A day off?
My jaw tightened before I could stop it. Why the hell would she take the day off? Was she sick? Had something happened? Theanswer gave me nothing, and that only pissed me off more. It left too much space for my mind to fill, and every possibility that entered it scraped hard against my nerves.
“Why?” I asked.
The single word came out sharper than I intended, and this time, the lecturer seemed to notice. His expression shifted, just a little, as if he had finally sensed the pressure behind the question. Still, he gave a small smile, as though the explanation were harmless.
“It’s her daughter’s birthday.”
Everything in me stopped. For a second, I did not understand him. The words reached me, clear as fucking glass, yet my mind refused to take them in.
Her daughter.
The classroom seemed to narrow around that one phrase. Students. Desks. The lecturer standing in front of me. All of it blurred into background noise while those two words carved themselves into my skull.
Her daughter.
Something hard dropped through my chest, cold enough to make my hands curl at my sides.
No.
That couldn’t be right.
Edwina had a daughter?
A child?
What the fuck?
The words kept moving through my head with a dull, punishing force. I stood there, my body locked in place while the damage spread under my skin. The phrase cut through the version of Edwina I had carried for years, tearing apart the assumptions, the bitter conclusions, and the answers I had forced myself to live with because there had been nothing else to hold on to.
“Her what?” I heard myself say. The lecturer blinked, as if the question confused him. “She has a daughter?”
Even to my own ears, my voice sounded wrong. Flat at first, then rough around the edges, dragged down by shock before I had time to hide it.
The lecturer nodded, casual as ever, completely unaware of what he had just torn open inside me.
“Yes. Her daughter.”
My jaw tightened. The words hit harder the second time. A daughter. Edwina had a daughter. She had carried an entire life forward while I had been left outside it, blind to its existence. Somewhere inside those missing years, there had been a life I knew nothing about, hidden beneath the goddamn emptiness I had been choking on.
The years she disappeared came back to me in a different shape. The scar. The panic in her eyes. The way she shut down whenever I got too close. Those details no longer felt separate. They locked together in my mind, ugly and sharp, forming a truth I could almost see. Something had happened to her, big enough to change her life from the inside out. I could feel the edge of it, and the fact that I still did not know the whole thing made a bitter pressure build in my throat.
“Fuck,” I muttered. The word scraped out of me before I could stop it.
A child.
Her child.
A life with birthdays, memories, bedtime stories, scraped knees, laughter, sickness, fear. A whole existence carried in secret while I had been left with fragments and ghosts.
The realization tore through me without sound, leaving something colder than anger behind. Then the need to know rose through the shock, hard and unstoppable, until it became the only clear thing left in my head.
I was going to find out.
Every fucking piece of it.
The address was already in my head before I reached my car. By the time I got behind the wheel, there was nothing left in me that resembled patience. Only one brutal fact kept tearing through my head.
