"Not like that," Julian said quickly, reaching for her hand. "Not the whole thing, not now. Maybe when she’s older, you tell her all of it. Right now you just tell her Nolan is trouble. That’s enough."

"I’m not ashamed of my past." Amara said it firmly, the way she’d said it to herself a hundred times over the years until she’d finally believed it.

"My only mistake was not knowing. Seven years, and I never knew. But my daughter won’t understand that the way I’ve made peace with it, she’ll hear that Sebastian was before you, and she’ll go looking for whatever that means to her, and how does that play out, Julian? A boy she already likes, and his father turns out to be the man her mother was married to before she ever met her own father. How is that not a story she’ll want to pull at?"

Julian was quiet for a moment, clearly turning it over, and then pulled her in against his chest, one hand smoothing slowly over her hair the way he’d done since long before either of them had children old enough to complicate things like this.

"Calm down, baby. We’ll fix this, okay? It doesn’t need to come to transferring them, not yet. And we’ve been over this before you did absolutely nothing wrong. Seb was a jerk. That’s on him, not you. It was always going to be on him."

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