The Daughter They Didn’t Want Won The Lottery Chapter 16
We ended up sitting across from each other in a café.
The air between us was thick.
Four years, and everything neither of us had said—we didn’t know where to start.
The heart in his latte foam collapsed slowly. Neither of us had said three words when he finally broke first.
He held his cup with white knuckles. “How—how have you been?”
“Fine,” I said.
“What did you end up studying?”
“Business. I’m working here now.”
“Oh… good.” He looked down and stirred a coffee that had already gone cold.
I said, “What are you doing in London?”
His eyes flickered. “Work trip.” A pause. “But also—I was hoping I’d run into you.”
His voice dropped. “I didn’t think I actually would.”
I didn’t answer. Took a sip of my coffee. Bitter. I set the cup down and looked at him, and I could tell my face wasn’t giving him anything.
“Liam,” I said, and pushed my chair back a little. “I should go.”
He reached across the table quickly and caught my wrist. Not hard. But urgent.
“Em—have you really never thought about me? Not once, in four years?”
I slowly pulled my hand free. I looked at his slightly red-rimmed eyes, and inside me there was nothing—still and cold as a winter lake.
“Liam,” I said. “We were classmates. I don’t think there’s much reason to spend my days thinking about an old classmate.”
The light in his face dimmed.
His lips moved once. Closed. His throat worked.
But he didn’t give up. After a moment he tried something else.
“Don’t you—don’t you want to know how your parents are? Your mom and dad—”
I shook my head. My voice stayed flat, like I was talking about people I’d never met.
“Whether they’re alive or dead has nothing to do with me. The day I left, I stopped having a family.”
Liam’s mouth opened. Something closed his throat.
Just then, my phone buzzed.
Ethan on the screen. I picked up. His voice came through the speaker—easy, warm.
“Where are you? I’m passing the market on the way home. Want me to grab anything?”
The corner of my mouth softened. I heard my own voice go a little different.
“No, I’m good. Just grabbing a coffee. On my way home.”
I hung up. Stood. Picked up my bag. Smiled politely down at Liam.
“Sorry. My fiancé’s waiting for me. Take care.”
I didn’t stay to see his face. I turned, pushed the café door open, and walked out.
The evening was going blue. I pulled my coat around me and stepped into it, and my heart didn’t so much as flutter.
Liam was a stranger from a life I’d already left.
The girl who’d once lain awake crying over every small thing he did—she’d grown up years ago, in a city he’d never been to.
She wasn’t going back for anyone.
I never saw Liam again.
Life kept moving.
The next spring I married Ethan. Small wedding, forty friends, a stone chapel out in the Cotswolds.
When I walked down the aisle in white, Ethan was standing at the other end with his ears bright red. He fumbled and slid the ring onto the wrong finger.
Everyone laughed. The light came through stained glass in scattered pieces of gold, and I was so happy it felt physically dangerous.
Two years later I got pregnant.
Ethan worked late every night that year, but no matter how brutal his hours, he came home and knelt in front of my belly and told her about his day.
I teased him. He told me, very seriously, that bonding started early. She needed to know his voice.
The night she was born I was in the delivery ward for eighteen hours. Ethan gripped my hand until his knuckles were white.
When the midwife finally lifted her—red and wrinkled and shrieking—onto my chest, I burst into tears. The kind of crying that scared him. He kept apologizing, kept telling the nurses I’d done such a good job, kept asking if I was hurt.
He didn’t understand.
I did.
I’d been waiting for this for so long.
I’d drifted through the world alone for nineteen years—ignored, used, thrown away. I had spent most of my life believing I would never have a person of my own.
Now there was a small warm body against my chest. Her heartbeat pressed against mine. Her breath moved against my collarbone.
She was the family I had given myself.
I would never be alone again.