Chapter 1 - I BROUGHT MY LITTLE GIRL TO SEE SANTA FOR A FREE CANDY CANE
My daughter did not ask Santa for a doll.
She did not ask for a bike.
She looked at that fake beard, held her tiny hands together, and asked for a new daddy.
Not a toy.
Not candy.
Not even Christmas magic.
A daddy who was strong.
A daddy who would bring food.
A daddy who would stop Mommy from crying at night.
And just like that, the whole mall went silent.
The elf with the camera stopped smiling.
The parents in line suddenly found the floor very interesting.
Even Santa looked like he wanted to disappear inside his own red suit.
I wanted to grab Lily and run.
I wanted to pretend I had not heard her.
But the worst part was not the embarrassment.
The worst part was knowing she was telling the truth.
She had noticed the nights I drank water and called it dinner.
She had noticed the way I checked every exit instead of every Christmas light.
She had noticed that I never relaxed, not even for five minutes in a crowded mall.
Because I was not there for holiday cheer.
I was there trying to give my child one cheap happy memory before life found us again.
Then Santa made it worse.
He gave that tired, irritated little laugh people use when someone else’s pain is inconveniencing them.
He told Lily that was not how Christmas worked.
He told the elf to hand her a coloring book and move the line along.
My daughter’s face broke right in front of me.
That should have been the cruelest moment of the day.
It wasn’t.
Because a man behind the velvet rope said one quiet word that cut through the whole room.
“Wait.”
I knew that voice before I even turned around.
Not because I had heard it recently.
Because some voices never really leave you.
When I looked up, Luca Santoro was standing there.
The same boy everyone feared in high school.
The same boy I once defended when nobody else would sit near him.
Only now he was no longer a boy.
He looked like money, power, danger, and control wrapped in a black coat that probably cost more than my rent for a year.
And the strangest part was not that he had stepped forward.
It was that the security guards straightened the second they saw him.
It was that the mall manager looked terrified.
It was that Santa stopped talking mid-breath.
Luca did not look at the crowd.
He did not look at the decorations.
He looked at my daughter first.
Then he crouched in front of her like the room belonged to him.
He asked her name.
He listened.
Really listened.
And when she whispered that Santa said he could only bring toys, Luca glanced at the throne, then at the glass display behind it, and said something that made my blood run cold.
“He has toys.”
“I have authority.”
Nobody laughed that time.
A minute later, my daughter was holding the giant raffle doll nobody was supposed to touch until Christmas Eve.
The manager was shaking.
Santa looked sick.
The crowd had started recording.
And then Luca turned to me.
Not to ask if I was okay.
Not to ask where I had been all these years.
Not to ask why I looked like a woman waiting for the world to hit her again.
He just stepped close enough for only me to hear him and said the one sentence I had spent two years dreading from the wrong man.
“You’re still watching the exits, Vanessa.”
“What exactly are you running from?”
I should have lied.
I would have lied.
But before I could answer, his expression changed.
His hand moved to the small of my back.
And he looked past me toward the south garage like he had just seen something that made even him go cold.
The next part is in the comments.
May you like
That is where I found out my ex had not just found me.
He had been waiting for me.
