Tiana removed her glasses carefully and set them on the table. Her eyes were red-rimmed, not from dramatic crying but from the kind that happens in private and repeatedly. “How long?”
“It’s complicated.”
“That’s a coward’s sentence.”
He exhaled. “There’s a child.”
Something in her face changed, not breaking exactly, but rearranging under strain. “Yours?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“Six.”
She stared at him. “Six.”
He looked away first.
“When were you planning to tell me?” she asked.
“I was trying to understand it.”
“No,” she said softly. “You were trying to decide who to become before you let me see it.”
That was true enough to sting.
Tiana walked to the window overlooking the city and folded her arms tightly across herself. “Do you love her mother?”
The answer should have been simple. It wasn’t. Love in his world had long been tangled with timing, usefulness, admiration, rescue. What he felt for Grace now was not clean romance in a polished box. It was guilt, respect, hunger for repair, old attraction resurfacing under new knowledge, awe at the woman she had become without him, and something frighteningly close to devotion.
“I don’t know what name to use yet,” he said.
Tiana nodded once. “That tells me enough.”
When she turned back to face him, her voice was steady. “I stood beside you when people said you were finished. I defended you when it cost me something. I built a future with you based on the assumption that whatever else you were, you were honest where it mattered.”
“I know what you did for me.”
“Do you?”
He did. Which only made this uglier.
She picked up her glasses and bag. At the door she stopped. “There’s something else.”
He waited.
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