Chapter 29
Homecomings
Hildy
Soft morning light pours through the kitchen windows, catching the steam rising from my coffee, the first regular-strength cup I’ve allowed myself since I found out I was pregnant.
The smell alone feels like rebellion after weeks of watered-down compromise.
I cradle the mug between both hands and watch the light move across the counter like it’s taking inventory of the room.
I stayed up all night trying to figure out why a man like him, with means and fame and those unfair, almost criminal good looks, could fall in love with a broke college girl who took custody of a sister she had never even met because their drunk mother nearly killed her.
It started a spiral.
Not jealousy. Not insecurity exactly. Just the quiet, persistent question that shows up in the middle of the night when logic is asleep, and your brain decides to run wild.
How did I end up here?
How did he end up here?
At first, I told myself I was just reading. Background context. Curiosity. Harmless late-night digging historians do when a name or a date doesn’t quite sit right in the narrative.
But the truth is, I was trying to understand him.
Understand how someone who grew up inside a world of legacy and expectation could look at the chaos that was my life and decide it was something he wanted to, no needed to step into.
In bed beside Lucy, Erin asleep downstairs, I started where scholars always start: records.
The foundation website, then public filings, and old press releases. Interviews he and his family had done early in his career, when reporters still asked about family history as if it were a human-interest footnote rather than a branding point.
The story was clean. Generational wealth. Thousands of acres of land. A grandmother who rebuilt after the war. A family known for discipline and resilience. The kind of narrative that fits neatly into magazines and donor brochures.
The dates bothered me. Nothing glaring, just enough that kept my brain circling back, so I opened a new tab.
Then another, and ended up finding civil registries, municipal archives, and historical land transfers from the region his family comes from.
I told myself it was academic instinct, the same impulse that has gotten me through half my coursework, and my paper Digital Afterlives: Metadata, Identity, and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in European Archival Systems.”
When something doesn’t align, you follow the thread, forward and backward.
Through the grandmother everyone knows about, the property records that predate the foundation entirely.
Through a branch of the family that stopped appearing in official biographies somewhere around the early twentieth century.
And then there was a huge gap in the story that the information was telling me.
I widened the search and used different spelling variations of the surname. Maternal lines instead of paternal. Church registries instead of civic ones.
And then I found the first record that didn’t belong where it was. Not a baptism entry, not a marriage in the church ledger. A community archive preserved by a historical foundation. Handwritten records scanned page by page, the ink faded, but still legible if you leaned close enough to the screen.
The name was there. Not the version used now. The one from before.
For a long time, I stared at it, convinced I had followed the wrong branch of the family tree. That I’d crossed into someone else’s history by mistake. So I checked again and again.
Every cross-reference I ran pulled the line back to the same village, the same family structure, and the same cluster of names echoed across decades.
Somewhere along the way, the name had shifted. Documentation had changed. The paper trail had been adjusted very carefully. Like someone understood exactly how dangerous a surname could become depending on the decade.
I slept like crap for three hours, and then I came downstairs.
The laptop is still open on the table. Tabs everywhere.
Notes scribbled into the margins of printed documents.
Dates circled. Lines of ancestry traced with the obsessive focus that only shows up when something personal and historical collide.
All this time, he has carried the weight of a narrative tied to geography and assumption. All this time, the truth has been sitting quietly in archives no one bothered to read closely enough.
I wrap my fingers around the mug again and take a slow sip, letting the warmth settle into my chest.
I know how he jokes about others’ views of him and Kilovac.
But I saw what happened when Anna was ambushed.
For those reasons alone, I can’t wait to show him what I found, if for no other reason than to never have him look at me the way he did that night, like he was afraid he was going to lose me…
us, and trying to figure out what it would take to keep us.
I hear the front door open and smile as I set the mug down on the island when he says, “Fuck.”
I take my time walking to the door.
The chain I installed still bars him from entering. I mean, he could easily break it, but I know he won’t.
I know this with certainty.
When he sees me, he straightens a little and asks, “You gonna let me in?”
I try to look as angry as I was last night when I say, “To my house?”
He closes his eyes and lets out a long, slow breath.
“Your house, our home, Schatz.”
Damn him.
“You contacted my father.”
“Our lawyer contacted your father,” he states calmly.
“I didn’t hire a lawyer. I—”
“We hired him.”
I stare at him through the small opening of the door and finally admit, “I’m too tired to argue.”
He nods once, completely unfazed. “Perfect. So now would be a good time to tell you I met your mother and she’s a wretched bitch.”
I shut the door in his face, hard, then I lean my forehead against it and sigh.
One second. Two. Three.
I slide the chain back and open the door.
“I showered off Ryker’s before I even came here. You can be pissed, Schatz, but first kiss me.”
I grab the front of his coat and pull him close, my breath hitches, my throat tightens, my heart beats faster, and my tummy flutters.
The kiss is a little rough and a lot needy on both of our parts, because I’m still irritated and clearly neither of us has slept enough to use patience. His hands find my hips and pull me closer. And for just a moment, everything is quiet, and then…
“DADDY!”
We both break at the exact same time.
Lucy’s voice echoes down the staircase as she slides down the steps on her bottom like a tiny hurricane
Lenzin laughs against my lips before he even turns, the sound warms the parts of me that the kiss didn’t.
I barely step back before she launches herself at him.
He catches her easily, scooping her up before she can crash into his legs.
“Easy there.” He laughs, lifting her high before settling her against his hip.
“You’re home!” she squeals, grabbing his cheeks with both hands.
“I am home.”
“You gots to see my new room!”
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s upstairs, and it’s big, and Erin says I’m promoted, and there’s gonna be a reading corner and I can put my books there, and we gotta go see it.”
He looks at me with brown eyes, light, and so happy. “Right now, then.”
“Yes!”
From down the hall, Erin appears, hair a complete mess, one hand pushing it out of her face as she walks toward the kitchen.
She stops to take in the scene.
Lenzin is carrying Lucy toward the stairs, her laughter and excitement about showing him, and his obvious because of her. Our Lucy.
Erin looks between all of us and smiles slowly. “Well, this seems like a good morning.”
“They all are.” I sigh as I watch them head up.
“Come on, my mommy and my Erin,” Lucy yells to us.
We’ve eaten breakfast, Erin has left for her conference, and Hank has returned. Lucy is giving him a tour now.
Lenzin walks over and turns me from the sink to face him, and kneels in front of me, framing my belly with his hands. “Papa skuchal po vam, moi malen'kie serdechki.” Daddy missed you, my little hearts.
He looks up at me, brown eyes warm and soft.
“I want us, you and me, Schatz, to adopt Lucy, our first herzchen. I want her to share our name, whatever it will be.” He presses a kiss to my shirt and stands fully, brown eyes warm and soft.
“I should apologize for overstepping, but I won’t lie and say it won’t continue to happen.
I want you and me… us to have everything we deserve.
To give Lucy and those to come, everything they deserve.
Love, Hildy. Loving you has made me the man I didn’t know I could become or wanted to be. ”
Damn it, how can I even be mad now?
“I will overstep in effort to give you peace, and happiness, and whatever else it is you want.”
“I—”
“You do the same. The room? Lucy’s and ours?” He holds his hand to his chest. “Didn’t expect that to happen so soon, but that’s us.” He holds his hand over my belly. “Unexpected perfection.”
“Stop,” I say, eyes burning as I grab the scruff of his beard and pull him down and kiss him.
“Shit,” Hank whispers from behind us.
“It’s okay, they kiss all the time,” Lucy whispers back, and I feel his lips turn into a smile.
So do mine.
Lucy is tucked against Lenzin and Hank on the couch, her legs stretched across his lap while he holds the remote in one hand. The broadcast is replaying LA’s last game, the analysts breaking down plays while Lenzin pauses every few seconds to rewind something.
Studying plays, even on a Saturday morning.
Lucy doesn’t really care about the analysis, but she loves watching the skating.
“That one fell,” she narrates as a player loses an edge.
“He got pushed,” Lenzin corrects gently.
“Sure did.” Hank chuckles.
“Oh.” She says as I walk over and sit in the chair that I love, it’s oversized, and I can curl up with my laptop and edit, which is hard when I am so wrapped up in Noelle’s stories that are equal parts steam and humor, a true escape.