“Your address was in this.”
“That’s following me with paperwork.”
His eyes flicked toward the narrow opening behind me.
“May I come in?”
“No.”
He nodded once.
The lack of argument unsettled me more than anger would have.
“Then I’ll stay here.”
I waited.
He opened the folder.
“Noah was born on October seventeenth.”
My hand tightened around the door.
“You had no right.”
“I asked for a date.”
“You asked people to investigate my child.”
His gaze sharpened.
“Your child?”
There it was.
The first fracture.
“Don’t do this in my hallway.”
“Then tell me I’m wrong.”
I couldn’t.
Dante looked down at the papers again.
“You left me in January.
Noah was born in October.”
“Babies aren’t calendars.”
“No.
But doctors are.”
My pulse jumped.
He removed a photocopied form from the folder.
The details were too small for me to read from behind the chained door.
“There was no father listed on his birth certificate.”
“That proves nothing.”
“I know.”
“Then leave.”
He folded the paper back into the file.
“I will.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“If you tell me there is no possibility he’s mine, I’ll walk down those stairs.”
The hallway went silent.
Dante’s voice lowered.
“I won’t ask you again.”
Behind me, Noah rolled his train across the floor and made an engine noise.
Dante heard it.
His face changed, but he remained outside.
I remembered the man from the market who could silence a crowd merely by approaching.
Then I looked at the man standing on my stained apartment carpet, waiting for permission to cross a cheap brass chain.
“There’s a possibility,” I whispered.
His eyes closed.
Only for a second.
When they opened, the anger was gone.
That frightened me too.
“How much of a possibility?”
I swallowed.
“Dante.”
