My billionaire ex-husband blamed me for our childless marriage and walked away—eight years later, he entered a restaurant and saw me sitting with twins who had his unmistakable eyes.

Chapter 18

Winter came.

The first snow of the season fell on a Sunday, and the twins dragged Dominic outside to build a snowman before breakfast was even on the table.

I watched from the kitchen window.

Eli was directing operations with the seriousness of a site manager. Zara was decorating the snowman with a scarf she had taken from Dominic’s coat. Dominic was kneeling in the snow, packing the base, laughing at something Eli said.

My phone buzzed.

Jade.

You’re staring out the window with a look on your face.

I looked down at my phone, then back at the window.

What look?

The look you had the summer you met him. Before everything. That look.

I didn’t answer.

Imani. It’s okay to be happy.

I set down the phone and watched my family build a snowman in the yard.

That evening, after the twins were in bed, Dominic and I sat on the porch with mugs of hot chocolate, watching the snow fall over the city.

“Do you remember the night we separated?” he asked.

“I remember it was snowing.”

“It was.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’ve replayed that night a thousand times. The things I said. The way I said them. I keep trying to find the version where I was less cruel — but I don’t think there is one. I think I was exactly as cruel as I needed to be to make you leave, because I was too much of a coward to admit I was the problem.”

“You weren’t the only problem.”

“I know. But I was the one who gave up first.” He looked at me. “I gave up on us before you did. And I’ve spent nine years telling myself it was because you’d failed me somehow — because we couldn’t have children, because you must have hidden something, because any reason except the truth.”

“And what’s the truth?”

“The truth is I was afraid.” His voice was rough. “Afraid that if I couldn’t give you a family, you’d eventually realize I wasn’t enough. Afraid that you’d leave me the way my father’s luck had — suddenly, without warning. So I left first. I pushed you away and called it strength.”

I reached out and took his hand.

“We were both afraid,” I said. “We were both wrong. And we both lost years we can’t get back.”

“I know.”

“But we’re here now.” I squeezed his hand. “That has to count for something.”

“It counts for everything.”

We sat in the snow-lit dark, and I thought about how different this winter was from the winter our marriage ended.

That winter, I had been alone in a crowd.

This winter, I was not alone at all.

In January, Dominic took me to dinner.

Not a fancy restaurant this time. A small jazz club in the West Loop, the kind of place where the music was too loud for conversation and too good for distraction.

We sat at a tiny table near the stage, and Dominic ordered wine, and we listened without talking.

When the set ended, he turned to me.

“I have something to ask you.”

My heart did something complicated.

“Not that,” he said quickly, reading my face. “Not yet. I promised you I’d take this slowly, and I meant it.”

“Then what?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph.

It was old, creased, worn soft at the edges. It showed two people on a rooftop — young, laughing, arms around each other. The Chicago skyline behind them.

Us.

Our first apartment.

I remembered that night. We had dragged an old mattress onto the roof and lay on it watching the stars, and Dominic had told me he was going to build something that would make the world sit up and notice, and I had told him I didn’t care about the world, I just wanted him.

“Where did you find this?” My voice came out strange.

“Your sister.” He smiled. “She kept a box of things you’d left at our parents’ place. She gave it to me last week. Said it was time.”

I stared at the photograph.

Two people who had been so sure of everything.

“I’ve been carrying this for nine years,” Dominic said. “Not the photograph. The memory. The version of us on that rooftop. The people we were before we learned to be afraid.” He set the photograph on the table between us. “I don’t want to go back to being those people. We can’t. We know too much now. But I want to build something with the people we’ve become.”

I looked up at him.

“What do you want, Dominic?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“I want to wake up next to you for the rest of my life,” he said. “I want to argue about pancakes with you at sixty and braid our grandchildren’s hair with you at seventy. I want to tell you when I’m afraid and have you tell me when you’re hurt. I want to be the man you hum old songs for in the kitchen.”

He took my hand across the table.

“I want to marry you again, Imani. Not because I’m trying to fix the past. Because I want to build a future with you. Whenever you’re ready. However you want it. There’s no timeline. No deadline. Just — whenever you believe me.”

The jazz club faded around me.

The music. The people. The years.

All I could see was Dominic Hayward, holding my hand across a small table, offering me a second chance wrapped in the scars of the first.

“Yes,” I said.

He blinked. “What?”

“Yes, Dominic.”

“Imani, you don’t have to decide — ”

“I’m not deciding.” I laughed, and it came out wet. “I already decided. I decided the night you built that ridiculous tent and slept on the floor with our children. I decided when you cried at Zara’s recital. I decided the moment I stopped hoping you’d fail and started hoping you never would.”

He stared at me.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

The jazz club erupted around us — or maybe that was just my heart.

Dominic kissed me.

It was the first kiss of our second marriage, and it tasted like snow and wine and nine years of waiting.

When we finally pulled apart, he was grinning like the twenty-five-year-old on the rooftop.

“I was going to do this properly,” he said. “I had a whole speech. Three pages.”

“Good. You can give it to me later.”

“There’s a ring.”

“I assumed there was a ring.”

“It’s in my coat. I was going to wait — ”

“Dominic.” I took his face in my hands. “I don’t need the ring to know. But I’ll take it anyway.”

He laughed and fumbled in his coat and produced a small velvet box, and when he opened it, I saw the ring — warm gold, a small diamond, and two tiny birthstones set beside it.

“For them,” he said. “For Zara and Eli. Because they’re part of this. We’re not just marrying each other. We’re finally becoming the family we were always supposed to be.”

I looked at the ring.

At the man.

At the life stretching out ahead of us like a road we’d almost missed.

“Yes,” I said again. “Yes, Dominic. A thousand times yes.”