Chapter 5
Hawk
I'll tell you everything. I promise.
Those four words sat on my phone screen the whole night, and I must have read them a hundred times, turning them over the way you turn over a stone looking for what's underneath, already half certain and still not letting myself finish the thought.
I got to her place early. Couldn't help it. I'd been awake since before dawn, riding the coast road just to burn off the restless energy, watching the sun come up over water that didn't care one bit about the storm building in my chest.
She opened the door looking like she hadn't slept much either, dressed simply, her hair loose around her shoulders this time instead of pulled back, and something about that small detail — like she'd stopped bothering to armor herself for this conversation — settled some of my nerves and set off new ones in equal measure.
"You're early," she said.
"Couldn't wait."
"Neither could I, if it helps. I've been up since five." A ghost of a smile, gone as fast as it came. "Come in. Nico's at Lucia's for the day. Marco and Juliet offered."
Nico. Hearing his name out loud, deliberate this time, not slipping accidentally into conversation, sent something sharp through my chest.
I followed her into the kitchen, same warm light, same gallery of a child's drawings on the refrigerator that I made myself not stare at this time, though every instinct wanted to catalog every detail.
She gestured to the same chair I'd sat in two days ago, and I took it, and she sat across from me with her hands wrapped around a coffee cup she didn't drink from.
"I don't know how to start," she said.
"You said that last time."
"I know. I still don't." Her eyes met mine, steady despite the fear I could see underneath it. "So I'm just going to say it. All at once. Because if I try to build up to it, I'll lose my nerve, and I promised myself I wouldn't lose my nerve again."
"Okay."
She took a breath. I watched her gather herself, watched six years of careful walls preparing to come down in real time, and some part of me already knew, had known since the harbor path, since the drawings on the fridge, since a scuffed helmet with a small boy's name written on the strap.
"The night you left," she said, "I found out I was pregnant three weeks later."
The kitchen went very quiet. I heard my own pulse in my ears, loud, insistent, drowning out everything except her voice and the words still coming, unstoppable now that she'd finally let them start.
"I didn't know how to reach you. I didn't know if reaching you would put you in more danger, or put the baby in danger, or both.
Diesel told me you were dark because you needed to be dark, and I made a decision, alone, in my bathroom, with a positive test in my hand and absolutely no idea what I was doing.
" Her voice wavered but didn't break, six years of practice holding it steady even now.
"I decided to keep it. To keep him. And to keep him a secret, from you, from the club, from anyone who might carry word back to whatever you were running from. "
"Him," I repeated, the word landing somewhere deep in my chest.
"Nico." She said his name like it cost her something, like she'd been saving it, protecting it, for exactly this moment.
"He's six. He was born in March, four days early, furious about it from the very first breath, exactly like—" Her voice caught.
"Exactly like you. He has your jaw, Tomas.
He has your eyes. He has this exact stubborn line right here—" she touched her own eyebrow, demonstrating, "—that you get when you're thinking hard about something, and I've watched him do it a thousand times and thought about you every single one of those times. "
I couldn't speak. I sat there with my hands braced on the table, my whole world rearranging itself around one impossible, enormous fact.
"I have a son."
"You have a son." She said it gently, like she was handing me something fragile, watching my face for the break she was clearly bracing for.
"I'm so sorry, Hawk. I know that's not enough.
I know six years is — I know what I took from you.
From him. I've spent every single day since trying to convince myself I made the right call, and some days I believe it, and some days I don't, and I don't have a version of this conversation where I come out looking like anything other than the woman who kept your child from you. "
"Six years." My voice came out rough, barely recognizable to my own ears. "Six years, Lena."
"I know."
"I have a son and I've missed six years of his life."
"I know." Tears were falling openly now, and she didn't wipe them away, just let them fall, like she'd decided she'd earned the right to cry through this instead of holding it together the way she'd held everything together for six years alone.
"I can't give those years back to you. I wish to God I could.
I've thought about this moment for six years and I still don't have anything better to offer you than the truth and an apology that doesn't come close to covering what I owe you. "
I stood up so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor, and I saw her flinch, brace herself, clearly expecting the worst — anger, maybe, the kind of explosive fury that would have been easy, almost welcome, compared to what was actually happening in my chest.
I wasn't angry. Not the way she thought.
I was standing in her kitchen with grief and fury and disbelief and something enormous and terrifying and entirely unfamiliar all crashing into each other at once, and underneath all of it, cutting through everything else with total, absolute clarity, was one single certainty that arrived whole and unshakeable.
That boy was mine. And I was never leaving again.
"Show me," I said. "I need to see him. I need—" My voice cracked, six years of hard-won composure abandoning me completely. "I need to see my son."
"Tonight. Juliet's bringing him back at six. I thought — I thought you should have some time first. To process. Before you meet him."
"I don't need time to process that I want to meet my child."
"Hawk." She stood too, closing some of the distance between us, careful, like she was approaching something wounded.
"He doesn't know. About you. Not really — I've told him things over the years, careful things, enough to answer his questions without lying outright, but he doesn't know you're his father.
Not yet. I need to tell him first. Gently.
On his terms, not sprung on him in a moment that's already going to be enormous. "
"When?"
"Tonight, if you want. After Juliet drops him off. I'll talk to him first, alone, and then—" her voice wavered again, "—then you can meet him. Properly. As what you actually are to him."
I wanted to argue. Every instinct in me wanted to demand it happen immediately, right now, no more waiting, six years of waiting was already six years too many.
But something in her face — the careful, protective fierceness of a mother who'd spent six years guarding this exact moment — made me swallow the demand and nod instead.
"Tonight," I agreed.
"Thank you." Relief broke through the fear on her face, just slightly. "For not — I expected you to be angrier."
"I am angry." I said it honestly, because she deserved honesty even more than she deserved gentleness right now. "I'm furious, Lena. Six years is not a small thing to lose. I'm going to need time to work through that, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."
"That's fair."
"But I understand why you did it. I hate that I understand it.
If I'd known there was a threat that could reach a child, I might have made the same impossible call in your position.
" I ran a hand down my face, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
"That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. Both things are true at once.
I'm furious, and I understand, and neither one cancels the other out. "
"That's more grace than I expected."
"Don't mistake it for absolution. I'm not there yet." I met her eyes, steady despite everything crashing around inside me. "But I'm not running, Lena. Whatever this looks like going forward — I'm here. For him. For however long it takes to earn back what six years cost us."
We stood there in her kitchen a long moment, the weight of everything finally spoken settling into the space between us, and for the first time since I'd ridden back into Cala Sirena, I let myself feel something underneath the anger and the grief — a fierce, protective, overwhelming love for a boy I hadn't even met yet, already staking a claim in my chest that nothing was ever going to shake loose again.
I left an hour later, my whole world rearranged, and rode the coast road again, slower this time, giving myself the space to feel every part of it — the anger, the grief for six stolen years, and underneath all of it, growing steadier with every mile, a certainty that settled into my bones like the tide finding its level.
I had a son. And come six o'clock, I was finally going to meet him.
I spent the afternoon at the garage in a haze, useless for actual work, enough that Diesel eventually took the wrench out of my hand before I stripped a bolt I'd already tightened twice.
"You're going to hurt yourself or the bike," he said. "Sit down. Tell me."
I told him. Watched his face move through the same disbelief, the same slow-dawning understanding, that I imagined had crossed my own face that morning.
"A son," he said finally, quiet, almost reverent. "Hawk. You have a son."
"I have a son."
"That's—" He shook his head, at a rare loss for words, before something broke through the shock, warm and genuine. "That's incredible, man. Scary as hell, probably, but incredible."
"Both things at once."