Chapter Eight: A Father's Instinct
Damien
He hadn't planned to check the file again.
Not after midnight. Not after half a bottle of scotch.
But the image haunted him.
Ava, mid-step, her head turned toward a child in her arms. A toddler, small and soft, wearing a red hoodie and looking away from the camera. The photo was taken two years ago—random, probably by accident, but to Damien it might as well have been a live wire.
He zoomed in.
The curls.
They were unmistakable. The same dark chestnut brown. Soft, unruly. Familiar.
Too familiar.
His chest tightened.
He'd seen those curls before. In old photos of himself as a child, in memories his mother used to show off in faded scrapbooks that smelled like time and cologne. And if that weren't enough to rattle him—
The child's ear. The shape. The angle.
It was his.
"Damn it," he muttered under his breath, pushing the glass of scotch away untouched.
He couldn't breathe.
The pieces began to crash together—like dominoes collapsing inside his mind. Ava's abrupt disappearance. Her refusal to explain. The walls she put up the second she walked back into his life. The flicker of fear in her eyes when he mentioned the child.
A child she never told him about.
A child who might be his.
He stood suddenly, knocking the chair back.
What if I've had a son all this time?
What kind of man misses something like that?
Damien hadn't let himself want much from life, beyond success. But this... this felt bigger than any deal. Deeper than any loss.
If the boy was his—his—then he had missed first steps, first words, first birthdays.
He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
"I would have stayed," he whispered to the silence.
He would have fought harder. He would have changed everything. For her. For them.
But Ava never gave him the chance.
Or maybe…
Maybe he was too blind back then to deserve one.
Marcus's text buzzed on his phone at 1:36 AM.
> Marcus Gray: "Confirmed. Ava left New York four weeks after she quit Wolfe Interiors. Booked a one-way flight to Chicago. Hospital records show a delivery under her maiden name six months later. No listed father."
Damien stared at the screen.
His lungs burned with silent fury and something else he couldn't name. Regret. Grief. Guilt. Love.
She hadn't even written his name on the birth certificate.
His fingers curled around the edge of his phone.
Not because he was angry at Ava.
But because he didn't know if he could forgive himself.
And if the child was his, he would not—could not—be a stranger one more day.