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The guilt lands hard. Why didn't I pick up that crumpled receipt instead of kicking it farther under the bed frame? How much simpler would everything have been if I'd just picked the damn thing up and read it?

Every version of this past year comes flying at me. The one where he was nothing but a cheat. The one where I was smart to never try and find him, and how I built an entire fortress of a life three hours away from my daughter's father. Every one of those versions required him being the villain, easy to hate, easy to justify keeping a daughter from.

None of them accounted for a scrap of paper I kicked under a bed out of spite.

And now, I don't know what to do with a man who isn't the villain I've spent eleven months needing him to be. How do I hold both truths at once, that he hurt me by disappearing and that I hurt him right back by never reading his note? Are we both at fault as much as we are blameless?

Our six-week-old daughter's cries soften. Her wet tears have already soaked my shirt.

The door flies open. "You have to leave," Mama declares, stepping fully into the space between Jagger and me like she can physically hold this entire disaster together with her own body. Her voice hasn't softened one degree since he came through that door, and something about the rigid set of her shoulders tells me she hasn't caught up to what I just figured out. She's still operating three steps behind on a version of Jagger that no longer exists.

"You don't have any right to be near my daughter and granddaughter while you sort out whatever guilt trip you're working through while your wife stands several hundred yards away from us!"

"Ma'am, you⁠—"

"Don't you try to defend him now," Mama's voice climbs, sharp enough that Charlie's cry pitches again. "You think you're entitled to show up here, sprinting across a pasture, and hollering demands in my daughter's face?"

"I'm not trying to holler at anybody. I just found out I have a daughter four minutes ago," Jagger asserts.

Guilt, grief, and a stubborn, exhausted kind of love all tangle together so tight, I can't separate one thread from the next.

He adds in a firm tone, "I have a right to know her."

Mama's spine goes straighter. She spouts, "Rights? You want to talk about rights, after eleven months of nothing?"

"That wasn't my fault."

"Wasn't it?" Mama fires back. "From where I'm standing, a grown man who was engaged to another woman doesn't get to stand in my home and talk about rights."

"You have it wrong," Jagger restates.

Mama scoffs. Her eyes burn with rage. She hisses, "Liar."

"Mama. He's not lying about Phoebe. She's his brother's wife. I met her myself an hour ago."

Mama's head whips toward me. Some of her fury falters. "What?"

"Alexander's wife. Not his." Saying it out loud makes it more real, more impossible, and I watch my mother's face cycle through the same disbelief I felt standing in that barn not an hour ago. "I got it wrong, Mama. I got the whole thing wrong."

"That doesn't change what he did." But some of the certainty's gone out of her voice now, replaced by a note of uncertainty she clearly hates having to show in front of him.

"No, ma'am," Jagger agrees, quiet, and it takes me by surprise. He stands taller. "It doesn't change that I should've asked for her last name. And it doesn't change a baby entering this world without me knowing she existed."

"It sounds so bad," I mutter, kissing Charlie's head again.

"I'm not asking anybody to pretend this is simple. But she's my daughter too," he declares, pinning his gaze on mine.

"She's Lainey's," Mama says, but her voice isn't as sure as when she first came into the room.

Jagger scowls at her. "She's mine, too. And she's not going anywhere," he adds, then turns his eyes, locking them on me, warning, "I don't care what it takes. My daughter isn't leaving this ranch."

Ice floods straight through my veins. My voice comes out thin and shaky. "Excuse me?"

"I mean it, Lainey." He takes a step closer and threatens, "I just found her. I'm not losing her again. Whatever this looks like, whatever we have to figure out, she's not leaving."

"You don't get to say that." Panic climbs fast and ugly up my throat, replacing the guilt with something sharper, more protective, an instinct that doesn't care one bit about receipts or misunderstandings or eleven months of searching. "She's my daughter. I decide where she goes."

"That's right," Mama interjects.