“Bullshit.” His eyes dropped to the scar again, and when he looked back at me, the anger in his face had changed. “I know your body, Edwina. I know what was there and what wasn’t.”
My throat tightened. “You don’t know anything about me anymore.”
“That scar says otherwise.”
“It doesn’t concern you.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” He stepped closer, his voice rough now. “Something happened to you, and you’re standing there telling me to ignore it?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “Because it is mine. My body. My life. My scar.”
The silence between us turned heavy. I could see it in his eyes now, the anger still there, the possession still burning, yet suspicion had begun to take shape beneath both. And if I wasn’t careful, he would follow it straight to the truth.
Hayden
The moment I saw it, everything else faded. She was hiding from me. Her hands moved as if she could cover what I had already seen, and the whole room shifted around us. The tension no longer belonged to old lies or unfinished arguments. It belonged to the life she had kept locked away from me.
“What happened to you?” I asked again, my voice stripped down to the question. This was no longer accusation. I had seen a mark on her body that did not fit with anything I remembered, and I wanted the truth.
“It’s nothing,” she said at once.
Fast enough to give herself away.
I moved closer without touching her, cutting down the space between us enough to see the panic she was trying to hide. Her breathing had changed, and her gaze kept slipping away from mine.
“You don’t react this way over nothing,” I said, studying her face. “You don’t look at me like that over something meaningless.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeated, though the words cracked before she could make them convincing.
She was not telling me the truth, and that bothered me more than any answer she could have given. Edwina did not lie without reason. She hid when the truth cost too much to say. My mind began putting the pieces together before I could stop it. Her disappearance, the new name, the life she had built somewhere else, and now a scar I did not remember. None of it felt separate anymore.
“What the fuck happened in those years?” I asked, more to myself than to her, though my eyes stayed on her face, searching for a crack, a clue, anything that could give me a place to begin.
She gave me nothing. No answer. No denial. None of the anger she had thrown at me all morning. She stood there with her silence wrapped around her, and that told me more than I wanted to know. This was not small. She had not forgotten to mention it or left it out by accident. She had made sure I would never know.
I moved closer, careful this time, aware of the way she held herself as though one wrong word might break whatever control she had left.
“Look at me,” I said.
She kept her gaze fixed somewhere past me, jaw tight, hands curled at her sides.
“Edwina.”
She stood in front of me with uneven breathing and a face that kept betraying more than she wanted it to. Every detail felt sharper now. The scar had changed something in the room, and the version of Edwina I had carried for years no longer matched the woman standing in front of me. I could not ignore that. I would not.
“What happened to Edwina Carter,” I asked, my voice quiet but hard, “and who the fuck is Edwina Rhodes?”
Her head lifted at that, eyes flashing with guarded anger, yet she said nothing. Of course she didn’t. Answering meant opening a door she had spent years keeping locked, and I had already decided I was not leaving until I knew what she was hiding.
“You disappeared,” I continued, moving closer and cutting down the space she kept trying to protect. “You walked out of my life without a word, came back with another name, another life, and now you expect me to stand here like a polite bastard and not ask what the hell happened to you.”
“It’s none of your business,” she said, her voice firmer now, though I could hear the effort behind it.
“That stopped being true the moment I found you again.”
Her jaw tightened. I let my gaze move over her, taking in every change she had tried to make into proof that the past no longer owned her.
“Your hair, your clothes, the way you look at me as if I’m a problem you can manage,” I said, my voice roughening. “All of it is different. And that scar on your body sure as hell wasn’t there before.”