Daphne’s POV
Xander's hand settles on my lower back, warm through the thin fabric of my dress. The touch is gentle, tentative, asking permission without words. I don't pull away, don't tell him not to touch me. I just let him guide me out of the nursery, down the hallway, toward our bedroom.
He opens the door and leads me inside. Hope is still sleeping against my chest, her weight familiar and grounding. Xander takes her from me with careful hands, placing her in the bassinet we keep beside the bed.
Then he turns to me. His hand finds my lower back again, guiding me to sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips under my weight, springs creaking softly in the quiet room. I expect him to sit beside me, to maintain some semblance of equality in whatever conversation we're about to have.
Instead, he lowers himself to the floor.
The movement is deliberate, purposeful. He kneels in front of me so our eyes are level, his hands resting on his thighs.
The position is vulnerable in a way I've never seen from him before—supplicant, penitent, a man who's built empires and commanded boardrooms making himself small and powerless at my feet.
"Daphne." My name in his voice sounds like a prayer. "I know I can't take back the choice I made."
I want to tell him to stop, want to tell him we don't need to do this, that talking about it will only make everything worse. But my throat is too tight to form words, so I just sit there while he begins dismantling us both.
"I understand your anger," he continues, his voice steady despite the tremor I can hear underneath. "Your fear, your inability to trust me with our children. I understand all of it, and I know I'm the one who caused it. I made a choice that hurt you in ways I'm still discovering."
His hands move from his thighs, reaching toward me but stopping just short of contact. Like he's afraid I'll flinch, or worse, that I won't.
"But I need you to understand something." His voice cracks on the last word, splitting open to reveal the raw grief underneath. "I would make the same choice again."
The words land like physical blows. I knew this already—he's said it before, in different ways, with different justifications. But hearing it now, said with such quiet certainty while he kneels at my feet, makes it real in a way it hasn't been before.
"Not because Hope matters less."
Xander rushes to add, words tumbling over each other in his desperation to make me understand.
"Not because I don't love her with everything I am. But because losing you would destroy me completely. Would destroy the twins, would leave us all broken in ways we could never recover from."
Tears are sliding down my cheeks now, silent and unstoppable. Each word he speaks lands like a stone in my chest, piling up until I can barely breathe under their weight.
"I chose you because I had to. Because the thought of a world without you in it was—is—incomprehensible."
Xander says, and now I can see his eyes are wet too.
"Because the twins need their mother and I need my wife and I'm selfish enough that I couldn't let you go. Even knowing it might cost me you anyway. Even knowing you might never forgive me."
He pauses, drawing a shaky breath. His hands finally make contact, resting on my knees with feather-light pressure.
"I'm not asking for forgiveness," he says quietly. "I don't deserve it, I know that. What I'm asking for is time."
"Time," I repeat, my voice barely above a whisper.
"Time to prove I can be the father our daughters need, all three of them."
His grip on my knees tightens slightly.
"I failed in that impossible moment. Hope needed me to fight for her, and instead I fought for you. But I swear to you, Daphne—I swear I can be better. I can be the father she deserves, the father the twins deserve. If you'll just give me the chance to prove it."
The vulnerability in his voice undoes me. This is Xander stripped of all his armor, all his power, all the careful control he maintains like a second skin. This is just a man who made an impossible choice and is begging for the chance to prove he's more than that one decision.
"I love you," he whispers. "I love all of you. And I know that's not enough right now, I know love doesn't fix what's broken between us. But it's what I have to offer."
He stops talking. The silence fills the space between us, heavy with everything we're both feeling and everything we can't say. I look at him and see the exhaustion carved into every line of his face.
The dark circles under his eyes that match mine. The tension in his shoulders that never quite releases. The man who's been sleeping in the guest room, existing on the margins of our family, loving us from a distance because I won't let him any closer.
When he finishes speaking, when the last words die in the quiet of our bedroom, I reach out. Take his face in my hands. His skin is warm under my palms, rough with stubble he hasn't bothered to shave.
My thumbs stroke his cheekbones, and I feel wetness there—tears I didn't realize he was crying, grief he's been holding back while trying to be strong for me.
"I love you," I tell him, and my voice breaks on the words. "Of course I love you."
Relief floods his face, transforming it into something almost hopeful.
"But every time I close my eyes, I see you in that hospital corridor." I continue, and watch that hope flicker and die. “I see you standing there, telling the doctors to save me instead of our daughter. I see you making that choice, and I understand why you made it, and I hate you for it anyway."
"Daphne…"
"I hate you for choosing me, for loving me so much that our daughter's life was negotiable, for making me complicit in her almost dying."
The words come faster now, jagged and raw.
"And I hate myself for being glad you chose me. For being relieved I'm alive even though it meant Hope almost wasn't, for loving you despite everything, for wanting to forgive you when I'm not sure I can."
Xander's eyes close, fresh tears tracking down his face. I wipe them away with my thumbs, the gesture tender despite the brutality of my words.
"I can't forget it," I whisper. "Even when I want to, even when it's tearing me apart and destroying us and making the twins ask why Daddy doesn't sleep in your room anymore. I can't forget that you were willing to let our daughter die. That you looked at that impossible choice and picked me."
"I'm sorry," he chokes out. "God, Daphne, I'm so sorry."
"I know you are." I pull him closer, pressing his forehead to mine, our tears mixing together. "I know you are. And I know you'd make the same choice again, and I don't know how to live with both of those truths at the same time."
We stay like that, kneeling and sitting, foreheads pressed together while we both fall apart. Hope sleeps peacefully in her bassinet, unaware that her very existence is the fault line running through the center of our marriage.
Unaware that her father chose her mother over her and that her mother can't decide if that makes him a monster or just human.
"What do we do?" Xander asks finally, his voice small and broken.
I don't have an answer. Don't know how we move forward from here, how we bridge the distance that feels like miles even when we're touching.
Don't know if love is enough to survive this kind of betrayal, this kind of grief, this kind of impossible situation where no one did anything wrong but everything is broken anyway.
"I don't know," I admit. "But I'm here. Right now, in this moment, I'm here."