Chapter 23
twenty-three
The two-hour drive to Trinity Hospital, where Imogen told me that they would all wait for me, was a suffocating nightmare.
Rhys kept one hand on the wheel and the other locked around mine, his thumb rubbing continuous, soothing circles over my skin, but nothing could stop the storm raging in my head.
When we finally pulled into the parking structure sitting on the concrete barrier near the glass entrance were Lavender and Imogen.
Imogen was staring into space and Lavender aggressively paced back and forth, biting her fingernails.
Sebastian was leaning against the wall, slamming his ankle repeatedly into the concrete with a dull thunk.
I stepped out of the car, my knees shaking, and Rhys fell into step right beside me. I stopped, turning around to put a hand on his forearm. “Rhys... you don’t have to come in. Sebastian is right there, and with everything going on today, if he sees you—“
“I don’t care about Sebastian right now, Ainsley,” Rhys said, calm and steady. “And I’m not leaving you to walk into this alone. I’ll stay in the back. I won’t say a word, I won’t draw attention, but I am not sitting in this car while you deal with him.”
Looking into his face, seeing the absolute, unwavering determination to protect me, a lump formed in my throat. I didn’t have the strength to fight him on it. I just reached out, squeezing his hand. “Okay.”
As we approached, Sebastian snapped his head up. The second he saw Rhys, his jaw clenched violently. “What’s he doing here?” he barked.
“Don’t, Seb,” I said quickly, stepping between them before he could utter a word. My voice was raspy, but firm. “It’s a long story and I promise I’ll explain later, but Rhys gave me a ride here, okay?”
Sebastian glared at Rhys over my head. Rhys didn’t flinch, didn’t smirk, and didn’t posture—he just stood his ground, impassive and silent, letting Sebastian see that he wasn’t going anywhere.
Sebastian let out a harsh breath through his nose, turning his back on Rhys and forcing his focus entirely onto me. “Fine. Whatever.”
“How is she?” I asked, looking toward my sisters. Imogen stood up immediately, throwing her arms around my neck. I hugged her tight, feeling her shaky breaths against my collarbone, while Lavender gave me a tight, exhausted nod.
“Hilary’s out of surgery,” Sebastian said, his voice flat. “The baby’s in the NICU—seven pounds, four and a half weeks early, but the doctors say she’s stable. Dad’s upstairs waiting outside the room.”
We moved into a secluded corner of the ground-floor waiting area, near a bank of vending machines. Rhys lingered ten feet back, leaning his broad back against a concrete pillar, folding his arms across his chest. He was completely silent, a human barrier between us and the rest of the world.
“So what are we doing?” Lavender asked, her voice cracking slightly as she looked around at the three of us. She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, defensively. “He gave us an ultimatum on the phone, Ainsley. Come now, or never meet her.”
“He’s using a newborn baby to bully us into playing happy family,” I mumbled.
“I want to see her,” Imogen said quietly, wiping her cheeks with the back of her sleeve.
“I know what he did is horrible. I know he destroyed everything. But she’s just a baby.
She’s our sister. She didn’t choose him.
She didn’t choose Hilary. If we walk away today, we’re letting him decide that we don’t get to have a sister. ”
“He’s forcing our hands,” Sebastian snapped, his voice a furious whisper as he paced the small circle of linoleum. “If we go up there, he wins. He gets to parade us around in front of everyone, pretending he’s some great family man who brought all his kids together.”
“So we don’t give that to him,” Lavender said. She was staring off into the distance, seeming like she was looking without seeing.
Sebastian stilled. “What do you mean?”
“We go up there, and we meet our sister,” she said in a deadly calm voice.
” We make it completely clear to his face that we are here for her, and her alone.
We tell him that we will be in her life, but that he doesn’t get a single piece of ours.
He lost his right to be our father the day he packed his bags and left Mum.
He’s not a dad anymore, he’s just the guy who shares our DNA and happens to be raising our sister. ”
“Can we do that?” Imogen asked softly.
Lavender leveled her with a look. “It’s exactly what I told him the first time I dropped you off at his flat.”
“You think that will work?” I asked, my gaze bouncing between my siblings.
“Won’t know until we try,” Sebastian said. “Let’s do it.” And with that, he led the way into the entrance of the hospital and toward the elevators.
When the elevator doors slid open, Dad was standing right outside Room 412. The second he saw us, he dropped the paper coffee cups he was holding, letting them splatter across the floor, and rushed forward with his arms wide as if he expected us to collapse into a group hug.
None of us moved. We stopped as a solid unit ten feet away from him, our faces cold and stony.
Rhys lingered somewhere a few feet behind us, a presence I could feel even if I wasn’t holding his hand the way I wanted to for strength right now.
My father’s arms faltered, dropping awkwardly to his sides as his smile wavered.
“What... what’s with the faces? I know today was a shock, but Hilary had an emergency C-section.
It was touch and go for an hour, the baby is barely seven pounds, she’s in an incubator down in the NICU—“
“Is Hilary okay?” Imogen asked, her voice tight.
“She’s resting,” Dad said quickly, taking another step toward us. “She’s doing fine. Look, I know I was sharp on the phone earlier, but I was panicked. You have to understand the pressure I was under. But you’re here now. We can go down to the nursery together. We can see her as a family.”
“Don’t say that word,” Sebastian growled out, his voice shaking with a sudden, violent tremor.
Dad blinked, his brow furrowing in frustration. “Sebastian, please. Not today. Can we just have one day where you don’t drag your anger into everything?”
“Drag my anger?” Sebastian took a threatening step forward, his fists clenched at his sides. “You called us screaming, threatening to disown us and ban us from ever meeting our sister if we didn’t drop our entire lives to jump when you said jump. You forced this on us.”
“I did what I had to do to get you here,” Dad said, his voice echoing loudly off the linoleum walls.
A passing nurse shot him a warning glare, but he ignored her, stepping right into Sebastian’s face.
“You kids have been icing me out for a year. You ignore my texts, you turn down my invitations, you refused to come to the baby shower—I am your father. I brought you into this world, I provided for you, and I am sick and tired of being treated like a villain in my own family.”
“That’s because you are the villain,” Lavender said. “You cheated on Mum, walked out on us for a woman half your age, and then you moved into a house twenty minutes away and acted like we were the ones being unreasonable because we didn’t want to play house with your mistress.”
Dad pinched the bridge of his nose like we were being the stressful ones here.
“Sometimes, adults fall out of love. It happens. I tried to be gentle about it, but you four have built this wall around yourselves and treated me like rubbish ever since. I gave you a home. I paid for your school. I offered to buy you cars, I offered to take you on trips—what more do you want from me?”
“I tried to give you a chance,” Imogen said, a sharpness in her voice I’d never heard before. I briefly wondered how hard it was for her to get those words out. “I tried to visit you and you sent me away. I gave you a chance and you ruined it. So don’t you dare blame us. You did this to yourself.”
Her voice almost cracked on the last word, the emotions building up deep in her chest. I took a step closer to her and interwove my fingers with hers, giving her hand a tight squeeze.
She responded with a squeeze of her own and it eased something in my chest—the idea of us as siblings, as sisters, always being there for each other, especially after the man who was supposed to love us above all else couldn’t be.
Imogen turned her gaze to Lavander, extending her own hand out to our older sister. She took it without hesitation.
I turned my gaze from my twin to my dad and waited for the familiar, agonizing spike of panic in my chest. I waited for the knot in my stomach to tighten, for the desperate urge to cry, to scream, to demand that he love me, to demand that he fix the family he had smashed to pieces.
But as I stood in that sterile hospital hallway, listening to my father complain about how hard his life was, a strange, profound quiet settled over me.
I looked at him—really looked at him. I saw the desperate, selfish panic in his eyes. I saw a man who was terrified of looking like the bad guy, a man who desperately wanted us to forgive him not because he loved us, but because our forgiveness would wash his hands clean of his own guilt.
And then, I thought about Rhys. I thought about how Rhys had stood between me and Kelcey without hesitation.
I thought about how he had driven four hours in silence just to hold my hand.
I thought about the way he looked at me on the lawn, the way he made me feel valued, protected, and completely seen.
I thought about my brother, who done everything he could in his life to shield us from hardship, and my sisters, who loved me fiercely, and Mum who had taken on the role of two parents better than any of us could have imagined.
I had built a life. I had found real, deep happiness, safety, and love—and none of it depended on the man in front of me.
My father wasn’t even the villain in my story anymore.
He wasn’t the monster under the bed. He was just...
a pathetic, selfish, middle-aged man screaming in a hospital hallway.
He didn’t have power over me. He didn’t even matter.
I didn’t hate him. I felt completely, utterly nothing for him.
Sebastian was breathing heavily, his chest heaving, his eyes wild with rage. Before he could open his mouth, I took a step toward him, my fingers still linked with Ainsley’s, and grabbed his hand too. “Seb,” I said softly. “Stop.”
“Ainsley, he—”
“I used to be angry with you,” I told Dad. “I used to spend hours lying awake at night, wondering what we did wrong. Wondering why we weren’t enough for you, why Hilary was better, why a new baby was more important than the four kids you already had. I hated you for a really long time.”
Dad swallowed hard, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. “Ainsley, I never meant to—”
“It doesn’t matter what you meant,” I interrupted, my tone as flat as glass. “The point is, I’m done hating you. Hating you takes energy, Dad. It takes up space in my mind and in my heart, and you just don’t deserve the space anymore.”
Dad stared at me, his mouth opening and closing like a landed fish. “Ainsley, I am your father—”
“You were,” I corrected gently. “When we were kids, you were our dad. But then you quit. You traded us in. We spent a year crying over you, but guess what? We rebuilt our lives. We are happy without you.”
“That’s a lie,” he shouted, though his voice trembled now, his bravado entirely crumbling. “You’re just saying that to hurt me. You came all the way here.”
“Because of her,” I said, looking down the hall toward the NICU. “Because an innocent little girl was born today, and she happens to be our sister. We are here for her.”
Dad froze, stunned into absolute silence.
“We are going to be in her life,” I continued, locking my eyes onto his, taking a step closer to him, my siblings walking with me, the unified front we’ve always been.
“We will visit her. We will send her birthday gifts. We will take her out when she’s older.
But we are doing it entirely on our terms. We will speak to you only when it concerns her safety and well-being.
We will not attend your dinners, we will not spend holidays with you, and we will never pretend that we are a happy family. ”
“And when she’s old enough to make her own choices,” Sebastian added, his voice completely stripped of its previous rage, leaving only cold certainty, “you won’t even be the middleman anymore. You will be completely gone.”
Dad stood frozen in the middle of the hallway.
The anger was entirely gone from his face, replaced by a hollow shock.
He looked at the four of us—Sebastian, Lavender, Imogen, and me—standing together, hands linked, siblings united, entirely unaffected by him.
I was sure he must have been realizing in that moment that he had lost. He hadn’t just lost an argument—he had lost his children.
“I... I love you,” he whispered, his voice trembling, sounding smaller than I had ever heard it before. “I always loved you.”
“Maybe you did,” I said softly, feeling a quiet, final click in my heart. “But it doesn’t change anything. Now—where is her room?”