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“But you suspected?” I asked, and the small movement of her head broke something inside me that Nolan had somehow left intact.

Cian stepped forward, drawing my attention back to him. “I didn’t know until a few weeks ago. None of us had any idea until Nolan told us,” he confessed, and Mom gasped as her hands covered her mouth.

The horror on her face seemed real—as though she hadn’t known Nolan possessed the truth—but there was no room for sympathy when I was drowning beneath the consequences of choices everyone had made for me.

“He knew,” I whispered, hearing his voice again from the recorder as he denied I was his daughter. I turned toward Mom, and the years beneath Nolan’s roof rose inside me like the rooms of a burning house. “This is your fault! I lost everything because of you!”

“Maddie, please let me explain,” Mom pleaded, reaching toward me with the same hands that had buttoned my coats and braided my hair. Every remembered tenderness became tangled with the lies she hid behind.

“No. I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t even want to look at you!”

I ran upstairs before my anger could become something neither of us could survive, the evidence forgotten with my purse that now lay on the floor in my wake.

I reached the landing before Cian’s voice rose behind me. “Caity.”

Mom’s answer cracked through the foyer. “Fuck you!” she spat, and the front door slammed hard enough to shake the framed photographs along the upstairs hall.

Silence filled the house for one breath before Duncan’s voice followed me upstairs.

“We’re having a baby!” he declared, and a broken sound escaped me that might have been laughter in another life.

Ignoring the muffled voices below, I threw myself on the bed and buried my face in the pillow while the truth searched for another place to destroy.

The door opened a second after the knock. My subconscious told me I’d left the door unlocked hoping he’d follow. He’d always been my greatest champion. The one I went to when I needed a father because mine couldn’t be bothered with me.

“Maddie, honey, can we talk?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

“No. Go away.” The pillow muffled my answer, but he entered anyway.

The mattress shifted when he sat beside me. His hand settled against my back with the same careful pressure he had used whenever childhood pain became too large for me to hide, and the knowledge that my body still recognized him as safety made fresh tears burn my eyes.

“Baby, I know you’re upset.” His words were gentle, but upset was too small for what I was feeling.

I sat up so quickly that he nearly fell from the bed. “Upset?!” I shrieked, staring at the man who had always loved me without knowing why the love felt different. “Upset? I lost everything because she lied. I lost my husband and my son because the man I thought was my father wanted to get back at her.”

Nolan had used my mother’s secret to poison every love I tried to claim, and whether he had caused Salvatore’s death or merely made the years before it unbearable—the distinction no longer mattered to the part of me that needed someone living to blame.

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Cian asked quietly, pain pulling his features tight. “I would have helped you. I would have protected you.”

The question reached backward through every moment when I had wanted to call him and stopped myself. Despite the unconditional love he’d always shown me, he’d still been one of Uncle Sal’s men and another person whose love for family might have turned Henry into territory.

“There was nothing you could have done. It wasn’t just my da—” The word died when I realized I no longer had to call Nolan that, although the revelation did nothing to remove the scars left behind by believing it. “Uncle Sal would have killed Salvatore.”

“I would have fuckin’ killed him,” Cian mumbled, and disbelief momentarily cut through my grief. The father I had discovered less than an hour earlier was already furious over a marriage that death had ended years ago.

I glared at him because Salvatore had spent years paying for the crime of loving me, and I would not let another man reduce our marriage to something shameful. Cian saw the fury in my face and showed no sign of retreat.

“Don’t look at me like that; he was too fuckin’ old for you. He never should have touched you.” The protectiveness in his voice arrived years too late to feel like anything except hypocrisy.

“You never should have touched her,” I spat back, watching the accusation find its mark.

Cian closed his eyes and released a heavy breath. He looked wounded, but he didn’t defend himself with anger.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have. But I don’t regret it, and if I could go back, there are things I would do differently, but being with your mother isn’t one of them. Without that night, I wouldn’t have you.” His certainty unsettled every defense I wanted to hide behind.

“You didn’t even know I was yours.” My voice broke because that truth had hurt him too, and I resented the compassion trying to survive inside my anger.

“You think that stopped me from loving you? You think that stopped me from wishing you were mine?” he asked, and tears filled my eyes before I could turn away.