My throat felt tight. My hands were shaking slightly as I gripped the edge of the couch cushion.
This wasn’t what I expected. This wasn’t the narrative I’d been building in my head. The dangerous man who hurt people and felt nothing. Derek was showing me something else entirely. He was showing me a conscience. A capacity for remorse that seemed to contradict everything I’d been afraid of.
And that terrified me more than his violence ever could.
“Sam told me about Carrie.”
Something flickered across his face at the name.
“About the child you had and lost. I’m sorry, Derek.”
He stood up and paced the room, towering over me, and his jaw ticked in frustration. “How much did she tell you about Carrie?”
I swallowed roughly, thinking back to what Sam had shared with me. “She told me about how Carrie had manipulated her into thinking you were stalking her, and that she kidnapped Charlie. She told me about her bringing Charlie to your motel room and pretending she was the child you both lost. About how you saved Charlie by killing Carrie.”
Derek blew out a breath and confessed, “We didn’t lose our child, Kat. She was taken away.”
“What?”
He ran a hand over his face and sat in the chair on the far side of the room. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands.
“We had only been together for a few months when she told me she was pregnant.” He lifted his head and looked me in the eye. “I had told her I didn’t want children. I gave her money to get an abortion, then I walked away.” Pain crossed over his faceas he said the words. “I got a vasectomy shortly after to make sure it would never happen again.”
He stood up and paced again, his hands clasped together around the back of his neck as he faced me. “There was something wrong with her. Something I hadn’t seen until that day in the motel room. She gave birth to our child and abused her. The child was taken away and put in foster care. Only, she wasn’t happy about that. She attacked a social worker trying to find out where the child had been placed and she went to prison where they stripped away her rights.”
The room tilted slightly. I gripped the edge of the couch to steady myself, my mind suddenly moving in slow motion, processing his words like they were coming through water.
A child. Taken away. Foster care.
My stomach clenched.
But the pieces were there, scattered across the floor like a puzzle I was afraid to assemble. A child in foster care. A mother who was dangerous. Derek’s inexplicable connection to my daughter from the moment he’d walked into our lives. The way his hand had trembled when he touched Frankie’s hair. The bunny, oh God, the bunny that Frankie carried everywhere, that she’d left behind like some kind of message.
My heart was hammering against my ribs so hard I thought it might break through.
I opened my mouth to ask, but something held me back. Fear, maybe. Or the desperate hope that I was wrong, that my mind was making connections that didn’t exist, that I was seeing patterns in chaos because I was terrified of what the truth might mean.
“When they stripped her rights, they came looking for me. They wanted me to take responsibility for the child. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t raise a child. I was so fucking afraid of turning into him, Kat. I went to see her. I wanted to meet her justonce. Tell her how sorry I was she got stuck with the parents she got.”
“Derek—” I started, my voice barely a whisper.
But I couldn’t finish. Couldn’t ask the question that was clawing at my throat, demanding to be spoken. Because once I asked it, once I heard the answer, everything would change. Everything would shatter.
And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
“I held her in my arms and told her I was sorry. That I loved her, and that was why I had to let her go. I gave her something. So she’d always have a piece of me with her. A piece that was safe.”
My breath caught.
“You’re her father,” I whispered.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Derek
The words hit me like a physical blow.
My chest tightened. My lungs forgot how to work. The world narrowed to just her face—those beautiful eyes filling with tears, her expression shifting from confusion to devastating clarity.
