All Chapters of The Hockey Star Wasn't My Baby's Father. His Father Was : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

021: ELARA POVThe pause stretches long enough that I almost tell him he doesn't have to answer. Then he exhales, slow and deliberate, like he's been holding the breath for longer than just this conversation."Yes," he says. "I have feelings for you."The admission sits in the small kitchen between us, plain and unguarded, nothing like the careful, layered way most things get said to me lately. No qualifiers. No hedge. Just the truth, delivered the way Kieran delivers everything directly, without performance."I've had them for a while," he continues, before I can respond. "Longer than you'd probably guess. I'm not telling you this because I want something from you, or because I think saying it out loud is going to change anything about where you are right now. I'm telling you because you asked, and I don't lie to you. That's not a policy I'm willing to break just because the truth is inconvenient."I don't know what to do with my hands, so I wrap them around the mug of tea he made me

023: ELARA POV The filing goes in on a Tuesday, quiet and procedural, nothing like the chaos of the rink or the dean's office or any of the other moments this story has handed me so far. Just Kieran's firm submitting paperwork, a case number assigned, a hearing date set three weeks out. It feels almost anticlimactic, after everything — the opening move in a fight that's going to matter enormously, filed with all the ceremony of a parking ticket. I tell Dominic that evening, sitting across from him at the small kitchen table in his suite, the same table where two untouched water glasses once sat between us like a boundary neither of us had agreed to yet. There's no boundary tonight. He listens carefully as I walk him through what Kieran and my aunt told me — the trust, Eleanor's petition, the box of my mother's things somewhere in transit from my aunt's attic. "I want to help," he says, when I finish. "Not to take it over. Just — resources, if you need them. Access to records on my e

025: ELARA POVThe dorm is quiet by the time I get back, Mia already asleep in her room, the common area lit only by the small lamp near the window that neither of us ever remembers to turn off. I stand in front of the mirror on the back of my closet door for a long moment before I let myself actually look.The girl staring back at me doesn't look like someone in the middle of a scandal. She looks tired, mostly. A little thinner in the face than a few months ago, a little steadier in the eyes than I expect given everything that's happened today alone — Eleanor's threatening text, the estate filing, Kieran's honest confession, my aunt's voice cracking open thirty years of careful silence.I place a hand over my stomach. There's still barely anything to feel, just the faintest suggestion of change beneath my palm, but it's real now in a way it wasn't a few weeks ago. Real enough that I've stopped flinching every time I remember it's there.I think about my mother, a woman I've spent my

Marcus calls at seven in the morning, which is early enough that I already know before I answer it's not going to be good news. "You should sit down for this one," he says, by way of greeting. "I'm sitting." "Good. Because I've spent the last three days going through every disbursement from that trust since Eleanor was appointed co-trustee, and the picture is worse than either of us expected." Papers rustle on his end, the particular sound of a man who's printed everything out because some things feel more real on paper than on a screen. "The trust was valued at just over two point one million when Elara's mother set it up. Property included." "And now?" "Now it's sitting at around one hundred and forty thousand. Most of that tied up in the property itself, which hasn't been touched, thankfully. The liquid assets are almost entirely gone." I sit with the number for a moment, feeling something cold settle into my chest. Two million dollars. An inheritance meant to change the ent

The folder is sitting on my desk when I get back from practice, no note, no explanation, just my mother's handwriting on the label: *For your own good, darling.*I know before I open it that whatever's inside is going to be bad. My mother doesn't send folders that aren't weapons dressed up as concern.Inside are printouts texts I sent Elara months ago, before any of this started, back when I still thought the low-grade possessiveness I felt toward her was just old friendship running hot. Some of them read fine out of context. Most of them don't. There's a photo, too, one I don't remember being taken, of the night I gripped her wrist too hard in the suite kitchen, my face caught mid-argument, hers caught mid-flinch.None of it is criminal. I know that immediately, running through it with the specific, sinking clarity of someone assessing exactly how bad something looks rather than whether it's technically illegal. But it doesn't need to be criminal to be damning. It just needs to be pu