18. Declan
EIGHTEEN
DECLAN
The water was hot, the steam thick. I stood under the shower with my eyes closed and my palms flat against the tile, letting the night replay behind my eyelids.
I was happy. The word was foreign in my mouth. I was genuinely, in-my-body happy, and the unfamiliarity of it was almost frightening. I turned off the water and reached for the towel.
Then I heard my name.
Not Thea's voice. Not the night nurse. A voice I hadn't heard in months — higher, sharper, edged with something desperate and raw. A voice that hit the base of my spine before my brain identified it.
Then Lena screamed.
I didn't dry off. I pulled joggers from the hook on the bathroom door and dragged them over wet skin. My feet were bare. My hair dripped onto my shoulders and down my chest. I was in the hallway in four seconds, the cold floor shocking against my soles, water leaving prints on the hardwood.
The front door was open.
Thea stood in the entryway, her body angled sideways — one arm locked around Lena, the baby pressed against her chest, shielded.
Her other hand was raised between herself and the woman in the doorway, palm out, a barrier made of nothing but air and the force of her will. Her face was pale. Her jaw was set.
Lena screamed — rigid, red-faced, her mouth stretched open.
Kira stood in the entrance of my penthouse.
My feet stopped. The hallway narrowed. The air left the room like a door slamming on a pressurized cabin. My lungs locked. My hands hung at my sides, and the water still running down my forearms dripped onto the hardwood.
Kira.
She looked different. Thinner. The bones of her face were more visible than I remembered. Her hair was pulled back, but strands had come loose, sticking to her temples with sweat or rain or both. The coat she wore was too thin. Her eyes were red-rimmed, raw, swollen, locked on Lena.
She was the woman from the Dominican restaurant with the plastic chairs.
The woman who ordered for me in Spanish, and said, “Trust me.” The woman who left because she felt trapped by an invisible limit.
She tried to reach me after, and I blocked her number in my kitchen in the dark with a whiskey in my hand and told myself the past needed to stay in the past.
The past was standing in my doorway.
"Declan! Declan, that's my baby!" Her voice cracked on my name. Her hands reached toward Lena — trembling, grasping, the fingers opening and closing on the air between her and the child. "Give me my baby. Please. Please give me my baby."
Thea pulled Lena tighter against her chest. The baby's screaming climbed — sharp, piercing, filling the penthouse and bouncing off the glass.
I stepped into the room. My voice came out low and steady, and I didn't recognize it as mine.
"Kira."
She turned and saw me fully. Her eyes swept down my body — the bare chest, the wet hair dripping onto my shoulders, the joggers riding low, the water still beading on my skin — and her face changed. The desperation didn't leave, but something else layered over it. Disgust. Recognition.
"There he is." Her voice flattened. "Father of the year."
"What are you doing in my apartment?"
"I'm here for my baby." She took a step forward. Her shoe left a wet print on the hardwood. Thea stepped back, angling her body, one arm locked around Lena, her other hand raised. "I'm not leaving without her."
"Thea." I kept my eyes on Kira. "Take Lena to the nursery."
Thea moved. She didn't run — she walked, steady, controlled, her body between Lena and the doorway until she cleared the hallway. I heard her footsteps recede, the nursery door, Lena's screaming thinning as the distance opened, and Thea's humming started — low and tuneless.
I turned to Kira. She watched the hallway where Thea disappeared, her body leaning toward it, her hands still raised. Her fingers trembled so badly the tendons in her wrists were visible.
"You're not leaving here with Lena." I kept my voice even. "Sit down. Talk to me."
"I don't want to sit down." She spun toward me. "I want my daughter. That woman — that woman is holding my daughter, and I don't know who she is, and I don't know why she's in your apartment, and I want — I want — "
Her breath hitched. She pressed her fist against her sternum and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the wildness remained.
"Her name is Thea," I said. "She's been taking care of Lena since you left Lena on her doorstep in a rainstorm."
Kira's head jerked back. Her mouth opened. Her hand dropped from her chest.
"Don't." The word came out sharp. Serrated. "Don't you dare throw that at me. You don't know what I was going through. You don't know what it was like to be alone with a baby and no money and no one — no one — picking up the phone."
"Then tell me."
She paced — three steps toward the window, three steps back.
Her coat flapped with each turn, the thin fabric swinging around her hips.
She pulled at the strands of hair stuck to her temple.
Her fingers couldn't stay still. They moved to her hair, her coat, the back of her neck, gripping and releasing.
"I moved." The words came in bursts. "After I left her, I couldn't stay here.
I couldn't be in this city. I went upstate.
My cousin has a couch." She stopped pacing and pressed both palms flat against the window.
Her reflection stared back — thin and disheveled.
"I was trying to figure out how to live with what I did. "
She pushed off the glass and turned.
"Then I heard you had her. Someone at the agency told me. Declan Hale has the baby." Her chin lifted. "My baby. In his penthouse. With some woman I've never seen before."
"How did you get into this building?"
"I told the concierge I was the baby's mother.
He called up. The woman buzzed me in." She waved her hand in a dismissive motion.
"It doesn't matter how I got here. What matters is my daughter is down that hall with a stranger, and you're standing here in your — " She gestured at my bare chest, the penthouse, the hallway where Thea's humming drifted like something from another world. "Playing house."
The words landed. I felt them in my jaw, in my hands, in the muscles along my shoulders that wanted to clench. I didn't let them.
"I made a mistake, Declan." Her voice broke.
Her eyes filled. She blinked fast, but the tears didn't fall.
"I was alone. I was broken. I couldn't cope.
The pregnancy…you don't know what it did to me.
I lost my job, the apartment — everything.
" She breathed hard now, her chest rising and falling.
"And I tried to reach you. I called you over and over, and you didn't pick up. And then I came here."
She stopped. Her hands dropped to her sides.
When she spoke again, her voice was lower, steadier.
“I came to the Vanguard. I walked into the lobby.
I was seven months pregnant, and I told the woman at the desk that I needed to see Declan Hale, and she made a call, and ten minutes later, a man came down. "
My hands went still at my sides.
"He sat me down in a chair near the elevator." She looked at me. "He was wearing a charcoal suit. Wire-framed glasses. He had a way of sitting that made you feel like you were in a meeting you didn't schedule."
Graham. The description was so precise that it was like she was reading it from a photograph.
"He put an envelope on the table between us.
" Kira's hand moved in front of her body, miming the gesture.
"He said you were aware of the situation.
He said the timing was difficult with the acquisition cycle.
He said the check inside would help me get settled.
" She looked at me. Her eyes were dry. "Then he told me to handle it quietly. "
The room was silent. The humming from the nursery was gone.
"I took the envelope." Her voice didn't waver. "I sat in that lobby chair, and I took it because I thought you knew. I thought you sent him. I thought you were paying me to disappear." She swallowed. "So I disappeared. I gave our daughter to an agency because I thought her father didn't want her."
My hand found my left wrist and gripped it. I couldn't speak. The words were in my throat, and they were true — I didn't know, I didn't send him, I didn't know — but they were insufficient.
"I didn't send anyone," I said. The words came out rough.
"Then who did?"
I didn't answer. The name was in my mouth, my tongue pressed against the back of my teeth.
"You can deny it all you want." Kira read my silence.
Her voice hardened again. "But someone in your building, working for you, paid me to go away, and I did.
I've regretted it every day since." She was shaking from head to toe.
"So you can stand there in your penthouse with your perfect life and your new girlfriend holding my daughter, but I'm not going away this time. "
"You left her on a doorstep." My voice dropped. "You put her up for adoption without telling me. You left her on a stranger's porch in a rainstorm with a note. You abandoned her. Twice."
"I abandoned her because your people told me you didn't want her!" Kira's voice broke open. "I carried her for nine months. I felt her kick." Tears were on her face now. She wiped them with the back of her hand, angry, fast. "So don't you dare stand there and tell me I don't get to come back."
She took a breath. Then another. She straightened her coat and wiped her face again.
"I'm taking you to court, Declan. I'm filing for custody. I'm getting my daughter back." She lifted her chin. "And I'll win. Because I'm her mother, and you're a man who didn't even know she existed."
She turned toward the hallway and raised her voice.
"And you, woman — " Aimed at Thea, wherever she was listening from. "Get away from him while you still can. He doesn't know how to love. He pays people to leave and then pretends they chose to go."