She Has His Eyes, and He’s Marrying My Stepsister Chapter 05

Chapter 5: The Wrong Number

vy fell asleep in the back of Killian’s car, her head on his folded jacket. He kept glancing at her in the rearview mirror ke he was afraid she’d disappear.

We sat in my driveway with the engine off.

“Show me,” he said.

I pulled up an old cloud backup with trembling fingers. Five years of photos. Ivy’s first smile. Her first steps. The buried deep, a screenshot I’d never been able to delete.

I handed him the phone.

He read it once. Then again. I watched his face turn to stone.

Get rid of it. That night was a mistake.

“This isn’t my number,” he said quietly.

“It was your London number.”

“I never had this number. I’ve had the same phone since the day I landed.” He looked up. “Who gave it to you?”

I opened my mouth to answer. And stopped.

The memory came back slowly, like fog clearing. The week after he left. Sloane knocking on my bedroom door with a sticky note, all sugar and sweetness.

Killian asked me to give you this. His new number. He said call him anytime.

“Sloane,” I whispered.

Killian went completely still.

“She gave it to me. She said you asked her to.” My voice broke. “I believed her. Why would I not believe her?”

He stared out the windshield. For a long time, he didn’t say anything. And then he laughed. A low, broken sound with no humor in it at all.

“I called you,” he said. “Every day for two months. Your number was disconnected.”

“My mother cut off my phone plan. Sloane told her I was running up bills.”

“I wrote you letters. To your mother’s house.”

“I never got a single one,”

He closed his eyes. “Of course you didn’t.”

Five years. Five years of crying myself to sleep, of telling Ivy her daddy “lived far away,” of hating him. And it was all a lie built by a girl with a sticky note and a smile.

“I thought you didn’t want us,” I said. The tears came hot and fast now. “I thought you looked at a picture of my positive test and laughed.”

He turned to me. His eyes were wet. Killian Voss, the coldest man I’d ever known, had wet eyes.

“I would have come back,” he said roughly. “I would have crawled back across the ocean on my hands and knes, Wien. If I had known-”

He stopped. Swallowed. Looked back at our sleeping daughter.

“I missed everything,” he whispered. “Her first word. Her first step. Five birthdays.”

“Mama,” I said softly. “Her first word was mama. Her second was duck.”

A small, broken smile tugged at his mouth. “Duck.”

“She was obsessed.”

He laughed again, but this time it was real. And it cracked something open in my chest that I’d kept locked for five years.

Then a fist slammed against the driver’s side window.

We both jumped. Ivy stirred in the back.

Grant stood outside the car, his face red, his chest heaving. He was holding his phone, and on the screen was a photo of the three of us on the grass at the duck pond. Someone had taken it. Someone had sent it to him.

“Get out of the car,” my brother growled. “Get out of the damn car, Killian.”

Killian stepped out calmly. “Grant-”

“She’s five and a half. You left five and a half years ago.” Grant’s voice cracked. “You slept with my little sister? And then you just left her?”

“It’s not what you think.”

“She raised that kid ALONE!”

Grant’s fist connected with Killian’s jaw so hard his head snapped sideways.

And Killian didn’t even lift his hands to stop him.