KAEL

Aria was asleep.

She’d gone under about an hour ago, her breathing evening out slowly, her body finally giving up the fight to stay awake.

She was curled slightly toward me, one hand resting loosely near her stomach the way it had started doing without her seeming to notice, like some part of her was always checking, always making sure.

I watched her for a while.

I didn’t mean to. I just couldn’t stop.

She looked younger when she slept. Less like someone who had spent the past several days being put through the worst kind of hell and more like herself, the version of her I’d started collecting without realizing it.

The one that showed up in small moments.

The way she laughed when something caught her off guard. The way she looked at me sometimes when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, like she was still trying to figure out what I was.

She was carrying our child and she had survived a bomb strapped to her chest and she was here, breathing, warm, and mine.

I had everything I’d wanted for longer than I’d let myself admit.

So the fact that I was lying in the dark staring at the ceiling with my jaw tight and my chest full of something I couldn’t name was, frankly, annoying.

My father’s face wouldn’t leave me alone.

I’d spent years building something solid around that part of me. The part that used to wait by the door when I was small, listening for his footsteps, hoping today would be different.

The part that used to work harder, push further, do more, trying to earn something from a man who had decided before I was old enough to understand it that his legacy mattered more than his son.

I’d taken all of that and I’d packed it down and I’d buried it under enough years and enough discipline that most days I didn’t feel it at all.

Most days it didn’t move.

But tonight it was moving.

Ewan in that garden. That look on his face. The way he sat there and took what I said and what Aria said and didn’t flinch from it and didn’t get cold the way he always got cold. He just sat there looking like a man who had finally run out of places to hide from himself.

I hated that it did something to me.

I hated it because I knew, I’d always known somewhere I refused to look directly, that the want was still there.

The stupid, childish, completely unreasonable want. Not for the man he was. Not for any of the specific things he’d done or failed to do. Just for the thing that was supposed to exist between a father and a son and never had.

That simple, ordinary thing that other people seemed to have without even thinking about it.

Aria’s voice came back to me in the dark.

A part of you still wants it.

She’d said it so plainly. Like she could see straight through the wall I’d spent years building and was just standing on the other side of it, patient, not asking me to knock it down, just acknowledging it was there.

Don’t make the same mistake I made.

She hadn’t spelled it out. She hadn’t needed to. I knew what she meant. Her father. All the things she’d swallowed and held back and decided there was still time for, until there wasn’t. The way grief feels when it comes with regret sitting inside it like a stone.

I looked at her sleeping beside me.

Then I looked at the ceiling.

I lay there for another few minutes telling myself I wasn’t going to do anything about it tonight, that it could wait, that I didn’t owe that man anything including my time, and every single one of those thoughts dissolved the second it formed.

I moved carefully. I’d learned how to get out of a bed without making a sound sometime around my second deployment and it turned out that skill had more uses than I’d originally anticipated. Aria didn’t stir. Her breathing stayed even.

I stood over her for a moment longer than I needed to.

Then I walked to the door.

My two guards were outside in the corridor, both of them straight-backed and alert, the kind of men whose eyes never fully stopped moving even when nothing was happening.

Both trained in the military. Both with records that would make most people uncomfortable to read. I’d chosen them specifically and I’d briefed them twice and I was going to brief them again right now.

"Nobody enters," I said. "I don’t care who it is. I don’t care what reason they give. A fly doesn’t get through that door without my word. Understood?"

Both of them said yes without hesitation.

"I’ll be down the hall. If she wakes up and I’m not back, you call immediately."

Then I walked.

My father’s room was in the same wing, not far. The hospital had put us all in the private section on the upper floor, the kind of floor where the rooms were large and the hallways were quiet and the staff moved softly and didn’t ask unnecessary questions. I’d barely registered any of that when we first arrived because my entire focus had been on Aria.

Now I walked through it slowly.

I stopped outside his door.

I stood there for a moment that was probably longer than it looked and told myself for the last time that I could still turn around. That I didn’t have to do this tonight. That there was nothing stopping me from going back to Aria’s room and lying down and sleeping and dealing with all of this in the daylight like a reasonable person.

Then I pushed the door open.

A nurse was beside the bed, working with quiet efficiency, adjusting something along the IV line, writing something in a chart. She looked up when I came in, politely, professionally, the expression of someone used to family arriving at odd hours.

My father was looking at me.

He’d seen me the second I walked through the door. I could tell because the surprise was already fading from his face by the time I registered it, the way it does when something happens that you weren’t expecting but some part of you was quietly hoping for.

"Is this a bad time," I said.

It wasn’t really a question.

"No," he said.

The nurse finished what she was doing and excused herself without being asked. My father’s assistant, who’d been sitting quietly in the corner chair, stood.

"Give us some time," my father said to him.

The assistant looked at me once, briefly, then left.

The door closed.