Chapter 143 One forty three

Chapter 143 One forty three
Aria POV

He is Maeve’s dad.

The words didn’t just hit me, they shattered something deep inside me. For a moment, everything around me went completely silent, like the world had been muted. I could imagine Auntie Gianna’s lips moving on the phone, but I couldn’t hear a single word she was saying anymore. It was like I had been pulled underwater, trapped in my own thoughts.

A loud ringing filled my ears instead, sharp, relentless, like an alarm bell that wouldn’t stop.

What did I just hear?

Damien… is Maeve’s father?

My fingers tightened around my phone as my body went cold. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe properly. My mind tried to reject it, tried to twist it into something else, something that made sense. But it didn’t. It refused to.

I must have gone quiet for too long because Auntie Gianna’s voice suddenly cut through faintly again.

“…we had a one-night stand,” she said, her voice breaking.

Her words came in fragments now, slowly piecing themselves together in my head.

“That was how I got pregnant with Maeve…”

My heart skipped.

A one-night stand.

With Damien.

I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry. My chest felt tight, like something heavy was sitting on it. I didn’t even realize I had started pacing until I found myself moving back and forth across the room.

“I searched everywhere for him,” she continued, her voice trembling now. “But he was nowhere to be found. He just disappeared… like I meant nothing.”

Her words carried pain…real, deep pain. 
The kind you don’t fake. The kind that lingers for years.

“He made me a single mother at such a young age,” she said, and then she broke down.

I froze.

Auntie Gianna… crying.

I had never heard her like that before.

“I looked for him everywhere,” she went on between sobs. “I traveled, I asked people, I followed every lead I could find… but he was gone. Completely gone.”

My chest tightened even more.

“Maeve grew up believing her father was dead,” she whispered. “All this time… he was alive.”

The words echoed in my head.

Alive.

Not just alive—but right here. Around us. Living his life like nothing happened.
My grip on the phone loosened slightly as my mind began to spiral.

Damien.

How could he be involved with so many women?

First, it was Ginny the stunning model everyone admired, the one whose name always seemed to follow him like a shadow. That alone had been hard enough to process.

But now… this?

My auntie?

Auntie Gianna?

I shook my head slowly, trying to make sense of it, but it only made things worse. Everything felt tangled, messy, wrong.

What kind of man was he?

How many lives had he walked into, ruined, and then walked out of like it meant nothing?

My thoughts raced faster, jumping from one memory to another. Every interaction I had ever had with Damien suddenly felt different, twisted in a way I couldn’t explain.

Was any of it real?

Or was he just… this person all along?
While my mind was still spinning, trying desperately to catch up with everything I had just learned, something shifted.
It was subtle at first.

The air.

It felt… different.

A strange tension filled the space around me, and my body reacted before my mind could catch up. A chill ran down my spine, and I slowly turned around.

And then I saw him.

Damien.

Standing there.

My breath caught in my throat.

I hadn’t even heard him walk in.

He just… appeared from nowhere.

His eyes were fixed on me, intense and unreadable, like he had been standing there for a while, watching. Waiting.
My heart started pounding violently against my chest.

Did he hear?

How much did he hear?

For a moment, neither of us spoke.

We just stared at each other.

I felt exposed, like everything I had just learned was written all over my face. My shock. My confusion. My anger.

My fear.

Because suddenly, I didn’t know him anymore.

Not at all.

The man standing in front of me felt like a stranger.

A dangerous one. 

I instinctively took a small step back, and his eyes flickered, just for a second, but I caught it.

He noticed.

Of course he always did.

“Aria…” he said my name slowly, his voice low.

Even that sounded different now.

Everything about him did.

My lips parted, but no words came out. My throat refused to cooperate, like it didn’t trust me to speak without breaking apart.

So many questions burned inside me.

Is it true?

Is Maeve really your daughter?

How could you do that?

How many more secrets are you hiding?

But I couldn’t ask any of them.

Not yet.

Because I was still trying to steady myself, still trying to breathe through the storm raging inside me.

Damien took a step closer.

I flinched.

It was small. Almost unnoticeable.
But he saw it.

His entire body stiffened.

And in that moment, something shifted between us, something fragile, something that had once felt strong.

Now, it felt like it was breaking.

Silence filled the room again, thick and suffocating.

And for the first time since I met him…
I was truly afraid of what I might discover next.