“I mean, I knew it was you but… We didn’t exchange names!” she bursts out. “We didn’t trade numbers or talk about our lives. It was dark, and loud, and we were both—” She cuts herself off, then tries again. “We had one night. That’s it. I never even saw yourfaceuntil I walked into your office.”
I stare at her.
The storm inside me rages, tearing at logic, at memory, at restraint. I see the cabin. The way she pushed her hands intomy hair. The way she moaned when I touched her. The way she tasted like heat and honey and something I’d craved long before I knewhername.
I remember the vault.
Her body. Her breath. The way she whisperedpleaselike a prayer.
Now the truth slams into me like a blow. That night didn’t end with the vault. It ended with a child. My child. Andi is my child.
I grab the edge of the table, and the whole structure shudders. Roxy flinches again.
The fear in her eyes stops me. It cuts directly through the rage and leaves something raw underneath.
I exhale once, harshly. “You should have told me.”
Her chest heaves. “How?” she asks, voice breaking. “How, Mak? Should I have put an ad in the paper? Should I have gone around town asking who the masked man?—”
“Enough!” I snap.
But the image flashes anyway. She was alone. Pregnant. Had no idea who I was. No name. No contacts. Nothing.
Addiction was crippling me, and Bratva’s had the worst operations going on. I was living a life that chewed me up until I didn’t recognize myself.
Even if shehadfound me, I would not have gotten involved with a child then. Not even my own.
Roxy’s voice softens, barely audible. “I didn’t know.”
My pulse slows. Not steady, but enough for clarity to seep back in. I stalk away, dragging a hand over my face. “For a week,” I say quietly, “I thought she belonged to another man.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it.
“I thought someone else had put their hands on you. Had a claim on you.” My voice roughens. “I thought you gave someone else what you gave me.”
She stares at me like she can’t decide whether to be furious or heartbroken.
Then I said the one thing I shouldn’t have said: “I thought you had a son.”
Roxy’s head jerks back, brows knit. “A son?”
“Andi,” I say, exhaling slowly. “It sounded like a boy’s name.”
Something cold flashes in her expression. Fuck. I said something wrong.
She takes a single, deliberate step toward the door of the pavilion. “Well,” she says tightly, “I’m sorry to let you down.”
“Roxanne—”
But she doesn’t stop; she just strides through the pavilion and into the field beyond, her boots crushing the wet dewy grass as she goes to find Andrea, our daughter, and put distance between us.
The papers on the table flutter in the morning wind, useless, irrelevant compared to the roaring emptiness expanding inside my chest.
I have a daughter.
I have a daughter.
And the woman who carried her, who raised her, who was alone through every moment of it, is walking away from me with bitterness and hurt.
