Updated Apr 16, 2026 • ~16 min read
Chapter 7: His Curiosity
Matthias
Matthias can’t stop thinking about Luna’s daughter—about the way the little girl looked at him with grey eyes that felt uncomfortably familiar, about the dark curls that reminded him of someone he couldn’t quite place, about the math that keeps working itself out in his head no matter how many times he tries to dismiss it as coincidence or wishful thinking or paranoid pattern-matching that means nothing.
He’s supposed to be in a conference call with his Tokyo office, five investors on the line waiting for his input on a major tech acquisition in the Asian market—but his attention keeps drifting away from profit margins and market analysis toward the memory of a three-year-old child saying “thank you” in a voice hoarse from fever, toward Luna’s panic when she got that call, toward the way she held her daughter like she was the most precious thing in the world.
Luna has a daughter.
The revelation shouldn’t matter—plenty of people have children, it’s a completely normal life event that has nothing to do with Matthias or their complicated history—but his brain won’t stop circling back to it, won’t stop doing the mental arithmetic that he knows is probably meaningless but feels dangerously significant.
Four years ago, they slept together.
Luna’s daughter is three years old.
Three years plus nine months of pregnancy equals…
No.
That’s impossible.
Luna would have told him if she got pregnant from their night together—would have found a way to contact him, would have demanded support or at least informed him that he had a child, because that’s not the kind of secret you keep from someone, not when a whole human life is involved.
Except Luna thought he ghosted her, thought he deliberately chose not to call, thought he abandoned her after promising to stay in touch—and if she believed that, if she thought he was the kind of man who made promises he didn’t keep and disappeared without explanation, why would she tell him about a pregnancy? Why would she trust him with that information when, from her perspective, he’d already proven himself unreliable?
Matthias’s stomach drops as the logic clicks into place with horrible clarity, as he realizes that his failure to find Luna after Berlin might have had consequences far beyond a missed romantic opportunity, might have resulted in him missing three years of his own child’s life.
His own child.
The possibility is absurd—he only spent one night with Luna, one perfect night that felt like destiny but was probably just chemistry and circumstance, and the odds of that one encounter resulting in pregnancy are relatively low, statistically speaking.
But not impossible.
And those grey eyes—Matthias saw his own eyes looking back at him from that little girl’s face, saw the same unusual shade that he inherited from his mother, the color that’s distinctive enough that people comment on it regularly, the genetic marker that’s supposedly rare in the general population.
He ends the conference call ten minutes early with a vague excuse about another meeting, ignoring the confused looks from his own team as he disconnects without his usual thorough wrap-up and action items, because there’s something he needs to check, something he needs to confirm before he lets this suspicion take root and grow into certainty or before he dismisses it as paranoid fantasy.
The HR database for Innovate Solutions is accessible from his laptop with the CEO-level credentials he was granted during the acquisition, and Matthias knows he’s absolutely not supposed to use those credentials for personal reasons, knows that accessing employee files without legitimate business need is probably illegal and definitely unethical—but he has to know, has to see the information that will either confirm his suspicions or put them to rest, and he’s willing to bend the rules this one time if it means getting answers.
He finds Luna’s personnel file easily enough—searching for “Vega” brings up exactly one result, her employee record complete with hire date and salary history and emergency contact information that lists Carmen Rodriguez as the person to call if something happens to Luna at work.
But it’s the dependent information section that makes Matthias’s heart stop, the section where employees list children for insurance and benefits purposes, the section that contains exactly one entry:
Sofia Vega.
Date of birth: [nine months and two weeks after the night Matthias spent with Luna].
Relationship: Daughter.
Fuck.
Matthias stares at that date of birth for a full minute, his mind racing through implications and possibilities and the dawning realization that he might—probably does—have a daughter he never knew existed, a three-year-old child who’s been living in Queens with her mother while Matthias went about his life completely unaware that one night changed everything in ways he couldn’t have imagined.
The timing is too perfect to be coincidence—nine months and two weeks is exactly right for a full-term pregnancy, the kind of precision that removes any reasonable doubt about when conception occurred, about who the father is, about the secret Luna has been keeping since the moment Matthias walked back into her life three weeks ago.
She knew.
That thought crystallizes with painful clarity—Luna knew the instant she saw him that he was Sofia’s father, knew when she introduced herself professionally and called him “Mr. Wolfe” and pretended they were strangers, knew every single time Matthias tried to talk about their past or asked her to give him another chance, knew and said nothing, kept the most important piece of information from him while he struggled to understand why she seemed to hate him.
The betrayal hits like a physical blow, stealing the air from Matthias’s lungs and making his hands shake where they rest on his keyboard, because how could she keep this from him? How could she let him spend three weeks trying to win her back, trying to apologize for a misunderstanding, trying to explain that he didn’t abandon her—when all along she was hiding his child from him, denying him the right to know his own daughter?
But then Matthias forces himself to think past the immediate hurt and anger, to consider Luna’s perspective, to remember that she doesn’t know he tried to find her, doesn’t believe his explanations about lost phone numbers and corrupted contacts, thinks he’s the kind of man who makes promises and breaks them without a second thought.
If Luna believed he ghosted her deliberately, if she spent four years thinking he chose to walk away, then her decision to hide her pregnancy makes a horrible kind of sense—she was protecting herself and her child from further abandonment, from the possibility that Matthias would reject them both or worse, that he’d show up and disappear again, leaving new wounds in his wake.
The understanding doesn’t make the betrayal hurt less, but it adds context, adds nuance to what could have been simple villainy and transforms it into a tragedy of miscommunication and mutual misunderstanding that’s spiraled into consequences neither of them could have predicted.
Matthias has a daughter.
The reality of it settles over him like a physical weight, pressing down on his chest and making it hard to breathe because this isn’t theoretical anymore, isn’t a possibility he can dismiss or a suspicion he can investigate—this is real, confirmed by official records and mathematical certainty and the memory of grey eyes that matched his own.
Sofia.
Even her name is beautiful, carrying a meaning that Matthias knows from his mother’s family—wisdom, knowledge, the kind of qualities he would want for his child if he’d had any say in the matter.
Except he didn’t have a say, didn’t get to choose her name or be there for her birth or hold her as a newborn or experience any of the milestones that fathers are supposed to witness, all because of a phone malfunction and a failure to try hard enough and Luna’s understandable but devastating decision to keep his daughter a secret.
He’s missed three years.
Three years of Sofia’s life that he’ll never get back—her first steps, her first words, her first birthday and second birthday and third birthday, every holiday and achievement and ordinary moment that makes up a childhood, all of it happened without him, all of it belongs to Luna alone because Matthias wasn’t there and didn’t know to be there.
The grief of that loss is overwhelming, threatening to swamp him with regret and rage and a desperate need to fix this, to make up for lost time, to claim his place in his daughter’s life even though he has no idea how to be a father or whether Sofia will even want him around or whether Luna will let him try.
His phone buzzes with a text from his actual assistant at Wolfe Industries headquarters, reminding him about a board meeting in thirty minutes that he absolutely cannot miss—and Matthias stares at the message with a detached kind of disbelief because how is he supposed to sit through discussions of quarterly earnings and strategic planning when he just discovered he has a child, when his entire understanding of his own life has been fundamentally rewritten in the space of fifteen minutes?
But he’s Matthias Wolfe, CEO of a billion-dollar company, and people are depending on him to make decisions and provide leadership and pretend that nothing is wrong—so he closes Luna’s personnel file and shuts his laptop and forces himself to stand up and straighten his tie and become the version of himself that knows how to compartmentalize personal crises in favor of professional obligations.
The board meeting is torture, two hours of financial presentations and market analysis and strategic debates that Matthias participates in on autopilot, his conscious mind still stuck on the image of a three-year-old girl with his eyes and Luna’s smile and the reality of fatherhood that he never chose but now desperately wants to embrace.
He makes it through the meeting without anyone noticing his distraction—or at least without anyone commenting on it, which is close enough to success for his purposes—and the instant the last board member leaves the conference room, Matthias is pulling out his phone and opening Luna’s contact information, his thumb hovering over the call button.
What does he even say?
“Hi, I accessed your personnel file without permission and discovered that I have a daughter you’ve been hiding from me for three years, can we talk?”
“I saw Sofia’s birthdate and did the math, why didn’t you tell me I’m a father?”
“Did you really think so little of me that you decided I didn’t deserve to know my own child exists?”
All of those options sound accusatory, angry, likely to make Luna defensive and push her further away when what Matthias actually wants is to understand, to hear her side of this impossible situation, to figure out how they move forward now that the truth is out in the open.
Except the truth isn’t out in the open—Luna doesn’t know that Matthias knows, doesn’t realize he’s spent the past three hours spiraling through every emotion on the spectrum from fury to grief to desperate longing, doesn’t know that he’s already planning how to rearrange his life to make room for a daughter he met once for thirty seconds.
Matthias needs to talk to her, needs to confront her about this directly instead of letting suspicions and personnel files substitute for actual communication—but not over the phone, not via text, not through any medium that lets her hang up or ignore him or hide behind professional distance.
He needs to see her face when he asks if Sofia is his.
He needs to watch her reaction when he tells her that he knows, that he’s figured it out, that she can’t keep this secret anymore.
He needs to make her understand that he’s not walking away from this, from her, from their daughter, regardless of how complicated or messy or difficult the situation becomes.
The decision crystallizes with absolute clarity—Matthias is going to Luna’s apartment tonight, is going to demand the conversation she’s been avoiding, is going to claim his rights as Sofia’s father whether Luna likes it or not because this is too important to handle delicately, too significant to approach with caution.
He has a daughter.
And Luna Vega is going to have to face the consequences of keeping her from him.
Matthias leaves Wolfe Industries at six o’clock, telling his assistant to cancel tomorrow morning’s meetings and reschedule them for later in the week—because whatever happens tonight when he confronts Luna, he’s going to need time to process it, time to figure out what comes next, time to potentially meet his daughter properly instead of in the middle of a fever crisis.
The drive to Queens feels both endless and too short, Matthias’s mind racing through possible scenarios—Luna admits the truth and apologizes, Luna denies everything and kicks him out, Luna breaks down crying and explains why she felt she had no choice, Luna tells him to leave and never contact her again, Luna says Sofia isn’t his and provides evidence that Matthias is wrong about everything.
That last possibility terrifies him more than he wants to admit, because in the three hours since finding Sofia’s birthdate in Luna’s personnel file, Matthias has already started building a future in his mind—teaching Sofia to ride a bike, helping with homework, taking her to parks and museums and all the places that fathers take their daughters, being part of her life in meaningful ways instead of just a monthly child support check and awkward custody exchanges.
He wants to be her father, wants it with an intensity that surprises him because Matthias has never particularly wanted children before, has always assumed he’d get around to family eventually but never felt the urgent pull toward parenthood that some of his friends describe.
But that was before Sofia, before seeing Luna cradle a sick child with fierce maternal protection, before understanding that there’s a little person in the world who shares his DNA and his eyes and has been living without him through no choice of her own.
Matthias pulls up in front of Luna’s apartment building at seven-fifteen, the evening darkness making the Queens street look shabbier than it did in daylight—old brick buildings and tired storefronts and the kind of working-class neighborhood where people struggle to make rent and children play on concrete instead of grass.
Luna raised his daughter here, in this place that’s so far removed from Matthias’s Tribeca penthouse and private schools and assumed wealth—and the guilt of that realization cuts deep, the knowledge that while he was living in luxury and building his empire, Luna was pinching pennies and working multiple jobs and doing everything alone because she thought he didn’t care enough to help.
He should have tried harder to find her.
That regret is going to haunt Matthias for the rest of his life—if he’d just been more persistent, if he’d hired a better investigator, if he’d refused to give up after a month of searching, maybe he could have found Luna before Sofia was born, could have been there for the pregnancy and the birth and every moment after, could have spared them both three years of unnecessary hardship.
But he can’t change the past, can only affect what happens next—and what happens next is Matthias getting out of his car and walking into that building and demanding the truth that Luna has been keeping from him since the moment he showed up at her office three weeks ago.
The building doesn’t have a doorman or security, just a directory with apartment numbers and a buzzer system that’s probably older than Matthias—and he finds “Vega, L.” listed for apartment 4C, presses the button, and waits for Luna’s voice to crackle through the ancient intercom.
“Hello?” Luna sounds tired and wary, probably not expecting visitors this late on a weeknight, probably hoping it’s a delivery or a neighbor instead of her boss showing up unannounced.
“It’s Matthias,” he says, pitching his voice to carry through the speaker. “We need to talk.”
Silence for a long moment, and Matthias wonders if she’s going to refuse to buzz him up, if she’s going to tell him to leave and try this at a more reasonable hour—but then the door lock clicks open with a harsh buzz, granting him access, and Matthias is pushing through before she can change her mind.
The climb to the fourth floor is slow, the stairwell narrow and poorly lit and smelling faintly of cooking and old building and lives being lived in close proximity—and with each step, Matthias’s heart pounds harder, adrenaline and anxiety and anticipation combining into something that feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, about to jump without knowing if there’s water below or rocks that will destroy him.
Luna is waiting at her apartment door when Matthias reaches the fourth-floor landing, arms crossed defensively over her chest and an expression on her face that clearly says she knows why he’s here, knows what questions he’s going to ask, and is absolutely not happy about this confrontation.
“Sofia’s sleeping,” Luna says before Matthias can speak, her voice low and fierce. “Whatever you have to say, keep your voice down.”
“Is she mine?” Matthias asks, because there’s no point in pretending this is a social call, no reason to ease into the conversation when they both know what this is about.
Luna’s face goes through several expressions—shock that he’s asking directly, fear of the consequences, resignation that the secret is finally out, and something that might be relief that she doesn’t have to keep lying.
“Luna,” Matthias says when she doesn’t immediately answer, and he’s trying to keep his voice down like she asked but urgency makes it come out sharper than intended. “Is Sofia my daughter?”
And after a pause that feels like years, Luna finally, finally tells him the truth he already knows.
“Yes.”
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