“Heather.”

It’s wrong, this was so wrong—he knew better than to do this.

At the end of the day, the dawning realization settled in, harsh and unrelenting. He shouldn’t be seeing Heather in you. You weren’t her, and she wasn’t you.

He swallowed, feeling the weight of his mistake sink in. You looked at him with that familiar, gentle smile—one he’d leaned on for so long. But it was your smile, unique in its own way, radiating a quiet understanding that Heather had never possessed. A pang of guilt stirred in his chest as he thought of how unfair it was to you, to hold you in the same light as someone else, to see you as something more than what you had so patiently offered: his partner, his confidante, his anchor.

You’re not Heather. He should remember that, drag that thought behind his mind and keep it bitter at the tip of his tongue. She was long gone, deceased. But she was Yenna’s biological mother, his daughter, as well.

“I—” Suddenly, an apology tasted so sour. He looks at you, and perhaps he shouldn’t have because he knows how much her name became a wound to you. But he knows he loves you. At least, he knows a part of him loved you for who you were, not because you reminded him of her, and certainly not because he’s constantly plagued by the thought of her. “I didn’t mean to call you by her name.”