Free Web NovelChapter 260: I will not let anyone take that from me
The hospital was efficient when it needed to be, and Julian made sure it needed to be. He knew how to walk into a room and compress the timeline of things.
Within the hour, the DNA samples had been taken, Julian’s own, a sample he had brought of Josh’s, and a reference sample for baby Divina taken from the item his investigator had collected weeks ago for exactly this purpose.
Then they waited.
Yvette sat beside him in the private waiting area with her legs crossed and her bag in her lap, unusually quiet for a woman who was rarely quiet. She watched the wall. She watched the door. She watched Julian, who sat with his elbows on his knees and his eyes focused on something she couldn’t see.
The results came back faster than standard. Julian had made sure of that too.
He read them first. He sat with the paper for a moment. Just a moment. Let it settle into certainty. Baby Divina and Yvette’s daughter were a match. Siblings. Same mother.
Which meant the baby sleeping in the cradle at the Pedro mansion right now was not Divina at all. She was Yvette’s second daughter.
Which meant Yvette’s third baby, the one declared dead, handled and disposed of before her mother ever opened her eyes, was not dead.
And Julian’s daughter’s baby, Justina, was still out there. Somewhere. With someone. In a place he hadn’t found yet.
He folded the paper once. He looked at Yvette.
She was already looking at him.
And he remembered what he had thought in the café that underneath all the noise and the sass and the relentlessness, Yvette Alcantara could read a person. She always could. It was one of the things that had made her so hard to shake all those years ago.
You could control your face around most people. Not entirely around her. She uncrossed her legs and sat forward.
"Let me guess," she said quietly. Her voice was different. No performance in it. Just her.
"She’s not your baby." She held his gaze steadily. "And the baby you have at home..." A breath. "She’s my other baby." Something moved across her face fast, complex, too many things at once to name. Then it settled.
"My baby is alive." Julian looked at her. "Yes," he said.
Yvette nodded slowly. Once. Like she was absorbing it through the top of her head and letting it travel down.
"Okay." Her voice was very controlled for someone who had just been told her child was alive when she had believed otherwise for a month. "Okay."
Then she looked at him directly, and the control cracked just enough to let something fierce through underneath.
"Now, where could the third baby be, and where is your baby?" she asked
"I have seen family politics and power plays my whole life."
Yvette said it slowly, like she was arranging the pieces out loud as they landed. "That would explain why your uncle called me here. And Leo being in Verenza." She let out a short breath. "I was in such a rush to see him. Didn’t stop to think. Didn’t ask why." She shook her head. "It was well planned. All of it. Every single part of it."
Julian said nothing.
He was not in the hospital hallway anymore. Not really. He was in the Pedro mansion, standing in the doorway of a bedroom, watching Amara cry herself to sleep. He was watching her hands grip his shirt in the dark. He was thinking about what he was going to say when he walked back through that door today without their daughter.
Yvette looked at him.
She read whatever was on his face and, for once in her life, said nothing to fill the silence.
Then she let out a long breath and something in her whole body settled. The sharpness, the performance, the layer she wore like armour, all of it set aside at once. What was left underneath was quieter. More real.
"I’m glad," she said simply. "Whatever this is, whatever mess your family has made of all our lives..." Her voice was steady. "I’m glad my two babies are alive."
She stood slowly and picked up her bag.
The nanny rose beside her, and the baby adjusted carefully against her shoulder. Yvette took two steps toward the door.
And stopped. freewёbnoνel.com
She turned. Walked back to him without hurry, reached into her bag and pulled out a card, cream coloured, simple, and held it out.
Julian took it.
"I’ll be staying here for now," she said. "Call me." Her eyes stayed on his. "You will find my third baby. Won’t you?"
"Yvette..."
"Don’t soften it." She shook her head slightly. "Just answer me."
Julian looked at her directly. "Yes."
She nodded once. Absorbed it. Then she looked down for a moment at the floor between them, and when she looked back up, her voice had changed again, quieter, something exposed in it that she didn’t bother to hide.
"This had nothing to do with me," she said.
"Your family’s war, your uncle’s games, I was living my life. I was on a business trip." The brightness in her eyes was not tears exactly. It was something held just behind tears.
"You know what my life has looked like, Julian. You were there for some of it. Always looking for something, love, belonging, someone to stay..." She stopped herself. Steadied. "And then God gave me three girls. Three. He decided enough was enough and gave me everything I had been looking for all at once."
The hallway was very still.
"I will not let anyone take that from me," she said. "Not your uncle. Not Leo. Not this city. Not anyone."
Julian said nothing.
Because there was nothing to say that would be adequate, and he knew it.
"I understand your wife is in pain." Yvette’s voice softened at the edges just slightly. "I understand what she is feeling right now because I felt it too. I felt it for a month, thinking I had lost two babies." She pressed her lips together briefly.
"And because it is you, only because it is you, I will allow the baby to stay. A few days. So your wife can hold her and breathe and have a moment before the next hard thing comes."
She met his eyes one last time.
"A few days, Julian. Then I want my baby girl back."
