6. Stefan
— ? —
Stefan
Savannah was too bright.
I’d slept maybe three hours on the plane, another two in the hotel room before giving up entirely. Now I was stumbling down a cobblestone street at eight in the morning, desperate for caffeine before my ten o’clock meeting with the property developer.
The coffee shop on the corner looked promising. I pushed through the door and the smell hit me immediately. Fresh beans. Warm pastries. Something sweet underneath, maybe cinnamon.
The line was short. I joined it, pulling out my phone to check emails, trying to focus on the property specs my father had sent over. Three hundred rooms. River views. Prime location for the Graham brand expansion into the Southeast.
I didn’t give a shit about any of it.
The line moved. I stepped forward without looking up, still scrolling through messages I had no intention of answering.
Then I heard her laugh.
My head snapped up before my brain registered why. That laugh. I knew that laugh. I’d heard it a thousand times, in our kitchen, in our bed, across crowded rooms. I’d dreamed about that laugh for four years.
I turned toward the sound.
And the world stopped.
Layla.
She was sitting at a corner table near the window, sunlight catching in her hair. She looked different. Older. Her hair was longer, past her shoulders now, and there were fine lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there before. But it was her. It was unmistakably, impossibly her.
My Layla.
She was laughing at something, her whole face lit up with it, and I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I just stood there in the middle of a coffee shop staring at the woman who had vanished from my life four years ago.
Then I saw the child.
A little girl sat across from her, maybe three years old, kicking her feet against the legs of her chair. She had dark hair pulled back in pigtails. Brown eyes that crinkled when she smiled. And when she turned her head to look at the pastry case, I saw the shape of her jaw.
I didn’t cross the room so much as wake up already there, my hand on her shoulder before my brain had signed off on it. She went rigid under my fingers.
She turned.
The color drained out of her face. Her lips parted and nothing came out, and I watched four years of hiding fall apart in a single second. I knew that face. I’d traced it in the dark more times than I could count, stopped expecting to see it anywhere but the photograph shoved in my desk drawer.
“Stefan.” My name came out of her strangled, barely there.
I couldn’t answer. My eyes had already slid past her to the little girl at the table, and everything in me stopped working at once. Dark hair. Brown eyes. A dimple in the left cheek that matched the one staring back at me from the mirror every morning.
“You’ve been here.” It was all I could manage. “This whole time.”
“What are you doing in Savannah?” Her hand found the edge of the table and gripped it white. “How did you find me?”
“I didn’t.” My mouth had gone dry. “I’m here for work. Walked in for a coffee. And you were sitting right there.”
“You need to leave.” She was on her feet, the chair rocking behind her. “Right now.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. The girl was watching us, milk cup halfway to her lips, and whatever wanted to come out of me stayed jammed in my chest. I made my voice flat instead.
“Not until you talk to me.”
“Mommy?” The girl looked up at me, head tipped back, studying me with those eyes. My eyes. There was no other word for them. “Mommy, who that? He’s big.”
Mommy. The word detonated behind my ribs, and I felt the shock of it roll all the way down. I held still. I couldn’t do anything else with her looking at me like that.
“Nobody, baby.” Layla’s voice pitched too high. She crouched, smoothing the girl’s hair, angling herself between us. “Just a man Mommy used to know. Go get your chocolate milk from Mitch, okay? Tell him extra whippy cream.”
“Whippy cream!” The girl lit up like the tension over her head didn’t exist. “Okay Mommy.”
She slid off the chair and toddled toward the counter.
I watched every step of it, the bounce in her walk, the way her head tipped when she was thinking it through.
A bearded man behind the counter crouched to hear her with the ease of somebody who did it every day, and something turned over hard in my gut.
He set her up on a stool. She was out of earshot, both hands around the cup.
Three. She looked about three.
I did the math I didn’t want to do, and the floor tilted under me.
And then, with the girl safely up at the counter, the thing I’d been holding since the night I came home to a quiet house cracked open, and it all came through before I could stop a word of it.
“How could you do this to me?” It came out low and shaking, and I stepped in close so it stayed between us.
“You didn’t leave, Layla. You erased yourself.
An empty closet and a phone that rang into nothing and four years of silence.
I called until the number stopped meaning anything.
I stood on your parents’ porch like a beggar.
I went to Pippa, to every place you ever said you loved, and you weren’t in any of them. ”
My throat closed and I had to breathe through it. My hands were shaking, so I shoved them down at my sides.
“I blamed myself.” Quieter now, and somehow that was worse. “I took our whole marriage apart in my head looking for what I did. I thought you were gone for good. And now I walk in here and you’re twenty feet away with a kid who has my face.”
Her eyes filled, but her chin came up. “You don’t get to fall apart at me. You lost that a long time ago.”
“Then explain it.” My voice cracked straight down the middle and I let it. “Because the woman I married wouldn’t have done this. She wasn’t cruel.”
“Don’t.” She swiped at her face, furious. “You don’t know what I did or why.”
“Then tell me who she is.” I nodded toward the counter, toward the small dark head bent over a mountain of whipped cream. “Because I already know. I knew the second she looked up at me.”
“She’s my daughter.” The words went up like a wall. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Yours.” The heat surged back into me. “You carried her, you had her, you raised her three whole years, and you decided I didn’t need to know she existed?”
“You don’t know she’s yours.” Her chin came up. “You’re being presumptuous. You see a little girl with brown eyes and you decide she must be yours.”
“Look at her.” My voice broke clean in half. “Then look at me, and say that again.”
Her eyes wavered. The defiance frayed at the edges and I saw the fear underneath it.
“You kept her from me.” It landed slow, then all at once, every first I’d been shut out of. “Her whole life. On purpose.”
“What was I supposed to tell her?” Her eyes flashed. “That her daddy was a man I ran from in the middle of the night?”
“That he’d have wanted her.” The words scraped raw on the way up, and the anger finally gave out under them and left nothing but the ache it had been sitting on. “That he’d have been there every single day if anyone had let him.”
“Mommy?”
We both froze.
The girl stood a few feet off, chocolate milk down her chin, her eyes gone wide and uncertain between us.
“Mommy, why you crying?” She came closer and caught Layla’s leg. “You got a owie?”
“No, baby.” Layla scooped her up fast, angling her face away from me. “Something in my eye. That’s all.”
“I kiss it better.” A chocolatey kiss landed on her cheek. “All better now.”
“All better.” Layla’s voice was thick. “Thank you, sweet girl.”
Then the girl turned her head and looked at me over her mother’s shoulder. “You still sad?”
“A little.” The words barely made it out. “I’ll be okay.”
“You want kiss too?” She stretched both arms toward me. “Kisses make it better.”
My throat closed. I couldn’t speak. I could only stand there and look at this small person who had my smile and had lived a whole life in a world that never once included me.
“Cece, we need to go.” Layla was already at the door. “Say goodbye to the nice man.”
“Bye bye, nice man.” She waved, chocolate-stained fingers spread wide. “Hope you not sad no more.”
“Bye, Cece.” Rough. Barely mine. “It was really nice to meet you.”
“What’s your name?” She twisted in Layla’s arms, still watching me. “Mommy didn’t say.”
“Cece, stop wiggling.”
“But Mommy, I wanna know his name.” Her lower lip pushed out. “It’s polite to ask names. You said so.”
Layla stopped. Her shoulders rose and fell with one long breath.
“His name is Stefan.” She didn’t turn around. “Now wave goodbye.”
“Bye, Stefan!” Cece waved at me, her whole arm swinging. “You got a pretty name. Like a prince.”
“Thank you, Cece.” I crouched a little, closer to her level. “You’ve got a prettier one.”
She grinned, gap-toothed, and pressed her face into her mother’s neck. Layla’s arm tightened around her back.
“We’re leaving,” Layla said. She still wasn’t looking at me.
“Where do you live?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Then call me. We need to talk, Lay, and you know it.” I held her eyes. “It’s the same number. It never changed.”
She stalled. I watched her reach for something, anything.
“I lost my old phone.” She said it fast, too fast. “Ages ago. I don’t have your number anymore.”
“Layla.” I reached into my jacket and pulled out a card before she could turn away. “Wait.”
She stopped. Half a step, no more. I crossed the space between us and took her free hand, the one not holding the girl, and pressed the card into her palm.
“My cell. My email. The hotel I’m at.” I closed her fingers around it. “There. Now you’ve got no excuse.”
Her jaw worked. She glanced down at the card like it might burn through her skin.
“Whatever happened,” I said, quieter now. “Whatever made you run. I need to know.”
“You don’t get to need anything from me.”
“And if she’s mine.” My voice cracked on it. I couldn’t stop the words. “If that little girl is mine, then I get to know that. That’s not yours to keep.”
She flinched. Just a flicker, gone as fast as it came. Then she hitched Cece higher on her hip and turned for the door.
“Bye bye, Stefan!” Cece called over her mother’s shoulder, waving that little arm again. “Come back, okay? I like you.”
“Bye, Cece.” My throat closed around it.
Then the door swung shut behind them and they were gone.
The coffee shop kept moving. A machine hissed and spat behind the counter. Two women laughed at a table by the window. A kid dropped a spoon and someone bent to grab it.
I didn’t hear any of it.