Ava doesn’t shout. She doesn’t slam doors. She just stands in the middle of my kitchen with her spine straight, her jaw set, and that look—the one that tells me she has stitched the pieces together and she’s done pretending not to see the seams.
“We need to talk,” she says.
Two seconds in and my pulse is already a live wire. Violet is at school. No witnesses. No buffers. Just the two of us and a truth I never wanted to hear spoken aloud.
She gestures to the table. “Sit.”
I don’t move.
Her brow lifts—a dare.
I sit.
Slowly. Reluctantly. Like she has just strapped me onto a gurney and flicked on the surgical lights.
Ava pulls out a chair and sits too, arms folding tightly, gaze locked on mine with surgical precision.
“I know who you are,” she says.
The world narrows. My chest tightens. There it is—the avalanche I’ve been outrunning finally catching up.
Her voice softens, but it doesn’t waver. “Jackson Hale.”
My name—myrealname—lands between us.
“It’s none of your business,” I reply. The words come out rougher than I intend.
Her eyes flash. “A man invites me and my daughter into his home. Sleeps feet away from us. Calms her when she’s sick. Kisses me in a hot spring…” Her voice tightens, but she keepsgoing. “And I don’t get to know who he actually is? That is absolutely my business.”
I look toward the window. Anywhere but those eyes. “You’re safe here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Her voice doesn’t rise, but the floor feels like it does—shifting under me.
Ava draws a slow breath, steadying herself before she speaks again. “Violet is fourteen. She trusts you. Shelikesyou. And if there is something in your past that could hurt her, or bring danger into this cabin… I deserve to know.” Her hand lands on the table, fingers curled tight.“Shedeserves to know.”
For a moment, fear is so loud in my chest I can barely hear my own thoughts.I rub a hand over my face. My voice drops, quieter. “I didn’t lie to hurt you.”
“No,” she says softly. “You lied to disappear. I figured that out all on my own.”
I look down at my hands, flexing them once before I answer. “Iwashim. A long time ago. But that’s not who I am anymore.”
She waits. She lets me choose the order of the wreckage.
The words come slowly at first, then faster, unraveling the story I’d buried so deep it hurt to dig it up again.
“I built a company straight out of college. Too fast. Too loud. Too big. I didn’t know how to slow anything down. Emily did.” My throat works around her name. “She was the CFO. My fiancée. She made everything feel possible.”
Ava’s eyes soften, sympathy flickering—dangerous and undeserved.
“We were driving home from a board event,” I begin, but the words come out too smooth. Too practiced. Like an obituary I’vememorized because it’s the only story anyone ever wanted to hear.
“It was raining,” I say quietly. “Sheets of it. The kind that drowns headlights and turns the world into a smear of light and shadow.”
My fingers curl against the table, knuckles whitening, trying to hide how badly they tremble.
“Emily was laughing. She’d just told me…” My voice falters. I swallow, push through the burn in my chest. “She’d just told me she was pregnant. We were going to have a baby.”
