Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Mira’s POV

I didn’t call Ace back.

His messages came in quietly and consistently the way he did everything, no pressure, no escalation, just present in the way he’d been present since the beginning and I lay on Zara’s couch and read every one of them.

I put the phone face down and stared at the ceiling and thought about what presence actually meant when it had been built on a foundation the other person didn’t know about.

Saturday came.

I drove to Millhaven alone the way Flora had asked, Zara standing in the doorway of the building watching me go with her arms crossed and an expression that meant she was fighting every instinct she had not to follow.

Flora was waiting outside the community center.

She looked better than the first time. More settled in her own face somehow, like more of her had returned to the right places since we’d last seen each other. She had a bag over her shoulder and her car keys in her hand.

“I thought we’d go somewhere quieter,” she said. “My place.”



Her flat was small and warm and full of plants she’d clearly been collecting for a long time, every windowsill crowded with green, the kind of space that spoke of someone rebuilding a life carefully and with intention.

She made tea.

We sat across from each other at her small kitchen table and she wrapped her hands around her mug the way I wrapped mine and neither of us spoke for a moment, just existed in the particular quiet of two people who had things to say and were deciding how to begin.

“There are things I’ve been remembering,” she started carefully. “Things about your father.”

I kept my face still.

“He wasn’t a good man,” she said simply. “I want to start there so the rest of it has the right frame.” She looked at her mug. “He was wealthy. Charming in the way certain men are charming, the kind that doesn’t cost them anything and gets them everything. I was young and I confused it for something real.”

“What was his name?” I asked quietly.

She looked up.

“James,” she said.

Something moved through me that I couldn’t name yet.

“James Montenegro,” she continued, watching my face carefully. “He was married. I didn’t know that at first and by the time I did I was already—” She stopped and again. “By the time I knew everything, I was already pregnant. And he made it very clear that a child was not something he intended to accommodate.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

“He gave me money,” she said. “To go away. To be quiet. To raise you somewhere he’d never have to think about.” Her jaw tightened with an old anger that had clearly never fully cooled. “I took it because I had no other option and I have never stopped being ashamed of that even though I know I shouldn’t be.”

I sat with that.

Turned it over.

James Montenegro.

Alejandro’s father.

Which meant—

The thought arrived fully formed and hit me somewhere so deep and so central that for a moment the kitchen tilted.

“Mum,” I said slowly, and the word still felt new in my mouth, still felt like something I had to handle carefully. “This man. James Montenegro.” I held her gaze. “Did he have a son?”

Flora looked at me with an expression that shifted into something careful and sad.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Older than you by a few years.” She paused. “Why?”

I looked at my mother across the kitchen table.

Felt the full impossible weight of the last several months rearrange itself into something so devastating and so complete that I almost laughed.

Almost.

“No reason,” I said.

But my hands weren’t steady when I picked up my mug.

And Flora watched my face with the eyes of a mother who had been away too long but hadn’t forgotten how to read it.

“Mira,” she said carefully. “What do you know that I don’t?”

I looked at my mother across the table and felt the last several months rearrange themselves into something so complete and so devastating that the edges of it were almost funny.

Almost.

Alejandro finding the file on me. Coming to Zara’s. I’m trying to find your mother. The way he’d looked at me with his hands on my face like I was something he was terrified of losing.

He knew.

He had to have known.

The dates, the name, the digging he’d been doing—a man like Alejandro with those resources didn’t stumble onto coincidences. He’d pulled that thread and followed it all the way to the end and found exactly what I was sitting with right now and said nothing.

Said nothing and still looked at me like that.

Still came to Zara’s door.

“Mira.” Flora’s voice was gentle but direct. “What do you know?”

I looked at her.

“The son,” I said quietly. “His name is Alejandro.”

She nodded slowly, watching my face.

“I’ve been working for him,” I said. “Living in his house. I’ve been—” I stopped. The word falling sat in my throat and I couldn’t finish the sentence.

I didn’t need to.

Flora’s face did it for me, moving through the understanding in real time, her expression shifting from careful to something that looked like a woman absorbing a blow she’d been half expecting without knowing it.

“Oh Mira,” she said softly.

“He knew,” I said, and my voice came out completely flat. “He had to have known. He was digging into my past, he found you, he has resources and people and—” I pressed my fingers against my mouth briefly. 
“He knew and he didn’t tell me.”

“You don’t know that for certain,” she said carefully.

“I know him,” I replied.

And the terrible thing was that I did.

I knew the way his jaw tightened when he was carrying something heavy. I knew the look he wore when he was calculating the cost of a truth before deciding whether to hand it over. I knew what it meant when he went quiet in a specific way, not cold quiet, thinking quiet, the quiet of a man working out how to handle something he hadn’t been given a manual for.

I’d watched him do it in Zara’s living room.

There are things I need to tell you. About your mother.
He’d said that and stopped himself.

Because he’d already known exactly what those things were and had decided to find her first and tell me after and somewhere in that decision he’d also been sitting with the knowledge that we shared a father and had chosen to keep that specific piece entirely to himself.
I stood up from the table.

Not dramatically. Just couldn’t sit anymore.

I went to Flora’s kitchen window and looked out at her small garden and the plants she’d been growing in a life she’d built without knowing who she was, and I thought about a man who had looked me in the eye and said I’m not most people and meant it in ways I was only now beginning to fully understand.

“Are you alright,” Flora asked from behind me.

I thought about that question honestly.

About the surgery and the countdown and the bet and Ace’s unanswered messages and Marlo’s guilty face and Zara’s fury and Alejandro somewhere in this city not sleeping and now this, this thing sitting in the kitchen behind me that changed the shape of everything.

“No,” I said honestly.

First time I’d said that to anyone in months.

Flora came and stood beside me at the window.
She didn’t say anything.

Just stood there, her shoulder against mine, looking out at the same garden, and I felt her presence the way you felt something you’d been missing for so long you’d convinced yourself you didn’t need it anymore.

My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I already knew before I looked.

Alejandro: We need to talk. I know you know. Please don’t disappear on me.

I stared at it.

He knew that I knew.

Which meant he’d been watching and waiting and had known this moment was coming before I had.

I put the phone back in my pocket without responding.

Stood at my mother’s window in a town I hadn’t known existed six months ago.

And made a decision so quietly it barely made a sound.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​