“He signed the relinquishment of parental rights four days ago.” She searches my face for a lie. “Looks like he cares more about her future than you.”
The room goes very still.
“Ask Hildy how much he cares,” she sputters.
“This isn’t about Hildy, this is about a man who admits he’s been absent, due to his own choices.” I continue evenly. “He’sincarcerated and may very well have been detached. But when presented with the opportunity to provide her with stability, he signed. And you? You’re hesitating.”
“You don’t get to rewrite our history,” she snaps.
“I’m not rewriting anything,” I say calmly. “I’m paving a future.”
She shoves the papers at me. “You think this makes you noble.”
“No,” I reply. “It makes me responsible.”
She glares at me. Then— “I want to see them both before I do anything.”
“You want Lucy, that sweet little girl, to see the woman who was supposed to protect her, and epically failed and nearly killed her, to come to this place and see you in orange and living behind bars?”
“Yes.” She turns to the guard, “I’m ready to go back now.”
“Well,” I stand. “That will be up to Hildy, but with great confidence I can say, see you at court.”
Chapter 29
Homecomings
Hildy
Soft morning light pours through the kitchen windows, catching the steam rising from my coffee, the first regular-strength cup I’ve allowed myself since I found out I was pregnant. The smell alone feels like rebellion after weeks of watered-down compromise. I cradle the mug between both hands and watch the light move across the counter like it’s taking inventory of the room.
I stayed up all night trying to figure out why a man like him, with means and fame and those unfair, almost criminal good looks, could fall in love with a broke college girl who took custody of a sister she had never even met because their drunk mother nearly killed her.
It started a spiral.
Not jealousy. Not insecurity exactly. Just the quiet, persistent question that shows up in the middle of the night when logic is asleep, and your brain decides to run wild.
How did I end up here?
How didheend up here?
At first, I told myself I was just reading. Background context. Curiosity. Harmless late-night digging historians do when a name or a date doesn’t quite sit right in the narrative.
But the truth is, I was trying to understand him.
Understand how someone who grew up inside a world of legacy and expectation could look at the chaos that was my life and decide it was something he wanted to, noneeded tostep into.
In bed beside Lucy, Erin asleep downstairs, I started where scholars always start: records.
The foundation website, then public filings, and old press releases. Interviews he and his family had done early in his career, when reporters still asked about family history as if it were a human-interest footnote rather than a branding point.
The story was clean. Generational wealth. Thousands of acres of land. A grandmother who rebuilt after the war. A family known for discipline and resilience. The kind of narrative that fits neatly into magazines and donor brochures.
The dates bothered me. Nothing glaring, just enough that kept my brain circling back, so I opened a new tab. Then another, and ended up finding civil registries, municipal archives, and historical land transfers from the region his family comes from. I told myself it was academic instinct, the same impulse that has gotten me through half my coursework, and my paperDigital Afterlives: Metadata, Identity, and the Preservation of Cultural Heritage in European Archival Systems.”
When something doesn’t align, you follow the thread, forward and backward.
Through the grandmother everyone knows about, the property records that predate the foundation entirely. Through a branch of the family that stopped appearing in officialbiographies somewhere around the early twentieth century. And then there was a huge gap in the story that the information was telling me.
