Chapter Nineteen #3
“My little Flare, you were the one person I couldn’t forget, and that was the cruelest fucking joke life ever played on me.”
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, the room felt different, as if the truth had moved something between us even though it had fixed nothing.
I stood there with the accident finally dragged into the open, the old ghosts given shape at last, and still one question stayed lodged under my ribs.
Rhodes.
That fucking name.
I had been turning that name over in my head for too long.
Rhodes.
So I asked her again. “What happened to Carter?” My voice was rough from everything already dragged out between us. “How the fuck did you become Rhodes?”
For a moment, she only looked at me.
“Everything happened at the airport,” she said.
My body went still.
She drew in a breath, but it did nothing for her. “I was leaving. My mind was already made up. I remember feeling sick all day, but I thought it was stress. Heartbreak. All of it together.” Her mouth tightened. “Then I fainted.”
I stared at her. “Where?”
“At the airport,” she said. “I woke up in the hospital.”
A cold pressure moved through me. I could see it too clearly.
Edwina alone, already broken, dragging herself toward an exit she thought she had to take, then collapsing under airport lights while strangers gathered around her.
All of it had happened without me. She had fallen apart somewhere in the world, carrying my child inside her, and I had been nowhere near her. I had known fucking nothing.
I clenched my jaw and waited. Then she looked up at me and finished it.
“They told me I was pregnant.”
For a second, the room stopped making sense.My hand dragged over my mouth.
“You were alone,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered. “I was.”
That single word hollowed me out. Life had handed her my child while she was alone in a hospital room, scared, sick, and already convinced I had betrayed her.
The father of her baby had not been beside her.
No one held her hand or told her what the hell came next.
Just a doctor, a hospital bed, and the knowledge that nothing in her life would ever be the same again.
I closed my eyes for a second.
“Tell me the rest.”
When I turned back, she looked exhausted in a way sleep would never fix.
“I called my dad,” she said. “He knew I was leaving. He was already waiting for me, but the pregnancy…” She shook her head faintly. “That was a shock for both of us.”
Something in me eased and tightened at once.
Her father.
After the hospital, she had not been completely alone. Her father had come when she called, doing the job I should have been there to do.
“He helped me,” she said, her voice quieter now. “He didn’t push me for answers right away. He came, handled what needed handling, and gave me space until I could breathe again.”
I crossed my arms because my hands needed somewhere to go. “And Rhodes?”
She exhaled, and even now the answer seemed to cost her.
“I changed it.”
“I know that,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “I’m asking why.”
Her gaze met mine. There were tears at the edges of her eyes, but she did not look away.
“Because I didn’t want you to find me.”
The words cut through me because she was not trying to hurt me. She was only telling the truth, and somehow that made it land harder.I stood there and let it settle everywhere it wanted to hurt.
“You erased yourself,” I said.
“Yes.”
My jaw tightened. “You erased Carter.”
“I had to.”
“No.” The word came out rough. “You chose to.”
Pain crossed her face, but she held my gaze.
“Yes, Hayden. I chose to. I was pregnant, terrified, and convinced you had already chosen someone else. I needed a name you wouldn’t know.
A name you wouldn’t search for. Something that would let me build a life without turning around every day expecting you to appear behind me. ”
The honesty of it was fucking brutal.
Anger came first. It always did with me. Then came the worse part, the part I hated because I understood her. She had taken the only road that made her feel safe, and every step of it had led her farther from me.
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
“My father’s side,” she said. “Rhodes was my grandmother’s last name. Dad suggested it at first, and I hated it. It felt strange at first. Wrong. But Carter still belonged to everything I was trying to leave behind.” Her fingers tightened around the glass. “Rhodes gave me protection.”
Protection.
A pretty word for a fucking wall.
“Rhodes,” I said, almost to myself. “All this time, I hated that name because I thought it belonged to another man. But was there someone else?”
The question came out rougher than I wanted, dragged from the ugliest part of me before I could stop it. She knew exactly what I meant. I saw it in the way her face tightened, in the hurt that flashed there before she answered.
“No.”
I held her gaze. “Ever?”
Her answer came without hesitation. “No.”
The room went still around that, but I could not let it alone. The thought had been living under my skin for too long, mean and poisonous, and now that I had started, I needed every last piece of it.
“No man at all?” I asked.
Something close to disbelief crossed her face, as if she could not decide whether the question insulted her or simply exposed how badly the idea had fucked with my head.
“No,” she said again, and this time there was steel in her voice. “There was never anyone else.”
Relief hit me so hard it almost felt like shame.
“Hayden,” she said, quieter now, “you were my first.”
The words struck low.
She did not look away. “And my only.”
Jesus Christ.
I looked down because, for one fractured second, I could not take that and keep my face under control. My body had gone still in the worst way, locked around want, fury, and grief all at once.Those words were not some pretty confession meant to soothe me.
A breath left me, close to a laugh, though there was nothing light in it.