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He turns his back on me and starts for the door. “Since her mother left, I led my life a certain way, with Ayla at the center of it, with no one else between us, on purpose.”

“Ollie, stop.” I hold up my hands, pleading, begging, asking. “I’m sorry I made the wrong choice, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have opened up to me or let Ayla spend time with me.”

He turns back to look at me. “Then how do I explain to myself that I opened us up for this, and now my relationship with my daughter is damaged?” He shakes his head. “Ayla looked into my eyes day after day and lied, not about some dumb kid stuff, but about this. We were a unit, and now…it’s like I don’t even know who she is. She keeps secrets, and you helped her lie to me.”

Each word is like a slash over my flesh, cutting down and deepening the already gaping wound. I want to tell him no, but it’s true. I did help her lie, even if it was just giving her time to tell the truth.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” He turns away again.

“Please don’t go.”

“There’s no need to stay. All is said and done. No need to harp on it. I need to repair the damage…”

“That I’ve caused,” I finish for him.

He doesn’t look at me. “Goodbye, Luciana.”

He walks down the stairs, leaving me frozen to stare after him. When the door clicks closed, pain peaks in my belly, and I double over, leaning against the banister. He dumped me. He walked away. I was only trying to help.

My gaze goes to the door. I have to go after him. I need to talk to him. I take a step forward, and then it hits me. I’m not dressed.

He dumped me. Because I made the wrong decision. I lost him.

Panic sets in, and I run down the stairs and engage the security lock enforcer and the deadbolt.

I crumble onto the floor and bury my face in my knees. I don’t cry. I just will myself to breathe and let the waves pass. The last thing I wanted was to damage their relationship. He trusted me not to hurt Ayla, and that’s exactly what I did.

Then how do I explain to myself that I opened us up for this, and now my relationship with my daughter is damaged?

The wave of nausea rises up my chest, and my hand shoots to clutch my throat. I shoot to my feet and run to one of the bedrooms on the ground floor. I barely make it to the bathroom. I empty out my stomach and, with it, all my energy and strength. There’s a migraine looming in the back of my head. I rinse my mouth and collapse on the guest bed. The pain begins to set in, and I almost welcome it. It won’t let me think about anything else. My eyes well, but I fall asleep before the tears come.

Oliver

I go to the bathroom and wash my face. It’s been burning all day, like my blood, like my stomach, like everything I once thought to be true. Ayla is a liar, Lux was her accomplice, and Noris is back in my life once again, destroying my world as I know it.

Three times, she’s done this.

It’s different now. She broke me in a different way. I can’t focus on feeding, changing, and holding Ayla, because she’s now a teenager that keeps secrets from me. I don’t have the option of throwing myself into my work because I need to have tough conversations about how she conspired with the woman who left us and never looked back.

Noris is her mother. A mother’s love is the only thing I have not been able to give Ayla. I felt I was so close this time. Lux, God. Why did she ruin everything?

I swipe away the thought and step out of my bathroom. My daughter sits at the table, doing her homework, her pretty face down staring at her book, making annotations to remember the material. God, why can’t time just stand still and let me forget this? I would give anything to go back to last night, where confronting my kid wasn’t in the plans and I had a girlfriend with whom I could see a future.

I take a deep breath and tell myself I can do this rationally. She’s a child. I can forgive her. Who I can’t forgive is the adults who knew and conspired to keep this from me. Noris. Her grandmother. Lux.

Ayla’s phone pings, and she reaches for it. She looks at the screen, smiles, types something, and returns to her homework.

And I see red.

Is that Noris on the other end? Is that why she’s smiling that brightly? She’s been acting like this for weeks. All I can think about is how she’s been lying this whole time.

“Who is that?” I ask.

Ayla jumps in her chair, her eyes rounding as she looks at me. I’ve never used this tone with her.

“It’s Bron. She said something funny and?—”