(Liam Romano's POV)
“Hailey,” I said, and the name came out small and surrendered, as if saying it could undo what I'd done. She held Isabella against her chest — the nurse cradling my daughter — an image that should have jarred and enraged me, and instead landed with an odd, crooked rightness. I had watched her slip from my bed, felt the cold where her warmth had been, and a primitive part of me had trailed after her, wanting to draw back what I had let go of or perhaps seize what never truly belonged to me.
Her eyes met mine and there was no hangover from the night, no soft haze of want. There was the storm I had birthed: furious, leveled, and inside it a terrible, flat calm — the certainty of someone who had crossed a line and could not uncross it.
“Liam,” she said. The word wasn’t a
