Braxton never planned on being a father.

He knew what fathers could be—ghosts, threats, voices behind locked doors. His own was a blueprint of absence, then violence, then prison. So when she told him she was pregnant—standing in the kitchen barefoot, her voice shaking but her eyes steady—he didn’t flinch. He just nodded, exhaled slowly, and said, “Okay.”

But inside, everything cracked.

He’d changed—mostly. Or so he thought. He hadn’t been in the streets for nearly two years. Hadn’t touched a gun in almost ten months. Money was clean now—mostly. The laundromat paid slow, the car wash paid smaller, but it was honest. He’d stepped back from everything. For her.

Not because she asked—but because she loved him without needing to fear him.

She didn’t know who he used to be.

She knew the quiet version. The man who washed his hands twice before cooking. The man who read books out loud even when she fell asleep halfway through. The man who helped her aunt fix the water heater like it was second nature. She knew the rhythm of his reformed life—but not the echoes that still lived underneath it.

That changed in the seventh month.

A letter came to the house. No name on it. No stamp. Just slid through the mail slot like a whisper. She opened it.

Inside: a photo of Braxton from four years ago—standing beside a man now serving life. Another picture. A street surveillance shot: Braxton at a scene where a body had dropped.

She didn’t say anything right away. But he felt it. In her silence. In the way her hands slowed when folding laundry. In the way she paused before touching him. Her body still carried their child, but her spirit had pulled back.

Three days later, she left the envelope on the table. Nothing else.

He stared at it for twenty minutes before picking it up.

There was no denying it. No explaining away years lived in darkness. He had run money. Had enforced silence. Had watched life leave a man’s body and felt… nothing.

Back then, that was survival.

But now? Now he was building cribs. Now he was rubbing cocoa butter on her back. Now he was researching schools, saving receipts, considering middle names. Now, he wanted life.