Chapter 28 Mira #2
The coffee mug trembled in my fingers. A drop sloshed over the rim and burned my knuckle. I barely registered the pain because my brain was too busy short-circuiting over the fact that the man who’d walked out of my life years ago was standing on my porch.
I pushed past Lucian before anyone could stop me.
His hand caught my arm. Not restraining, just a point of contact, a reminder that he was there. I pulled free gently and stepped into the doorway.
Thiago Maxwell. My father.
The man who’d left a six-year-old girl alone, who’d disappeared into nothing, who’d become a ghost story I told myself on the worst nights in Hudson’s apartment.
“How did you find me?” My voice was steady despite my emotions.
“I’ve been searching for years.”
His eyes welled with tears. They tracked down the lines of his face, catching in the grooves beside his mouth, and with his raw emotions.
“I tried to raise you but your mother’s death really broke me. As you grow up, I couldn’t cope anymore so I ran when I should have stayed.” He reached for my hand. “I thought you’d be better off without me. I’m so sorry, Mira.”
I didn’t take his hand. My fingers tightened around the coffee mug instead, the ceramic warm against my palm, an anchor.
“You left me in foster care,” I said. “And never tried to contact me.”
“I know.” The tears fell. “I know what I did. There’s no excuse. I was selfish. I destroyed the relationship with the only family I had left.”
His voice cracked on the word family, and the sound hit me in a place I’d spent two decades trying to protect. “I don’t expect forgiveness. I just... I needed to see you. To know you’re alive.”
Through the bond, I felt them. Lucian’s suspicion, calculating behind his calm. Solomon’s unease running deeper and Percival’s protectiveness, a warm wall at my back.
None of them trusted this man.
But beneath their suspicion, buried under years of scar tissue and survival instincts, a six-year-old girl inside me was pressing her face against a window, watching the driveway, waiting for a car that never came back.
“How did you know this cabin?” Solomon’s voice from behind me. A question that sounded polite but carried the weight of an interrogation.
Thiago turned to him. “I heard in town that Mira was connected to some firefighters. The Valdris brothers.” His expression was unguarded.
“People know you live somewhere in the woods off the main road, but nobody had a specific address. I drove the back roads for two days until I found the right turnoff.”
Solomon’s jaw tightened by a fraction.
“You didn’t answer how you found the town,” Solomon said.
“Private investigator.” Thiago’s hands spread, palms up. “I’ve hired three over the years. The latest one tracked Mira’s records to Ashvale six months ago. It took me until now to work up the courage to come.”
The explanation was reasonable and logical.
I looked at them. Through the bond, their feelings were a chorus of warning. But their faces held the same expression: this is your choice. We won’t make it for you.
“Fine,” I said. “I’d hear you out. Maybe… maybe try to get to know each other but only for one week. I’ll only allow you a week in my life and decide if I want to reconnect with you after all these years.”
Thiago’s smile was warm, grateful.
“Thank you,” he said. “That’s more than I deserve.”
***
The afternoon that followed was the most bizarre social experiment I’d ever participated in.
If someone had pitched this scenario to me six months ago, I would have assumed they were either drunk or writing the most unhinged fanfiction in existence.
Lucian sat in the armchair with the posture of a king receiving a foreign dignitary he suspected of treason.
“And what is your profession, Mr. Maxwell?”
“Please, call me Thiago. I’m in consulting. Private sector.”
“Consulting.” Lucian repeated the word. “How versatile.”
Percival, bless his golden retriever heart, was trying. He’d positioned himself on the floor beside my chair with his head resting against my thigh, which wasn’t unusual, except that he kept glancing at Thiago with the specific wariness of a guard dog pretending to be a house pet.
“So, Thiago. You like sports?”
“Not particularly.”
“Movies?”
“I prefer reading.”
Percy’s eyes lit up. “Mira loves reading. She organizes her romance novels by heat level. Top shelf is the clean stuff, bottom shelf is the...”
“Percival.” Solomon’s voice cut the conversation. The universal signal for stop talking immediately.
Percy stopped talking. He buried his face against my thigh instead, and I ran my fingers through his curls while my father watched the interaction with an expression I couldn’t read.
Solomon was Solomon. He sat at the dining table with a glass of water he hadn’t touched, watching Thiago with unblinking focus. He contributed nothing to the conversation. His silence was loud enough to fill rooms.
“You all seem very... close,” Thiago said. His eyes moved between the three men and me. The emphasis on close was delicate, probing. “How long have you known my daughter?”
“More than a month,” Lucian said.
“And you all live together?”
“We’re brothers,” Percy supplied from my thigh. “Mira stays with us while her bookshop gets rebuilt.”
“A bookshop.” Thiago’s attention returned to me, and a softness crossed his expression. The warmth of it hit me in the chest. “Your mother loved books. She used to read to you when she was pregnant.”
My heart clenched at the memory I wasn’t able to even have. My mother died just shortly after I was born. I never got to meet her.
“She would have loved knowing you opened a shop.” He paused. “She would have been proud of you, Mira.”
The six-year-old me at the window pressed her face harder against the glass.
Evening came slowly.
Thiago stood and Lucian walked him to the door with the courtesy of a man who was very politely not throwing someone out a window.
At the threshold, Thiago turned back. “Mira, could I have a moment?”
Lucian’s eyebrow lifted by a millimeter. I touched his arm as I passed, a reassurance through the bond, and stepped onto the porch.
Thiago stood at the railing, looking out at the tree line, and for a moment he looked old. Tired. The kind of tired that accumulated over decades and settled into bone.
“Perhaps next time,” he said quietly, “we could meet alone. Just the two of us. Father and daughter.” He reached out and placed his hand on my head. A pat. Gentle, paternal.
“Be careful, Mira.”
My name landed strangely. Not wrong, exactly. Just unfamiliar.
“Be careful of what?” I asked.
His smile was small. “The world. People who seem kind don’t always have kind intentions.” He squeezed my shoulder once, then released me. “I’ll come back tomorrow. If you’ll have me.”
“It’s okay… You can come back.”
He walked down the porch steps and across the gravel drive to a rental car I hadn’t noticed before. He waved once before climbing in, and I watched the taillights disappear down the road.
Be careful.
The warning replayed in my head as I stepped back inside.
I didn’t have a framework for fatherly love. Or a reference point for what normal concern sounded from a parent because I’d never had one long enough to build one. Maybe this was just what it felt like.
I closed the door. They waited in the living room, bonds pulsing with varying degrees of concern, faces trying very hard not to look as suspicious as they felt.
“He seems… nice,” Percy offered.
Solomon didn’t dignify that with a response.
“He’s your father. I know you’d want to try reconnecting,” Lucian said. “But be careful. The man just suddenly appeared in your life.”
“Agreed,” Solomon said.
Be careful.
The same words sat in my chest.
Everyone kept telling me to be careful. The irony almost made me laugh.
But beneath the warnings, things were good. The kind of good I’d stopped believing existed back when happy endings only happened in the books I read under the covers with a flashlight.
Maybe I could finally hope for one of my own.