But slowly, the ugly truth sinks in when Aisling doesn’t laugh. Her face crumples, and the world tilts.
“Yes,” she whispers.
Blood roars in my ears. I stare at her, my mind scrambling for footing. “That’s not possible.”
“She’s mine,” Aisling says, tears spilling now. “She’s my daughter.”
I drag a hand through my hair, trying to put the pieces together. “Why does she call you her sister?”
“My parents raised her as theirs,” she says. “To protect me. To protect her.”
My heart hammers harder, a sick, relentless rhythm. A memory flashes unbidden—Riley’s laugh, her stubborn streak, the way she watches me with that familiar intensity. My stomach drops.
“Who’s the father?” I ask.
Aisling looks at me like I already know. Like I’m forcing her to carve it into air. The room goes silent.
“Aisling, who did you sleep with after me?” I know I was her first, but clearly, I wasn’t her only.
“There was no one else. Only you,” she breathes, as if the confession will destroy her completely.
No.No.She wouldn’t do that to me. She couldn’t…
Her voice is barely audible. “She’s yours, Raf. Riley’s our daughter.”
I feel it then—a hollowing out, a violent rush of heat and cold colliding in my chest. Mine. My daughter. Riley is my daughter.How is that even possible?Sure, we didn’t use a condom every time we had sex, but I always pulled out…
The walls close in.
“You’re saying,” I say hoarsely, “that I have a child. Thatwehave a child. And you never told me.”
She flinches. “I couldn’t.”
“You didn’t even try,” I snarl. Anger surges, sharp and uncontrollable.
Her own anger sparks, cutting through her fear. “Youbroke up withme.”
“I walked away to protect you!” I shout. “To keep exactly this from happening.”
“To protectme?” she fires back. “You told me you didn’t want me. You told me there was no future for us. You sent me away because you didn’t want my family to come after you for it.”
Fury pounds through my veins. “I would have stayed.”
“You don’t get to rewrite history,” she says, tears streaking her face. “You had the opportunity and you didn’t stay.”
“You think I wouldn’t have taken care of you?”
Her laugh is broken, sharp with pain. “You didn’t want me.”
The words hit like a slap to the face.
“You walked away,” she continues, voice rising. “I was young, pregnant, unmarried. Do you have any idea what that would have done to me? To my family?”
My jaw clenches. “I would have married you.”
“Oh, please. You could have when you found out who I was. But you didn’t. You ended it,” she says fiercely. “You made that decision for both of us. So don’t stand there and pretend you would have swooped in and saved me like some knight in shining armor.”
The truth of it stings because she isn’t entirely wrong. At the time, it felt like an impossible decision to make. Follow my heart or protect my family. Do the easy thing or the right thing. Only what I thought was right couldn’t have been more wrong.
