I knelt and kissed his forehead. “It’s okay, sweetheart.”

When I looked up, Mark was crying—real tears. Emily, meanwhile, was shaking with fury. She shoved him, her voice cracking. “You destroyed everything. You destroyed us!”

And in that instant, I saw how fragile their “perfect” marriage really was. Emily stormed off, leaving him alone in the crowd. He called after her, but she never turned back.

Then his eyes returned to me, raw with regret. “Please, Claire. Let me be part of his life.”

I clutched Jacob closer. “You made your choice. Don’t expect me to clean up the wreckage.”

And with that, I walked away, holding my son’s hand, leaving Mark standing in the wreckage of his own making.

But it didn’t end there. In the weeks that followed, Mark began appearing everywhere – outside my apartment, near the hospital, even once at Jacob’s daycare. He wasn’t threatening, just relentless. Every time, he begged for the same thing: a chance to know his son.

At first, I refused. Jacob was my entire world, and I wasn’t about to let the man who’d broken me anywhere near him. But Mark didn’t give up. He sent letters, emails, even late-night voicemails filled with guilt and longing. The man who had once walked away so easily now clung to the hope of being a father.

I later heard through my mother that Emily had left him. She couldn’t handle the truth—that Jacob existed, that Mark’s heart had never fully been hers. In her eyes, my son was living proof of a love that refused to die.

One evening, after tucking Jacob into bed, I found another letter slipped under my door. The handwriting was shaky.

“I know I failed you both. I see him in my dreams every night. I can’t undo what I’ve done, but please, Claire—let me try.”