A Daughter Between Two Men
1272 Words
Roberta's POV
We sat quietly for a moment.
Then Brett said, almost to himself: "If Millie is Nolan's mother—how did you not know she was pregnant? You were best friends."
I hadn't — in everything, in all of it, I hadn't stopped to think about that. The logistics of it. The timeline.
"She went to Italy," I said slowly. "About six years ago. A work placement, she said. She was there for almost eight months." I stopped. Something cold moved through me. "We only spoke on the phone. She said the time difference made it hard to video call regularly." I pressed my fingers to my lips. "I thought nothing of it. She came back, and everything was the same, and I never—"
I counted backwards.
Nolan was five years old.
Six years ago. Eight months in Italy.
She had been pregnant.
"She went there to have him," I said. The words came out flat, one at a time, as the shape of it assembled itself. "She went to Italy so I wouldn't see. She had the baby there. She came back and handed him to Irene—" My voice stopped. "That's why Irene's house was off limits. That's why she always had an excuse. Nolan was there. He had been there the whole time. Right there and I—"
I stopped.
My chest hurt.
Not the aching grief kind of hurt. Something sharper. The specific pain of understanding how completely and deliberately you have been managed by someone who knew exactly where to press.
"She planned it from the beginning," I said. "All of it. She grew up with me. She knew every part of me. She knew how I thought, what I feared, what would make me agree—" My voice cracked slightly. "She used all of it. Everything I told her in confidence. Every vulnerable thing I ever gave her."
The room was quiet.
Brett leaned forward. His hands clasped between his knees. "It makes sense now," he said. "All of it lines up."
"She was my sister." I heard my own voice say it. "I had no one. My whole life, no one. And she was—" I stopped. There weren't words for it. There was just the weight of it, sitting in my chest where she used to be.
Brett looked at me for a moment.
"I'm sorry," he said. "For all of it. Every part of what you've been through."
"You didn't do any of it."
"Still." He said it simply. Like it needed saying regardless.
I looked at him.
"Come." He said while standing up. "I'll take you to your room."
He held out his hand to me. I took it.
He led me down a hallway. Past closed doors. Past photographs of his wife.
His house was quiet and large in the way that houses are when only one person lives in them.
He stopped outside a door at the end of a hall.
"It's not much," he said. "But it's yours for now."
He pushed it open. A bed. A window with the city below it. Clean and simple and nothing like the room I'd shared with Jace for eight years — which was exactly what I needed.
"Is there anything you need?" he said. "Food, or—"
"I'm fine." I looked at the room. "I just need to wash and sleep."
He nodded.
"Alright then. Goodnight, Roberta."
"Goodnight."
He stood in the doorway for a moment like he was going to say something else. Then he didn't. Just said goodnight and pulled the door closed behind him.
I stood in the quiet.
The silence was different here. Not empty. Just quiet.
I walked to the bathroom. Turned on the shower. The water was hot. Steam filled the room.
I undressed. Stepped under the spray.
The water ran over my face. My shoulders. My back.
I thought about his hands. The way he held mine. The way he wiped my tears.
He's going to help me.
He's going to help me destroy them.
I whispered into the steam.
The bathroom was warm, and the water was hot and I stood under it for a long time and let it do what water does — not fix anything, just make the immediate surface of things more bearable.
I thought about what Brett had said.
The only way to win against people like that is to rise. To be in a position where they have to look up at you.
I thought about Jace's face the night I told him Ziva was dead. The way he'd sat on the bed and said her name. The way he'd kissed Millie right in front of me. The way Millie had said, "Go bury your bastard child." Like the word was a weapon, and she'd spent years sharpening it.
I spoke into the air.
"Jace." His name in my mouth like a match being struck. "I'm coming for you. Everything you took. Everything you built. All of it." I pressed my hand flat against the tile. "Wait for me."
I stood there until the water went cold.
I dried off and sat on the edge of the bed.
And then it came — the thought I'd been keeping at the edge of my mind since I woke up. The thought I hadn't let myself fully turn toward yet.
Ziva.
She was still in the morgue.
I had to bury her. I had to bring her home and give her somewhere to rest, and I had to do that before anything else — before the revenge, before the divorce, before any of it.
But before the burial—
I pressed my hands together.
Before the burial, there was something I had to know.
I had spent eight years believing Ziva was Jace's daughter. The DNA test that came back positive — the one Millie had collected for me, the one that was almost certainly manipulated — had settled that question, and I had never reopened it. But now, with everything I knew about Millie, with everything I knew about what she was capable of—
The real question was open again.
And the real answer had been sitting across from me all evening.
Brett.
I had met him once. One night. Eight years ago. A stranger in a hotel room on the worst night of a terrible time in my life. I had never forgotten his face. I had never forgotten his card falling from his jacket pocket and his name — just his first name — and the gentleness of his hands on a night I had given him something I had never given anyone else.
And nine months later, Ziva.
I pressed my fingers to my mouth.
How was I supposed to say this to him?
*We met once. Eight years ago. I think my daughter — the one who just died - might have been yours.*
How do you say that to a man who has just buried his wife?
How do you say it to a man who has been sitting beside your hospital bed every day for eight days out of kindness? How do you say that to a man who doesn't even recognise you?
How do you ask him to give you his personal items to get DNA done with a child he never knew existed so you can confirm whether she was his?
I lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling.
I couldn't tell him yet.
But I couldn't bury Ziva without knowing.
And I couldn't know without telling him.
- Writer
