Chapter 31 Emma
EMMA
Talia’s room is quiet except for the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor and the soft, steady whoosh of the ventilator breathing for my sister.
They’re harsh noises, clinical and cold, but right now, they are the most beautiful sounds in the world, because they mean she’s alive.
Badly, badly hurt, but alive.
I have never been as terrified as I was when I realized that the two most important people in my life had been taken.
Even running across that lawn under gunfire wasn’t as terrifying; by then, it was adrenaline and instinct.
But those minutes alone in the apartment with the silence, the waiting, the not knowing, that was pure, suffocating panic.
Fear in its truest form.
Liam has been in and out since we got here. He sat with us through Talia’s hours-long surgery. He brought food. Drinks. Found a blanket. Handed Laddie his phone to keep him distracted.
He’s been everything I knew he could be—steady, patient, kind.
I introduced him as a friend.
Calling him Laddie’s father seemed a bit too much in the aftermath of a significant trauma.
Honestly, I’m not sure when the right time will be. The truth is, I can’t picture us as a happy little family after all of this.
Maybe that sounds dramatic.
Maybe trauma is clouding my judgment. But I can’t ignore the reality: this happened because of Liam.
Not his hands. Not his intentions. But his world. His silence. His father’s debts and the danger that shadowed him.
He didn’t warn me. Didn’t give me a chance to protect the people I love.
And that wound runs deeper than anything I’m ready to untangle—not while my sister is fighting for her life, and not while my son sleeps across my lap, blissfully unaware of how close we came to losing everything.
The longer I sit in this room alone with my thoughts, the angrier I become.
So when Liam finally wanders back in from hockey practice, I feel an immediate, instinctive urge for him to turn around and leave.
“How’s she doing?” he asks. He lingers in the doorway, uncertain, like he’s not sure he’s welcome.
“She’s… stable,” I say, easing myself out from beneath my sleeping son.
Our sleeping son.
Liam watches Laddie for a long time, with that aching need to hold his son written all over his face. It’s been this way for the past forty-eight hours.
He wants Laddie to know. But he’s also respectful about where I’m at with things. He knows me well, as he always did; he knows better than to push a boundary, even an unspoken one.
I step toward the door, arms wrapping around myself, like I can brace my heart for what I’m about to say.
“Can I get you anything?” he asks.
He looks like he wants to pull me in.
Hell, he looks like he needs the hug.
Normally, I might relish the feel of his warm body, his size, the way being in his arms always made the world feel small and manageable.
But now?
Now I can’t reconcile the man I loved with the man whose world and secrets nearly cost me the two people I love most.
Loved.
I keep forcing it into the past tense, like that will somehow make this easier. I never responded to his confession in my apartment.
I don’t know why he chose to say it then.
Maybe he thought it would clarify the mess he’d made.
Maybe he thought it would make up for the weeks he disappeared on me.
It didn’t.
“I think…”
The words scrape out of me as I take a slow breath, exhaling until something inside me splinters.
“I think I want you to leave.”
His brows pull together in confusion. The hallway light behind him casts his face in shadow, hiding the sage green of his eyes, and thank God for that.
I couldn’t survive seeing the exact moment he understands what I’m asking.
I couldn’t take the full force of that heartbreak.
“For now, or...” It’s a question disguised as a statement.
“I don’t know,” I say, and I’m being honest.
He shifts his weight, trying to find some steady ground. “Do you…Want me to take Laddie somewhere for a while? Give you space to go home, shower, and eat? Or I can stay with Talia while you two —”
“No,” I say firmly. “No, I don’t need any of that. I just need you to leave.”
A muscle in his jaw ticks as he looks at Talia in her hospital bed.
“May I ask why?” he finally asks.
I thought I was done crying.
God knows I’ve cried these last two days enough to wring myself dry. I feel scraped out inside, raw, exhausted.
But the moment I try to explain, the sting comes back. My throat tightens.
“My sister...she’s my best friend. She’s been there every step of the way for me, and I couldn’t...I couldn’t live with myself if something...if she hadn’t...”
I can’t even finish the sentence.
Liam swallows hard, nodding. “I get it.”
“No, Liam, you don’t.” I shake my head. “And it’s not your fault. You’ve spent your whole life trying to survive your family. Trying to protect people who mistreated you. You’ve done more than anyone should’ve had to do.”
I lift my eyes to his.
“But this is different,” I whisper. “My feelings about my sister are different. What almost happened to her…”
My breath shudders.
“I can’t just pretend it didn’t come from your world.”
“And Laddie?” he asks, his eyes darting to the sleeping child across the room. “Where does he fit into all this?”
“He’s my world, Liam.” My voice breaks, and the tears flow freely.
“When I went to get that abortion, they made me do an ultrasound. It was one of those places that makes you face your decision before they do the procedure. And I saw that little bean, which was barely a living thing yet, but I knew he’d be everything to me. ”
Liam’s face twists. “I… want that,” he says quietly. “I want him in my life, Emma. I never said I didn’t. I never even got the chance.”
“I know,” I say. “Maybe I fucked up. Maybe I made every wrong choice. But I was eighteen and terrified, and I did what I thought was best. I wanted him. I wanted the baby, but I also wanted you to have a chance at getting free of your family’s bullshit.”
He laughs, but it sounds bitter. “Yeah, and look how that turned out.”
I finally unwind myself, allowing a hand to reach out and touch his arm.
“You went through a lot,” I say, “And none of it was your fault. I’m not even mad about most of it.”
“Most of it,” he says, emotionless.
I draw a slow breath, steadying myself. “You should have told me, Liam, about the threat on my life. You should have warned me. Given me a chance to protect myself—protect my family.”
My gaze drifts helplessly to innocent Laddie, still sleeping peacefully.
“And Laddie...I don’t know what this will do to him. He’s so good, Liam. So full of light. So gentle and happy and unscarred. And I’m afraid this will take something from him that I can’t ever give back.”
I look at Liam, tears blurring my vision.
“And I don’t know if I can forgive you for that.”
There it is, the recoil.
He jerks back as I’ve physically struck him.
He steps into the hallway light, and I finally see his face clearly. The hurt is unmistakable.
“Emma,” he says quietly, “it’s over. All of it. My dad’s debt… the threats… everything. They won’t be back.”
I nod. “That’s good.”
“But I want to be part of your lives,” he pushes on, and I can hear the desperation creeping into his voice despite his best efforts to hide it. “I love you. I want to be a father to Laddie. A partner to you.”
I’m shaking my head as he talks. I’m backing away.
Part of me wants him so badly it hurts.
Even now, even through all the anger and fear, something in me still pulls toward him.
I can’t tell if it’s logic trying to convince me I could get over this, or my heart wanting to run back to what feels familiar.
And right now, I don’t know which one I can trust.
“I need space,” I finally say.
“You need space.” That dead tone again.
“I almost told you so many times,” I say, words tumbling out fast, “You know that. I wanted us to figure things out together. The moment you came back into my life, I thought… maybe we could find our way to being a family. And none of your family stuff worried me. I believed in you. I believed we could make it work. There’d be time.
We could grow. We could fix things. I wanted all of it with you. ”
“Wanted. Past tense.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Liam,” I say. “Not again. Not ever.”
I press my hand to my chest, over the spot where my heart feels bruised and aching. Then I give him the gentlest smile I can manage.
“Then what is this?” he asks, and his voice cracks on a wretched sob. He lets it out, then straightens, holding back the emotion that he seems to be holding back with a great deal of effort. “You are hurting me, Emma. You say you don’t want to, but you are.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What do you want?” he asks. “Proof that this is over, that they’re both safe? That you’re safe? That I’m free of the past? I’ll get it for you. What do you want, Emma?”
“I don’t know,” I say gently. “I just want space. For now.”
He stands there like a statue for a long moment before he suddenly throws his head back and lets out a raw, gut-wrenching sound of frustration.
I actually step back from him, unsure how to take such a strong reaction.
“I spent six years wondering what I did to make you leave,” he finally says.
His voice is low, shaking with something he’s barely holding together.
“Six years thinking it was my fault—six years of feeling like I’d lost a part of myself.
I knew—I knew—I’d never be that connected to anyone else again.
And then there you were. Standing in front of me.
Perfect. Beautiful. And everything inside me clicked back into place. ”
“I felt that way too,” I admit. My arms fold around my torso again, instinctively protecting myself. “When I spent the night with you, I thought it was the beginning, Liam. I thought we were choosing each other again. And then you pushed me away.”
He drags both palms down his face, exhausted. “I was trying to fix things. I needed to get out from under the money. I needed to be steady. Stable. I wanted you to see I could be safe for you. I wanted to be worthy of you—for once in my damn life.”
I laugh and cry at the same time. “Oh, Liam. You were always worthy of me. You are kind, caring, talented, and loving. I didn’t want or need you to be anything other than what you were.”
“It didn’t feel that way when you left.”
“I know,” I say. “I know. And I can see why you felt like you had something to prove. I shouldn’t have left, but I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
It was only about not trapping you. I left because I wanted you to have the chance to become who you were meant to be.
I didn’t want you to feel held back just because I decided to keep the baby. ”
“I get that,” he says. “I know it now, and I’m telling you that I want to be with you. Let’s put everything behind us. Let’s start over and just—”
“My heart can’t do that,” I whisper. “Not yet.”
His face falls slightly, but enough to break something inside me.
“I was willing to be with you,” I continue, forcing the words out through the tightness in my throat.
“Even with the debt. Even with the mafia. None of that scared me enough to walk away. But you left me in the dark, Liam. And because of that, my sister almost died. Our son was taken. He went through something we can’t even measure yet. ”
Tears burn my eyes, and I keep going.
“This isn’t about the mess you were born into—that part was never your fault. It’s about the fact that you shut me out. You left me blind and unprotected. And I don’t… I don’t know if I can forgive you for that.”
He swallows hard and shoves his hands into his pockets, his whole body tightening, shutting himself off.
And here we are, both of us bracing to protect ourselves from each other.
It feels awful. It feels wrong. Because all I really want to do is close the distance between us, wrap my arms around him, and tell him I will never stop loving him.
But I don’t.
Because even if that were true, even if I loved him with every broken piece of my heart…
I don’t know how long it will take to get past this.
Or if I ever will.