivica was wrong so I could finally stop letting a dead woman control who I think I am. ”
I put my hands over his and held them against my face and let the last of the anger go because I couldn’t hold it anymore.
Not after hearing that. Not after understanding what he’d been dragging around inside himself while I was worried about his distance and his deflections.
He wasn’t pulling away from me. He was pulling away from a wound that started long before I existed in his life.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For assuming the worst.”
“Don’t apologize. You found a paternity test with my name on it. Any woman would’ve thought the same thing.”
“I’m not any woman.”
“I know you’re not, Peach. That’s why I’m standing here.”
He kissed my forehead. Then my nose. Then my mouth, softer this time, slowly and deep. I leaned into him and felt his arms wrap around me and we stood there in the middle of the hotel room at six in the morning holding each other while the sun started coming through the curtains.
“The war is over,” he said into my hair.
I didn’t ask for details. I could smell it on him. I could see it in the way he held me, like a man who’d just done something permanent and needed to feel something gentle to balance it out. Whatever happened tonight was done. He was here and he was alive. That’s all that mattered to me.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I pulled back and looked up at him. “Let’s go be with our baby.”