She was the one part of my life I had never questioned. Helena had come into the world and changed everything. She kept me going when the past felt too heavy, taught me how to stand again, and gave me a reason to hold myself together on the days that tried to break me.
My thoughts drifted as I stood there with a pack of gold balloons in my hand. Memories rose, pulling me back to months I rarely allowed myself to revisit. They had been hard in ways I still struggled to name. I had carried grief, fear, and loneliness while trying to convince myself I could survive all three. Losing Hayden had stayed with me through the silences, during the moments when I reached for a life that no longer existed, and inside the ache of wanting someone I had already decided I could not have.
“Edwina?”
Giselle’s voice pulled me back. I blinked and turned toward her.
“You went quiet,” she said, watching me with concern.
“I’m here,” I replied, giving her a small smile.
She studied me for another second, then let it go and turned back to the decorations. I followed her lead, grounding myself in the present again. The basket between us. The birthday we were planning. The little girl who deserved a day untouched by everything I was trying to keep away from her.
Tomorrow had to be perfect.
I would make sure it was.
Chapter Thirteen
Hayden
Thenextday,Iwent to her class with one thing on my mind.
Edwina.
The whispers meant nothing. The eyes turning in the corridors, the pathetic rumors spreading through the university, the half-formed assumptions people were already chewing on because they had nothing better to do with their empty fucking lives, none of it mattered to me.
She mattered. And she was avoiding me.
I knew it before I even reached her building.Her unanswered messages told me what I needed to know.
So did the silence she kept choosing and how she had walked out of my apartment as if distance could make me disappear. As if stepping outside my door had given her back some control she had already lost the second she let me touch her again.
That was what pissed me off the most. She wanted to take that moment, the kiss she had returned, her body answering mine, the look on her face when she forgot to hate me for half a fucking second, and bury all of it under silence.
No.
Not this time.
People could whisper, stare, invent whatever version of us made their boring lives feel interesting. Gossip had never scared me, and it sure as hell would not make me back away from the woman I had spent years trying to find.
Edwina cared, though. Too much.
She measured consequences before she let herself breathe. Fear became logic in her hands, polished and practical enough to pass as self-control. Reputation, judgment, people seeing too much and deciding they knew the whole story, all of it mattered to her. The world had crawled under her skin and convinced her that wanting me was another mistake she had to survive.
That thought made something ugly twist in my chest.
Because she was still trying to protect herself from me.
Fromme.
As if rules, offices, titles, and polite distance could erase what had happened between us. As if a closed door or an unanswered message could change her mouth opening for mine, the sound of her breath breaking, the truth flashing across her face before she buried it again.
She could act cold. Ignore my messages. Stand in front of me with that careful face and pretend I had no power left over her.
I knew better. There was nothing left between us now except the lies she kept feeding herself. And I was done letting her hide behind them.
She was no longer my student. That excuse was dead.
