He lowered himself to her level with a care that broke something in me. When his eyes settled on her face, I knew.
He noticed.
The stillness in him changed. His gaze held on Helena, taking in her eyes, her dark hair, the shape of her face, the tiny details I had lived with every day and feared he would recognize in a single glance. The hardness in him did not vanish, yet it cracked enough for something raw to show through.
My pulse stumbled. Tears burned again, and I could not tell whether they came from fear, grief, or the unbearable ache of watching him see her for the first time.
Up close, with Helena standing beneath the party lights and paper banners, nothing could soften what he might recognize. I saw the thought take hold of him. I knew that dangerous quiet, the way his mind locked onto a detail and refused to release it.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
His voice had changed. It was softer now, stripped of the blade he had used on me only seconds earlier. Underneath it, something rough remained, held back with so much force it almost sounded unfamiliar.
Helena blinked at him, solemn in the way children became when deciding whether a grown-up deserved an answer.
Then she said, with complete seriousness, “Mommy taught me not to talk to strangers.”
For one absurd second, even in the middle of my terror, something inside me nearly broke.
Hayden’s mouth shifted. It was almost a smile, though smaller, stranger, a thin crack in the severity he had brought into the room.
“I’m her friend,” he said.
The word settled over me with bitter irony.
Friend.
Helena turned to me at once, waiting for permission, her eyes wide with a question she was too polite to ask out loud.
Hayden’s attention lifted with hers. He did not fully look at me, yet I felt the weight of him there, reading my face, measuring even this small exchange. My vision blurred again. I blinked quickly, fighting to keep the tears back and my expression from giving away anything more.
I gave Helena the smallest nod I could manage. That was all she needed. She looked back at him with the shy confidence of a child who had decided the danger had passed.
“My name is Helena,” she said. Then, after a small pause, she added with careful politeness, “What is your name, sir?”
Standing there, with my daughter looking up at him and Hayden staring as if the whole world had narrowed to her face, I felt a sick certainty settle in my chest.
The next few seconds were going to change everything.
Chapter Fifteen
Hayden
Helena.
The name stayed lodged deep in my skull, moving through me with the same brutal force it had carried the moment it left her small mouth.
Light. Brightness. A name that meant something close to shining, and fuck, that nearly ruined me all over again.
I had called Edwinamy Flarebecause she had been the only light I ever found in the middle of my own darkness. She had burned through the worst parts of me without even trying. She had lit up places I had never let anyone touch. And then she had named our daughter Helena, as if that little girl had become her own light after I was gone. Her light in the dark.
Christ. I could still hear Helena saying her name in that soft, careful voice, polite and bright enough to make the darknessinside me feel even uglier. She had looked at me with no fear in her eyes, no suspicion in her expression, completely unaware of what she had just done to me by standing there with my eyes in her face and my blood written into every tiny part of her.
I saw it the second I looked at her.
No. That was too weak. I knew. The truth hit too hard to mistake for hope. Grief was not playing tricks on me, and this sure as hell was not some pathetic fantasy my mind had dragged out of the wreckage. Her eyes gave it away first.
Fuck.