“Two months.”
Two months.
The cold in his chest turned to something else. He looked at the stroller again, really looked this time. Pink blanket. A tiny fist curled against the fabric. Dark hair—not blonde like Christina’s, but dark. Almost black.
Two months old. Nine months of pregnancy.
Eleven months since Miami.
“Can I—” He stepped closer before he could stop himself, drawn toward the stroller like a magnet. “Can I see her?”
Christina’s whole body went rigid. “Marco?—”
But he was already looking.
The baby was awake, staring up at the sky with the unfocused gaze of the very young. Rosebud lips. A button nose. Cheeks flushed pink from the morning chill. And that hair—dark and wispy, nothing like her mother’s honey-blonde.
The baby turned her head, and her eyes met his.
The ground tilted.
He knew that face. Not this particular face, not this specific baby, but the shape of it, the set of the eyebrows, the particular way the features arranged themselves. He’d seen it a hundred times in silver frames on his mother’s vanity. In photo albums pulled out at every holiday. In the mirror, when he was young enough that people still remarked on how much he looked like his sister.
Sophia. This baby looked exactly like Sophia had looked in every infant photo their mother had ever shown him.
“Two months,” he heard himself say. His voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else. “Two months old.”
Christina was crying now. Silent tears tracking down her cheeks, her knuckles white on the stroller handle.
“Nine months of pregnancy.” He was doing the math out loud, unable to stop. “Eleven months total. Eleven months ago, I was in Miami.”
“Marco—”
“Eleven months ago, I met a woman at a club, and we spent one amazing night together, and she was gone by morning.” He couldn’t look away from the baby’s face. From those features that screamed Castellano as clearly as any genetic test. “Is she mine?”
The question hung in the cold air. A bird called from across the lake, loud and oblivious. The mist continued its slow rise from the water.
Christina’s breath hitched—a sob held back, or maybe released. Her hands were shaking on the stroller.
“Yes.” The word was barely audible. “Her name is Violet.”
Violet.
He had a daughter named Violet.
The world went sideways. He reached out blindly, his hand finding the stroller handle, needing something solid to hold onto. Violet. Two months old. Dark hair and features that matched every Castellano baby photo ever taken. His daughter.
“Why didn’t you—” His voice broke. He tried again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know who you were. Not until later, not until I saw—” Christina was crying harder now, her words tumbling out between gasps. “And then I did know, and I looked you up, and you were—you had all those women, all those parties, and your family?—”
“My family?”
“Lawyers. Money. The kind of people who destroy girls like me.” Her voice turned fierce through the tears. “I’m almost twenty-four years old. I have an online job that pays thirty thousand a year. What was I supposed to do, call up the Castellano empire and say hey, I got pregnant from a one-night stand with your heir, the most eligible man on the planet?”
Violet made a small sound—a coo, soft and questioning. Her tiny hand waved in the air, grasping at nothing.
Marco stared at that hand. At those miniature fingers. At the daughter he hadn’t known existed until two minutes ago.
