Rashid was quiet.
“Especially Quest.” My voice cracked despite my best efforts to control it. “Please, Rashid. For me. For everything we’ve been to each other. Spare Quest.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Something shifting in his expression. Something almost like amusement.
“Why you so worried about Quest specifically?”
“Because he’s—” I stopped. Swallowed. “Because he’s the one holding the family together. The business. The legacy. If something happens to him, everything Alexander built falls apart.”
“That all?”
I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t say the words out loud. Not after all these years of silence.
But Rashid was dying. And some secrets were too heavy to carry to the grave alone.
“Because he’s yours, Rashid.”
The words fell out of me before I could stop them. Forty years of silence, shattered in three words.
Rashid’s whole body went still.
“What did you say?”
“Quest.” My voice cracked. “Quest is your son.”
I watched the words hit him. Watched his face change—confusion first, then disbelief, then something I’d never seen on Rashid Muhammad’s face in all the years I’d known him.
Shock. Pure, unfiltered shock.
“That’s not—” He tried to sit up, winced, fell back against the pillows. “Viv, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying what I should have told you thirty-eight years ago.” Tears were streaming down my face now. I couldn’t stop them. “When I found out I was pregnant, I knew. I KNEW. The timing, the—” I shook my head.
“No.” Rashid’s voice was barely a whisper. “No, you would have told me. You would have?—”
“Told you WHAT?” The words came out sharper than I intended. “That I was carrying your baby while I was married? That I’d been sleeping with both of you and didn’t know whose child I was carrying until I did the math?” I wiped my face roughly. “I chose Alexander. I chose that life. I couldn’t turn around and tell him his firstborn son wasn’t his.”
Rashid was staring at me like he’d never seen me before. Like I was a stranger wearing the face of someone he thought he knew.
“Thirty-eight years.” His voice was hoarse. Broken. “Thirty-eight years, Vivica. I have a son. I’ve HAD a son this whole time, and you never?—”
“I couldn’t.”
“You COULD. You just didn’t.” Something shifted in his eyes. Pain. Rage. Grief. All of it swirling together. “I watched that boy grow up. Watched him take over the business. Watched him become a man. And the whole time… the whole time he was MINE?”
“Rashid—”
“Does he know?”
“No. No one knows. Alexander never knew. Quest doesn’t know. No one.”
He closed his eyes. A tear slipped down his weathered cheek—the first tear I’d ever seen Rashid Muhammad shed in forty years.
“My son,” he whispered. “I have another son.”
“I’m sorry.” The words felt pathetic. Inadequate. “I’m so sorry.”
When he opened his eyes again, that familiar steel was back. Even dying, even devastated, Rashid was still Rashid.
