Page 61 of Single Mom's Daddies
She lifts her eyes to meet mine, and I keep my voice low, even.
“You shouldn’t sleep alone tonight.” Her brows pull slightly together, and I can already feel her defenses start to rise, so I hold up one hand in a soft gesture. “Not like that. Not sex. Not touching. Not anything. Just…togetherness.”
I glance behind me, where Roman is still staring into the fire and Nikolai hasn’t moved an inch from his chair. I look back at her. “You’ve been carrying this alone. You don’t have to.”
She blinks, once. Her lips part like she’s about to answer, but nothing comes out. She hesitates, and that pause—just a breath too long—tells me what I already knew. “I appreciate that,” she says. “Really. But I need to lie down in my own bed. I need to spread out. I need to not hear anyone else breathing. I just need…quiet. My own sheets. My own air.”
The way she says it—without apology, without flinching—still manages to land hard in my chest. It’s not rejection. It’s survival. Can’t blame her for that. But it still stings.
“I get it.”
She casts one last look at the three of us. Roman finally meets her eyes and gives her the faintest nod. Nikolai doesn’t look up. She walks to the door, slow but certain, and opens it without a sound. The air from the hallway brushes cool across the den. She steps out.
“Goodnight,” she says without turning back. The door clicks shut behind her. And she’s gone.
The moment the door closes behind Saffron, the silence in the den shifts.
It doesn’t go still like after an argument. It’s a silence heavy with the weight of her words. She said it so plainly.Ivy is your daughter. All of yours.And then she stood there, still as stone, waiting for our response like she wasn’t standing there shattered, holding the weight of nine years in her chest.
The silence she left behind won’t let go of my throat.
Roman stands by the fireplace, one hand braced on the mantel. He hasn’t said a word since she left. Nikolai’s still on the other side of the room, arms crossed tight, eyes unfocused, chewing the inside of his cheek the way he does when he’s trying to keep control.
We just learned we have a daughter. A second daughter. A living, breathing miracle who’s been missing from our lives for almost a decade. How do you wrap your mind around something like that?
Nikolai exhales through his nose. Sharp. Frustrated. “She’s right,” he mutters. “She needs space. We all do.”
I don’t answer. I walk to the window, look out into the dark, and watch the gravel path as it winds toward the edge of the property. There’s no light in her cottage yet. She probably hasn’t even taken off her shoes.
“She handled it well,” Roman says, his voice low.
She looked at us like she’d expected us to be angry with her.
And maybe part of me was angry, at first. The unreasonable part of me. She’s known who were are to her daughter for a day—I don’t blame her for taking a day to figure out how to tell us. It’s a damn miracle she told us that fast. I’m not angry with her.
I’m angry with fate. For not knowing all this time.
“She found the photo,” Roman says. “She did the math.”
“She was seven months pregnant when it was taken,” I murmur.
The fire crackles again. It doesn’t fill the silence. Not even close.
“She went through that whole pregnancy alone,” Nikolai says. “And never once tried to find us.”
“She didn’t know who we were,” Roman says. “That’s the point of anonymity.”
“She remembered the tattoos,” I say. I flex my left hand and look down at it, at the familiar twist of ink I’ve had for over half my life. I’ve never thought of it as anything more than what it was. A mark of loyalty. Of family.
Now it’s something that ties us to our daughter.
My throat tightens. She’s ours. She’s mine. It could be either of them. And maybe we’ll never know whose genes got to the finish line first.
But it doesn’t matter. She’s ours. That’s all that counts.
I close my hand slowly. “I’m glad she told us.”
“Me too,” Roman answers.
