Not a coincidence

Chapter 6

Isabella's POV

I remained standing in that corridor long after he disappeared behind the ward doors, my legs refusing to carry me anywhere else.

The smell of antiseptic clung to the air, sharp and clinical, mixing with the faint bitterness of hospital coffee someone had left forgotten on a tray nearby. Somewhere down the hall, a machine beeped steadily, patient and indifferent, while my own heart continued to slam against my ribs as though it did not know the danger had passed.

Why did he look at me like that?

I pressed my palm against my chest, willing it to settle. It was not simply the fright of nearly striking a child, though that alone had been enough to leave me shaking. It was the way his eyes had held mine, cold grey eyes that seemed to search my face for something he could not name, the same way I had searched his.

I knew him. Not intimately, not by name until Doctor Frank had addressed him, but I knew that face. I had carried it in some buried corner of my memory for seven years, tucked away beneath grief too heavy to examine.

The night I lost my daughter, he had been there. A tall stranger pacing outside the delivery ward, his jaw tight, his hands fisted at his sides, radiating the same helpless fury I now recognized on him tonight.

Could it be? No. It could not be.

I was still turning the thought over in my mind, my back pressed lightly against the cool corridor wall, when I heard his footsteps returning, sharp and deliberate against the tiled floor.

I lifted my head, and there he was, standing directly before me, close enough that I had to tilt my chin to meet his gaze fully. Up close, he was larger than I had realized, broad-shouldered, immaculate even in his rumpled state, his blue eyes narrowed on my face with an intensity that made my skin prickle.

"You are still here," he said, and it was not a question.

"I wished to know she was well before I left." My voice came out steadier than I felt, though my fingers curled into the fabric of my skirt.

"How convenient." His tone was flat, edged with something sharp beneath the calm. "A stranger nearly runs my daughter down in the street, and then lingers at the hospital for hours, refusing to leave, insisting on her welfare."

"I do not understand what you are implying, Mr. Cole." I lifted my chin, refusing to let him see how his nearness unsettled me. "I did what any decent person would do."

"Decent people do not linger this long." He took a step closer, and I caught the faint scent of him then, cedar and something clean, expensive, nothing at all like the cheap cologne Marcus wore. "Neither do they turn pale the moment they see my daughter's face."

My stomach dropped. He had noticed.

"I do not know what you mean," I said, though the lie sat heavy and useless on my tongue.

"You know precisely what I mean." He leaned in, his voice dropping lower, quieter, and somehow that made it more dangerous than if he had shouted. "My daughter has hair no one in her family carries. Not on my side, and as far as I have been told, not on the side she came from either. And yet you walk into my hospital tonight with that same rare white hair, those same striking eyes, and you expect me to believe that is coincidence?"

He noticed everything. Of course he did.

I forced my expression to remain composed, though panic clawed quietly at my throat. If I admitted anything now, if I gave him even a thread to pull, he would unravel everything, and I was not ready. I did not even know, myself, whether what I suspected was true.

"Resemblances happen, Mr. Cole. White hair is rare, yes, but not impossible. I am certain there are families across this country who share the same trait, entirely unrelated to yours." I kept my voice even, though my palms had grown damp.

"I do not believe in coincidences that convenient." His eyes did not waver from mine, searching, dissecting, and I felt, for one unsteady moment, as though he could see straight through the careful wall I had built around myself these last few hours. "Not when they involve my daughter."

"Then perhaps you should ask the good Lord why He fashions people the way He does, instead of interrogating a stranger who saved your daughter's life tonight." The words left me sharper than intended, my exhaustion and grief finally cracking through my composure.

Something flickered across his face, surprise, perhaps, that I had dared to push back against him. Few people, I imagined, ever did.

"What is your name?" he asked instead, his voice quieter now, though no less demanding.

"Isabella." I did not offer my surname. I was not yet ready to hand him that thread either.

"Isabella," he repeated, testing the sound of it as though committing it to memory, and something about the way he said it, low, deliberate, made an unwelcome shiver move down my spine. "I will find out everything about you, Isabella. Understand that now."

Before I could respond, a small voice broke through the tension between us, hoarse and half-formed with sleep.

"Mummy?"

We both turned at once.

The ward door had drifted open, and there she stood, swaying slightly on her small feet, an IV line still taped to the back of her tiny hand, her white hair falling loose and tangled around her face. Her eyes, when they found mine, went wide, and something in her small face crumpled with a longing so raw it stole the breath clean from my lungs.

"Lily, you should be resting..." Alexander began, moving toward her, but she was no longer looking at him at all.

She was looking only at me.

"Mummy." Her voice cracked, thick with tears, and she stumbled forward on unsteady legs, her arms already reaching. "Mummy, you came back."

The corridor went utterly silent around me. Even the beeping machines, the distant hum of the hospital, seemed to fade into nothing beneath the weight of those four words, spoken so plainly, so certainly, in front of the one man who had sworn, only moments ago, to uncover every secret I carried.

I opened my mouth, though no sound came, my eyes flying to Alexander's face.

His jaw had gone rigid, his blue eyes darkening with something I could not read, shock, suspicion, and beneath it all, a dawning horror that mirrored the very thing tightening around my own chest.

Oh God. She knows me. How does she know me?