She’d been adding quietly to the conversation throughout the afternoon but had taken a back seat, letting us get to know each other and staying on the sidelines.
“I need to say something,” she said, her voice soft but steady. She looked at the four brothers. “I owe you all an apology. I kept Leigh from you for twenty-seven years.”
My chest tightened. We hadn’t discussed this. I didn’t know she was going to do this now.
“When I found out I was pregnant,” Mom continued, “Jasper was married. Had four sons. A life here in Willowbrook. I made the choice not to tell him. I told myself it was to protect everyone. To protect his family, to protect Leigh, to protect myself.” She paused, her eyes shining. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I’m not sure I was. But either way, it wasn’t really my decision to make.”
The silence stretched. I held my breath.
Trace spoke first, his voice gentle. “Caroline, we understand. Given our mother, given the situation you were in, I can’t say I would have done differently.”
“Regina would have destroyed Leigh,” Xander added quietly. “If she’d known about her while we were growing up, she would have used it. Used her. You protected your daughter from that.”
“You did what you thought was right,” Booker said. “That’s all any parent can do.”
I looked at Gage, trying to figure out if he agreed. For a moment he didn’t speak but a look of such pain flashed across his face.
“I guarantee you that keeping Leigh away from our mother, was the best decision you ever made. We’re just glad we know now,” Gage finished. “Glad Leigh’s here. That you’re both here.”
I watched my mother’s face crumple with relief, watched these men I barely knew offer her grace and understanding, and something in my chest loosened.
This family. These people. They weregood. A part of me was curious to know what Regina was like. To meet the person that everyone here seemed to have nothing good to say about. Could she really be that bad? She was the wronged wife, the woman who had her trust broken by the one person she was supposed to be able to trust. Maybe she wasn’t the villain everyone seemed to think she was?
The conversation shifted after that, lighter, easier. I was starting to relax, starting to believe I might actually fit here, when the front door opened.
Delaney got up to answer it, and my entire body went cold.
Because walking through that door, looking tired and wary, washim.
Dex.
The man from the bar. The man who’d made me feel seen and wanted and then thrown me away like garbage the second he learned my name.
He was here. In this house. At this family gathering.
Our eyes met across the room, and I watched the color drain from his face. Watched guilt and panic flash across his features before he shuttered his expression.
No. No no no no no.
“Dex! Come in, we’re just...” Delaney stopped, looking at him more closely. “You okay? You look...”
“Fine,” he said, the word clipped. “Just tired.”
But his eyes were still on me, and I could see the same horror I felt reflected back.
She didn’t buy it. I could see it in her face. But she stepped aside. “Come meet Leigh.” Her hand briefly touched his, a gesture of concern that told me she knew him well.
He walked into the room like a man approaching his execution, and I couldn’t breathe. In that horrible moment at the end of the night, I’d known he knew them. But there was knowing them… and then there was being here, at our first meeting, and just walking through the door knowing them.
He actually had a relationship with them. A close one at that. Closer than I could expect to have any time soon.
This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t be part of this. He couldn’t be this connected to them.
But he was. I could see it in the way the brothers greeted him, in the easy familiarity, in the way he fit into this space like he’d been here a thousand times before.
Because he had.
He was part of their family.
