Not distant.Not lost.His gaze is fixed on Alisa with something like awe, as if he can’t quite believe she’s real.
Isla stares at it longer than she means to.
“He looks happy,” she says, the words slipping out before she can stop them.
Callum studies the photo.“He was,” he says quietly.“For a while.My father said they were in love, until Keir’s demons got in the way and Alisa had enough.”
The quiet agreement in his voice is oddly destabilizing.Not defense.Not blame.Just fact.
Isla nods, throat tight, and turns the photo over.Another slides free beneath it.
Alisa again, standing alone in a garden, one hand resting protectively over a barely rounded stomach.
Pregnant.
Isla’s breath shudders.She studies her mother’s face, the way she stands, as if she already knows she’s holding something the world will have to orbit.
And suddenly, Isla sees herself not as an abstract child, not as a future, but as a possession.
A gift.
A weapon.
Her fingers tighten around the photograph.
She forces herself to keep going.
The next picture steals the air from her lungs.
Hospital room.Harsh lighting.A narrow bed.
Keir sits on the edge of it, shoulders hunched, cradling something small and wrapped in white.His face is turned downward, reverent, stunned.
In his arms?—
Isla.
Her vision blurs so quickly, it shocks her.Tears spill before she can stop them, hot against her cheeks, humiliating in their honesty.
She presses a hand to her mouth, as if she can hold the sound inside.
Keir’s expression in the photograph is nothing like the man she’s imagined her entire life.There’s no distance.No avoidance.
His face is soft with wonder, eyes dark and intent as he studies the tiny bundle in his arms like she’s the most fragile, miraculous thing he’s ever seen.
Like he can’t look away.
Callum inhales sharply beside her.
“That,” he says slowly, voice rough, “is not the look of a man who never wanted to see his daughter again.”
Isla’s throat tightens painfully.
She can’t speak.She can barely breathe.
All the stories she’s carried, careful explanations, tidy conclusions, the narrative her mother fed her so she could swallow the past without choking, fracture under the weight of this single image.
He held me.
