POV: Jasmine
We went together.
Priya drove. I sat in the passenger seat with the message still open on my phone, not because I needed to read it again but because closing it felt like closing a door I had not yet walked through.
She had called ahead. A restaurant she had chosen — neutral ground, no history. A table by the window where the light was flat and honest.
Jackson was already seated when we arrived.
He stood when we came through the door. Not the way he used to stand — the slow, deliberate rise of a man who wanted you to watch him occupy space. He stood the way a person stood when they were not sure whether the people walking toward them were going to sit down or keep walking.
The silver hair. The green eyes that belonged to Asher and Finn and, through Liam, to Aurora.
He looked cracked. The surface was the same — tailored, composed — but something behind it had shifted, the way a building looked the same the day after an earthquake had moved its foundation.
Priya sat first. I sat across from Jackson.
"Thank you for coming," he said, and his voice was stripped of the authority I had spent years bracing against. He looked at Priya when he said it, then at me, and the looking at me cost him something visible.
I did not make it easier for him. I waited.
He turned the water glass between his hands. "I want to explain why I sent the message."
Priya's posture did not change. Her hands were folded on the table, her face professionally neutral, and I could feel the cost of that neutrality radiating off her.
"I did not send it because I woke up and realised what I was doing was wrong," Jackson said. "I have known it was wrong for a long time. I knew it when I sent the gifts. I knew it when I filed. I knew it when I sat in that cathedral four pews behind you and chose my angle before they had finished lowering my son."
His hand tightened on the glass.
"I sent it because someone made me understand that knowing a thing is wrong and continuing to do it is not strategy," he said. "It is cowardice."
He did not look at Priya when he said it. He did not need to.
Priya's fingers tightened on each other. One small movement. The only visible sign that the woman beside me was holding something enormous inside a professional container not designed to hold it.
"She did not ask me to stop," Jackson continued, his voice lower. "She told me what it would cost if I did not. And the cost was her." He looked up at me. "I have lost three sons. I have lost a wife. I have lost the company I built. I have lost every person who has ever been close enough to see what I am. I was not willing to lose one more."
The sentence sat between us.
I looked at him. I looked at the green eyes that were Aurora's eyes. I looked at the hands that had signed the documents that built Cadence, that had controlled Eleanor's medical access, that had written the card that said Grandpa Jackson.
And I looked at the crack.
It was real. The crack was where Priya had been standing. The crack was the shape of a woman who had told him the truth without flinching and had not left when the truth landed.
Something moved in my gut. Not sympathy. Recognition.
He had lost everything. Not the way people said it when they meant their position. He had lost his sons — two to estrangement, one to death. He had lost his wife to an illness he had managed instead of mourned. And the only person who had made any of it stick was the woman sitting beside me with her hands folded and her pulse visible in her throat.
I am not him.
The thought arrived clean and sharp, and it was the thought that decided everything.
I am not the person who withholds a child from her grandfather because the grandfather does not deserve her. I am the person who offers it anyway — not because he has earned it, but because Aurora deserves to know where she came from, and because refusing would make me the same kind of person who uses a child as a weapon.
"You can see Aurora," I said, and my voice came out steady and clear. "As her grandfather. On my schedule and my conditions. I will be present for every visit until I decide otherwise."
Jackson's composure held — but underneath it, for one unguarded second, I saw the impact of the word grandfather delivered not as leverage but as possibility.
"You will not use those visits to build a case for anything," I continued. "If you violate any of this, all contact ends. Permanently."
He looked at me. He did not negotiate. He did not modify.
"I accept," he said, and his voice was rough in a way I had never heard from him — the voice of a man receiving something he did not believe he deserved.
I stood up. I collected my bag.
"One more thing," I said, looking down at him. "Priya told me the truth this morning. About you. About what has been happening. She told me because she is honest, and because the wall she built for my daughter matters more to her than whatever she feels for you."
Jackson's eyes moved to Priya. She did not look at him.
"Do not make her regret that honesty," I said. "Because if you hurt her, you lose Aurora. And if you lose Aurora, you lose the last piece of Liam that is still alive in this world."
I walked out. Priya followed a moment later. We got into the car. She started the engine. She did not speak.
"You can breathe now," I told her.
She exhaled — a long, shaking breath that filled the car and emptied her at the same time. Her hands tightened on the wheel.
"Thank you," she said quietly, and the two words carried the full weight of a woman who had walked into my kitchen that morning prepared to lose everything and had walked out of a restaurant with something she had not dared to hope for.
I watched the city move past the window and I thought about Aurora, who would be home from daycare in an hour, who would want the park, who would carry the rabbit, who would one day sit across from a man with green eyes and silver hair and ask him to tell her about her father.
That was worth more than punishment. That was worth more than the wall.
I closed my eyes. I let the car carry me home.