Can you explain how Mia was born? How did it happen, was it an accident?
The voice in his head sounds like his father. It always has.
“Will, you’re just like me.”
No. He isn’t. He wasn’t. He refused.
But there are things that creep in at the edges of refusal. Thoughts that slide in between the cracks, thick and oil-slick. No one ever tells you that running from something means dragging it behind you.
He remembers his father’s eyes—dull, wet, calculating. The way his voice would flatten out when he wanted Will to obey, to understand the weight of his disappointment. The way it could shift, too, when it needed to. When coaxing was more useful than control. There was a slow-burn seduction to his father’s affection, a give-and-take that made Will hungry in ways he didn’t know how to name. That hunger stretched out inside him like something cavernous, growing in the dark.
And then Joseph happened.
Joseph, who saw that hunger and fed it, but only when it suited him. Joseph, whose hands were steady and instructive, whose praise felt like a baptism—warm and thick and staining. Joseph, who made Will feel wanted. Special. Who could make pain feel like proof of something holy.
It taught him, in quiet, shattering ways, that love was not a soft thing. That love was a wound you tended to, that bled beneath your hands. That love was something to earn.
So he would build it. He would craft it from the ground up. A child. A child would love him as he had never been loved. A child would tether him, make him whole. But not a son. Oh no, no, no.
A son would be a mirror, and Will could not bear to look at himself.
A daughter, then. A daughter would see him as something perfect, untouchable, godlike. She would never look at him with the kind of eyes he had once had—the ones that searched for weakness, for an opening, for the moment love would be revoked.
Lilly. Pretty, ruined Lilly. The kind of woman that moved through life like a ghost, waiting to disappear. She had only daughters in her family, she had said, and once, a long time ago, she had had one too. A girl. She died as a baby. Not enough care.
That was the moment something clicked. Something old and starving and deeply, deeply quiet.
He laid his claim in sweat and tangled sheets and the way Lilly looked at him when he bought her drinks—like she couldn’t decide if he was salvation or damnation. And when the test turned positive, it was never a question of if the child would be his. Only when.
Lilly didn’t fight him. She was too tired, too lost, too far away even in her own body. The grief of loss had already hollowed her out. One shot away from overdose. When she left—faded away before Mia could even form memories of her—Will felt something settle inside him.
She was his. His perfect little girl.
And when she looked at him, wide-eyed, worshipful, with the kind of trust he had never been allowed to have, something in him sang. Something fit.
But there were questions, sometimes. Late at night, in the too-quiet hours, when the voice in his head got louder. When his father spoke, or Joseph, or someone else entirely.
“Why does it feel like this?”
He knows exactly why he empathized with Garret Jacob Hobbs.