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“Come here.” He opened his arms but waited until I moved toward him before pulling me close. “You’ve always been mine, Maddie, even before I knew.”

I folded against him and my body remembered a thousand moments when those arms held me without asking whose blood gave him the right. His heart beat beneath my cheek, steady and alive, as I grieved the father I’d never known while being held by the man who had somehow still always been there.

“Why didn’t she tell us?” I asked after the first violence of my tears weakened.

“She was scared.” His answer came too quickly, and I pulled away before his love for her could turn betrayal into sacrifice.

“Don’t make excuses for her. She made a choice.” I backed against the headboard and twisted the hem of my shirt between my fingers.

“She did make a choice. She made the choice to protect you. You never told us about Henry because you were afraid of what Kelley would do. What do you think he would have done to her? What do you think Eamon would have done?”

His questions found the part of me that understood fear well enough to hate its logic. I’d imagined Nolan learning about Henry every day for years. I knew what terror could make a mother conceal, surrender, and survive, but understanding Mom’s fear didn’t make the years she had stolen hurt less.

“Why aren’t you mad at her?” I asked, his forgiveness feeling like another secret agreement from which I’d been excluded.

“Maddie, I am mad. I am fuckin’ pissed. But I love her. I always have. Love makes you forgive things you probably shouldn’t. Sure, I could be angry with her. I could scream and yell and walk away. But I’d only be hurting myself.”

There was no pride in his confession, only the weariness of a man who had spent most of his life loving someone he couldn’t claim. I understood more than I wanted to.

“She kept my dad from me,” I whispered as the anger inside me gave way to a grief too young to belong in an adult body. “The dad who loved me.”

“Did she?” Cian asked, and the softness in his voice made me look up. “Because I remember the day you were born. I might not have been there to see you come into the world, but I held you in my arms that day. I looked down at you, and fuck⁠—”

He turned his face away, but not before I saw tears gathering in his eyes. The memory belonged to him, one of thousands he had possessed while neither of us knew what it meant.

“I loved you the minute I met you. I’ve always been there, Maddie. She never kept you from me.” His voice roughened around the love he no longer had to disguise as an uncle’s affection.

“But she kept you from me,” I argued, although childhood memories had already begun rising to contradict me. What I’d lost was not his presence but the title I had the right to call him.

“In a way, yes. I didn’t get to see you every day because you lived in New York. But every holiday, every birthday, school play, sports game, I was there, baby. Cheering you on. So fuckin’ proud of you. Graduation. When you started college. I’ve always been there, Maddie. She made sure of it, the only way she could.”

Each memory became another place where Mom’s fear and love had existed together. I’d searched every audience until I found Cian, knowing he would grin too broadly and applaud too loudly. Nolan attended when appearance required it, but Cian came because I’d mattered to him.

“I thought you hated her.” The admission felt childish, but most of what I understood about my parents had been built from a child’s incomplete view.

“I could never hate her. She’s everything to me. She always has been,” he admitted, and the naked love in his expression made the photographs from the package feel less like proof of adultery and more like evidence of a life denied to all three of us.

“I took too long, and I missed my chance. But I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her.” Regret lived in every line of his face.

“Then why do you fight all the time?” I asked, remembering arguments that had seemed like hatred because I had never known how much desire and grief could resemble anger.

Cian blew out a breath and looked almost embarrassed. The expression was so unexpected that curiosity briefly loosened the knot inside my chest.

“Did you and Valentinetti ever bicker about stupid things?” he asked.

Salvatore’s smile moved through my memory, warm and wicked whenever he deliberately provoked me because he loved the reconciliation that followed. “Yeah, he used to do things just to make me mad. When we made up, we—” Understanding struck before I finished, and horror replaced the fragile smile on my face. “Ewww!”

Cian threw his head back and laughed. The sound should not have belonged inside the worst day of my life, yet it made the room feel less like a grave.

“Ew, ew, ew. No!” I made gagging noises because imagining my mother and Cian that way was a boundary no revelation required me to cross.

“I know that’s not something you want to think about regarding your parents.” The word parents landed between us with enough force to end his laughter.

I shoved his shoulder. “Stop talking!”

The small piece of humor vanished as quickly as it had come. Questions remained, crowding behind my teeth and making it impossible to rest inside even temporary relief.

“How long have you and her...?” I let the unfinished sentence carry what I couldn’t bear to ask.