Pain crossed her face, but she held my gaze. “Yes, Hayden. I chose to. I was pregnant, terrified, and convinced you had already chosen someone else. I needed a name you wouldn’t know. A name you wouldn’t search for. Something that would letme build a life without turning around every day expecting you to appear behind me.”
The honesty of it was fucking brutal.
Anger came first. It always did with me. Then came the worse part, the part I hated because I understood her. She had taken the only road that made her feel safe, and every step of it had led her farther from me.
“Where did it come from?” I asked.
“My father’s side,” she said. “Rhodes was my grandmother’s last name. Dad suggested it at first, and I hated it. It felt strange at first.Wrong. But Carter still belonged to everything I was trying to leave behind.” Her fingers tightened around the glass. “Rhodes gave me protection.”
Protection.
A pretty word for a fucking wall.
“Rhodes,” I said, almost to myself. “All this time, I hated that name because I thought it belonged to another man. But was there someone else?”
The question came out rougher than I wanted, dragged from the ugliest part of me before I could stop it. She knew exactly what I meant. I saw it in the way her face tightened, in the hurt that flashed there before she answered.
“No.”
I held her gaze. “Ever?”
Her answer came without hesitation. “No.”
The room went still around that, but I could not let it alone. The thought had been living under my skin for too long, mean and poisonous, and now that I had started, I needed every last piece of it.
“No man at all?” I asked.
Something close to disbelief crossed her face, as if she could not decide whether the question insulted her or simply exposed how badly the idea had fucked with my head.
“No,” she said again, and this time there was steel in her voice. “There was never anyone else.”
Relief hit me so hard it almost felt like shame.
“Hayden,” she said, quieter now, “you were my first.”
The words struck low.
She did not look away. “And my only.”
Jesus Christ.
I looked down because, for one fractured second, I could not take that and keep my face under control. My body had gone still in the worst way, locked around want, fury, and grief all at once.Those words were not some pretty confession meant to soothe me.
A breath left me, close to a laugh, though there was nothing light in it.
Chapter Twenty
Edwina
Thedayspassedquietlyafter Christmas, and before I fully realized it, the year had turned. London softened during that in-between time, when the city still wore its winter lights and the university remained closed for the New Year break. Mornings moved slowly. Afternoons stretched without urgency. Evenings carried that suspended feeling that came when one year had ended and the next had not yet properly begun.
Helena filled those days with warmth and noise, moving through the apartment with Snowy tucked beneath one arm, asking questions, making demands, and treating the world with the fearless certainty only children possessed. Within that small routine, I began to loosen. After five years, it was the first time I had truly felt happy.
The happiness was not bright or careless. It came quietly, almost shy after so much pain, and that made it feel fragile. I found it in ordinary things, Helena’s laughter drifting through the apartment, the comfort of familiar rooms, the relief of waking without dread already sitting in my chest. The days no longer felt like something I had to survive. I could live inside them again.
And whether I wanted to admit it or not, Hayden had become part of that.
He had begun to settle into our days with a patience I had not expected from him, or from myself. He came by often, never behaving as if the door automatically belonged to him, yet no longer standing on the edge of our lives as a stranger. Helena took to him so naturally that sometimes I caught myself watching them in silence. I was not afraid exactly. The sight simply gave me more than I knew what to do with.
