LOGIN🖤 Alexandra 🖤Fuck you, Alexandra. How dare you get your panties soaked just from his forehead on yours?I stood in front of the mirror in the hospital’s ladies’ room, both palms braced against the cold porcelain sink, and glared at my own reflection like it had personally betrayed me. Which, in a sense, it had.How dare you get like that just because his forehead was on yours. I pointed at myself in the mirror, fully aware I had lost whatever was left of my dignity the second I started lecturing my own reflection out loud. What the heck, woman.I could control my heart. Life had taught me exactly how to lock that particular door and walk away from it. I could control my brain. God knows I’d spent half a decade proving that, building a whole new empire back up from nothing while raising four children mostly alone, no breakdowns, no slipping. But my body, specifically my pussy apparently, had never gotten the memo that Jacob Grey was supposed to be a closed case.It was like I tur
🖤Jacob 🖤“Everything about Amara’s financial records was traced back to Stella,” I said. “Which is impossible because Stella is sitting in your custody.”She turned, and I watched the last soft edges of the woman who’d just held our children disappear behind something colder, something I recognized instantly even after five years, because I used to be the only person alive who got to see this version of her up close.“Then I need to torture the truth out of Amara,” she said. “Enough mind games. I want her alone, I want her scared, and I want her talking inside the hour.”The old Lex. No performance in it, no hesitation, just pure clean intention with all the softness stripped out of her voice like she’d peeled it off on purpose.God help me.“Is it weird,” I said, before I could stop myself, “that I like this version of you better?”She went still. Just for a second. Long enough that I knew the question had actually landed somewhere instead of bouncing off her.“Excuse me?”“You hea
🖤 Jacob 🖤Lex had barely finished saying help me find out who turned your mistake into a weapon before my phone started buzzing in my pocket, and some old instinct in me the one that had kept me alive for five years of running went cold before I even looked at the screen.Jack.I stepped a few feet further down the corridor before I answered, some reflex of keeping the worst of my life at arm’s length from Lex still firing even now, even after everything.“Talk to me,” I said.“Boss, you need to sit down for this.” Jack’s voice had none of its usual flatness. That alone told me everything I needed to know about how bad it was about to get. “I pulled Amara’s financials like you asked. Followed the money backward.”“And?”“She’s been getting paid two ways. One small transfer, monthly, from an account I’m ninety percent sure traces back to you the videos, the arrangement, whatever you had going. That part’s clean. That part makes sense.”“And the other way?”“The other way is bigger. A
🖤 Alexandra 🖤“Thank you,” Jacob muttered, the second we got outside the ward.He pulled me into his arms before I had time to decide whether I wanted to let him.“Thank you for keeping me alive in their little minds,” he murmured against my ear, his hold tightening like he was afraid I might disappear if he loosened it even slightly. “Thank you for showing them what I look like.”I let myself stay there for exactly three seconds longer than I should have. Three seconds of his heartbeat against my ear, three seconds of a smell I hadn’t let myself remember in years, three seconds where the only thing that existed was the relief of two children breathing on their own and a man who hadn’t disappeared completely, no matter how hard he’d tried.Then I pulled myself out of his arms, because three seconds was already three seconds too many.“You don’t need to thank me,” I said, stepping back, putting air between us where his arms had just been. “They exist because of your obsession with me
🖤 Alexandra 🖤I had braced myself for a lot of things when Caleb dropped my other two babies this morning. I had not braced myself for this.I stood by the window with my arms crossed, not because I was cold, but because I needed somewhere to put my hands that wasn’t reaching for something I hadn’t decided yet whether I was allowed to want, and I watched Jacob fold to his knees on a hospital floor with two of our children wrapped around him like he’d never left.Daddy’s back from the trip.I had built that lie so carefully, so many years ago, the first time Freddy asked where his father was and I couldn’t make myself say the truth out loud to a two-year-old. Working very far away. I’d told myself it was a kindness. Tonight, watching it land exactly the way I’d designed it to land watching my son cling to Jacob’s leg like gravity itself had finally been corrected I understood for the first time that it hadn’t only been a kindness to them.It had been a door I left open for myself,
🖤 Jacob 🖤When I walked through that door, five sets of eyes turned toward me at once, and for one full second nobody in that room moved at all.Lex’s face I could read instantly careful, watching, waiting to see what I’d do before she decided what she would. But it was the four small faces that undid me, because they all wore the exact same expression for the exact same heartbeat: confusion. The polite, searching confusion of children trying to place a face they almost recognized but couldn’t yet.And then one of them the little girl closest to the foot of the bed, the one with my eyes, my exact eyes, set in a face that was unmistakably half her mother’s broke first.“Daddy?”The word came out small and unsure, more question than statement, like she was testing whether the word even belonged in this room. And God help me, I lost my breath completely. Five years. Five years and I still recognized myself looking back at me out of a five-year-old’s face, and she knew me. She knew me.
🖤 Alexandra 🖤I found Jayden inside our parent greenhouse later that night, the one they gifted themselves on their twentieth anniversary. I remember finding it cliche l.The place still smelled like lavender and fresh rain because Dada spent years obsessively taking care of every flower personal
🖤 Alexandra 🖤The house still did not feel normal. I honestly did not know if it ever would again. Even the silence felt different now. Like grief permanently settled inside the walls with us. Everywhere I looked reminded me of Dada somehow.The living room couch where he always stretched across
🖤 Jacob 🖤I genuinely started thinking she was not coming out anymore.Four hours. Four fucking hours sitting inside my car across from the hospital while rain tapped softly against the windshield and exhaustion slowly ate through my body. Nurses came out. Doctors came out. Families came out cryi
🖤Jacob🖤The news headline stayed on my screen for so long the words started blurring together eventually.“Jay Hale finally laid to rest in private Hale cemetery.”Underneath it was a blurry picture somebody took from far away. Black umbrellas. Black cars. Black clothes. A family burying the cent







