Page 74 of Velvet Betrayal
I followed, feeling the day’s failures drag behind me like an old injury. The kitchen was exactly as we’d left it—Kieran pulling two mugs from the top shelf, setting one out for me without asking, the soft clunk of the water carafe like it had never been put down anywhere else.
“You saw Julian,” he said, dropping the tea bag into the cup so hard the tag vanished into the water. The air filled up with bergamot, or maybe licorice.
“Yeah. I don’t like Rosie staying there,” I said. “I miss her. But we have shit to work out.”
“She’s my daughter. She should be with her family.”
“I’m not getting into this with you,” I told him. “Julian is her father. He’s the only father she knows.”
He stared at me, unblinking but not cruel, and I could see how much it cost him to let it go. “I hate that she doesn’t know she’s mine.”
I took a sip of tea. “Thanks for the tea. I had a really long, hard day. I don’t want to talk about this.”
He exhaled, slow. “You have to tell her. Someday. It can’t be like this forever.”
“Don’t tell me how to mother my child, Kieran.” I meant it sharp, even though part of me hated the chill in my own voice.
“I wouldn’t,” he said, but his hand gripped the counter so hard the laminate shuddered. “I just want her to have the truth. Not the lie.”
“Yeah, well, in my experience, the truth only ever costs people more.” I didn’t look at him, but the words hung in the air. “If I tell her, everything else becomes a lie. Her home, her father, her whole goddamn life—”
“Her mother’s the DA,” he cut in, softer than I expected. “She’ll learn about betrayal and power whether you prep her for it or not.”
I closed my eyes. It was already too late for prep. Rosie walked the tightrope between our secrets every day, somehow smiling through it, like kids have a secret math for lies and only subtract what they can survive.
In the silence, Kieran swapped my mug for a fresh one, his knuckle brushing my wrist. The touch was nothing. It was everything.
“Why are you here, anyway?” I asked, barely louder than the radiator ticking. “The real reason. Not the shadow-bodyguard horseshit.”
He actually laughed. “I mean, that was part of it. But also, I missed you. Is that a crime?”
“Not in Boston,” I said, raising the mug. The tea had gone bitter. “If it is, it’s a misdemeanor at best.”
He smiled, but it was private, twitching at the edge of his mouth. His hand rose and fell on the counter, like a reflex he hadn’t managed to kill despite years of practice. Under my ribs,something wanted to dig my nails into his arm, call up the old muscle memory, but I reminded myself: this wasn’t safety. This was two bombs sharing a fuse.
“I booked an appointment with my tattoo artist next week,” he said, showing me the underside of his arm. “Think a rose would look good here?”
I blinked. I’d seen that patch of skin before, mapped it a thousand ways—whole, cut, bandaged, shadowed in the morning after sex—but the idea of a rose there threw me. Not because it was sentimental, but because I knew exactly what it meant, who it would be for.
“You’re not serious,” I said.
He shrugged, tracing a bruise above his wrist. “It’s the only thing that fits. Honestly, it’s happening whether you want it to or not. I guess, for some weird reason, I wanted your approval?”
“My approval doesn’t mean anything to you.” I tried to sound like I was joking, but it came out thin. Something inside me had cracked in the last twenty-four hours—a stress fracture, invisible until now.
He looked at me, searching for the joke, then realized there wasn’t one. “Don’t do that,” he said, voice low. “Don’t minimize what you are to me. I know I’m a dick, but… I’ve learned a few things since the last time I burned my life down for someone.” He pushed away from the counter, coming closer. “I’ll show you the sketch tomorrow,” he said, so quietly it barely made it across the three feet of air between us. I wanted to reach for him, or slap the words out of the room, but I just tapped my mug against my thigh, pretending the heat was something I could manage.
“I know you care about her, Kieran. Do you understand why I kept you from her now? Do you get it?”
His voice had gone ankle-high, a hush leaking under the kitchen door. “Of course I do,” he said. “You wanted her safe from everything that made me.”
He said it so plain it hurt. I remembered Rosie looking up from a Lego construction, or behind a book, asking a question I couldn’t answer without inventing a whole fraudulent family tree. I remembered, with sick clarity, the exact moment I decided to never say his name to our daughter—at the hospital, when Julian asked, Is there anyone else in the family who needs to know? and I lied: No. It’s just us. I’m all she’s got.
For all his faults, Julian never pushed me. Never asked. He fell in love with Rosie when she was just an idea, body parts on a magnet on my fridge.
And that—God help me—had seemed, for a long time, enough.
“I should’ve tried harder to reach out to you. To find you, so I could tell you,” I whispered. “I was a coward.”
