Page 28 of Beautiful When He Breaks

Maybe some part of me will eventually find room for nuance, room to think about her family and whatever pressure they put on her, room to separate what was done to her by them from what she did to me. Right now, there’s no room. Right now, all I can think is that she left our child on a doorstep and signed her rights away in a letter that apologized without actually being sorry for the part that mattered.

Julian comes around the island slowly, entering my space the way he always somehow manages to without making it feel like an invasion.

“Hey,” he says quietly. I look up at him. His hazel eyes are on my face, reading me too easily, as usual. “You okay?”

I laugh once under my breath because the answer is no in at least twelve different directions and twice as many languages. “I don’t know.”

“That’s fair,” he says.

Killian, because he’s Killian and would rather set a room on fire than let us drown in too much emotion without structure, says, “Be relieved. That part’s allowed.”

Julian must see the emotional collision on my face, too, because he says in a low voice, “Both can exist. The relief and the fucked-up part. You don’t have to pick one.”

I let out a slow breath. “Right,” I whisper.

I take my daughter from him with hands that still don’t feel like they belong to a father, even now that the test says they do. She’s awake, blinking up at me with that serious, scrunched little expression she gets right before deciding whether life is acceptable or offensive. The second her weight settles in my arms, the relief in my chest changes shape—it roots. This is real now in a way that nothing else has been.

“Hey,” I whisper to her. “It’s official, baby girl. I’m your dad.”

When evening rolls around, Killian decides we’re handling the news properly and informs me we’re having a meeting in the living room before anyone disappears into bedrooms and makes plans without me.

The living room looks ridiculous for a serious conversation, all massive couches, expensive rugs, and Killian’s family money sitting in every square inch of the architecture, but somehow the absurdity helps.

The baby is in my arms when I walk in, and every head in the room turns to us with such open concern that my throat tightens. Nobody says anything stupid; they just look at me like I belong here, baby and all, and that does something ugly and grateful to my chest.

Killian waits until everybody’s settled before he speaks. He’s leaning against the mantle with his arms folded, looking every inch the person in charge, whether anyone voted him there or not.

“Tests came back today. Eli is the father,” he says without preamble. “Mara is moving forward with the legal process. That means a lot of things are changing around here, and we’re not gonna be fucking idiots about any of them.”

Roman, sprawled in the armchair with one ankle propped over the opposite knee, lifts his brows. “By ‘we,’ do you mostly mean Ryan?”

Ryan, who is somehow balancing on the arm of the couch instead of sitting on it, points at him. “First of all, rude. Second, I’d be an incredible uncle.”

“You’d teach her bad words before she grows teeth,” Adrian says from the other end of the couch.

Ryan looks offended. “As opposed to the rest of this house?”

“That’s enough,” Killian says, but there’s the tiniest trace of amusement at the edge of his voice, which is basically the equivalent of him giggling.

Luca lets out a slow breath and looks from me to the baby and back again. “How are you feeling?”

That’s the better question, but I still almost laugh because the real answer is too messy for a group setting. “Like I got hit by a truck and handed a baby,” I say.

“That tracks,” Luca says dryly.

“So, new house rules,” Killian continues. The room settles again, and I shift the baby a little higher against my chest.

Ryan groans instantly. “Oh no.”

“Until further notice, everybody in this house acts like what it currently is: a fucking house with a newborn in it. No more parties here for the foreseeable future. I’m not having drunk strangers tripping over baby shit or posting pictures from inside the house while this legal situation is still active. If somebody wants to get wasted and grind on a stranger, they can do it somewhere else.”

“That’s devastating,” Thorn says dryly, popping the sucker from his mouth. “Thought this was still America.”

“You play hockey. You’ve never cared about America,” Luca tells him.

Killian doesn’t even glance their way. “This weekend, we childproof the house. Outlets, cabinets, sharp corners, cleaning supplies, stairs, whatever else people with actual brains say we need to handle. We do it now before she’s mobile because if we wait until she can crawl, Ryan will definitely leave a protein shaker full of something toxic within reach.”

Ryan throws both hands up. “That happened once.”