“I’m still digging.”
“Dig harder.”
“I am.”
“No,” I snapped. “You’re moving too slow. Find the hospital. Pull the birth records. Check who signed the documents, who helped her disappear, and who knew about that child while I was left in the dark.”
“Hayden—”
“Don’t,” I cut in, my voice turning rougher. “Do not tell me to calm down.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
Silence stretched between us. Then Elias said, “You think she’s yours.”
I stared through the windshield, my pulse pounding at the base of my throat. “I think Edwina has been hiding something from me for years,” I said. “And if that little girl is mine…”
I stopped because the rest of it was too big to say. Ugly enough to split me open in the middle of my own fucking car.
Elias did not speak for a moment. “I’ll keep looking.”
“You’ll call me the second you find anything.”
“I will.”
I ended the call and threw the phone onto the passenger seat. For a few seconds, I did not move. The engine hummed beneath me, the city shifted outside the windshield, and all I could hear was that number.
Four years old. My daughter?
The thought hit hard enough to drag the air from my lungs. I did not know enough yet. I had no proof. Dates, silence, and Edwina’s terrified eyes when I said Helena’s name should not have been all I had.
I drove to her place with fury burning through every nerve.
By the time I got there, instinct had taken over. I got out, shut the car door harder than necessary, and crossed the distance to her apartment. Her door was open just enough for warm light to spill through the gap.
Then the sounds reached me all at once, music, laughter, children’s voices spilling from inside.
I stopped outside the half-open door while a sick weight spread through my chest. I stepped closer and looked inside. The apartment was decorated for a party.
Banners stretched across the walls in bright colors. Balloons clustered near the windows and chairs, streamers hung from shelves and doorframes, and the table was crowded with gifts, ribbons, paper plates, and a birthday cake glowing with candles. Children ran through the room, laughing and shouting, filling the apartment with wild, careless joy that made me feel suddenly, violently out of place. Around them, people stood in small groups with drinks in their hands, talking as if they belonged there.
I did not.
Then I saw Edwina.
She stood near the center of the room beside the little girl, both of them dressed in matching pink. Edwina wore a long-sleeved dress that fell beautifully over her body, soft and feminine in a way that made my chest tighten before I could stop it. The child’s dress matched hers, smaller and brighter, making them look like two pieces of the same life I had never been allowed to touch.
The second my eyes found them, everything else faded. Candlelight moved over the child’s face, catching on bright eyes, flushed cheeks, and a smile so open it hit me harder than any fucking accusation could have. Edwina leaned toward her with one hand near her shoulder, and the softness on her face tore through me with brutal precision.
I had never seen that look on her before. It belonged to her so naturally it made me sick.
Daniel and Giselle stood beside them, folded into the moment with an ease that made my blood turn hot. They looked as ifthey belonged in her life, in her apartment, in a place I had been locked out of for years.
Something black shifted under my ribs.
The room began counting down. Voices rose together, laughter spilling between them as the little girl drew in a breath and blew out the candles. Edwina stayed beside her, caught in that small circle of light and joy, looking as though this was where the missing years had taken her. Not into emptiness. Into this. Into warmth, birthdays, children’s laughter, a home.
