Five Years Earlier
Bella's POV
Kai was eleven months old when he said his first word, and of course it happened on a Tuesday evening in the kitchen of the guest cottage, with flour on my hands and no one prepared to witness it except the two of us and a man I still hadn't fully admitted anything to, not even myself.
"He's staring at you," I told Ronan, who was crouched on the kitchen floor stacking wooden blocks into a tower that Kai kept gleefully demolishing the second it reached three pieces high.
"That's his concentrating face. He does it right before he does something new."
"He's been doing it for ten minutes. I think he's just planning his next attack on this tower."
"Maybe." I wiped my hands on a dish towel, watching them both from the counter, Kai's small fists opening and c
