XANDER
Shocked?
Shocked wasn’t even the right word. I was far beyond shocked.
Disbelief, anger, confusion—I felt it all at a time.
A huge part of me simply refused to accept it, to believe what I had just heard.
Ashley… my daughter?
It wasn’t the idea of having a child with Amara that unsettled me—no, if anything, the thought of sharing something so precious with her would have made me happy.
But what truly shook me to my core was the possibility that Amara had kept this from me.
That she could have hidden the existence of our child for five long years, keeping a father away from his daughter, and a daughter away from her father.
To me, that felt like the cruelest betrayal imaginable.
And yet, my heart fought against it.
This wasn’t the Amara I knew. She had always had the pur
