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 3

“Dominic.”

Behind him, his wife stepped forward. Up close she was even more composed than she’d looked from across the room — elegant, watchful, her smile precise and her eyes kind in a way I hadn’t expected.

“She’s right,” the woman said quietly. She placed her hand on Dominic’s arm again, and this time he flinched. “We have a private dining room upstairs. We don’t have to use it. But if you’d prefer somewhere less public…”

I stared at her. I had spent nine years — through magazine covers, charity galas, the occasional unavoidable Google search — building a picture of Camille Prescott as the woman who had everything I’d failed to give him. Elegant. Brilliant. Childless, the headlines whispered, and then went quiet, because even the gossip columns knew better than to poke that particular bruise.

I had never imagined her offering me kindness.

It made everything harder.

“I can’t go upstairs and leave my children sitting here alone,” I said.

“Of course not,” Camille said. “I wasn’t suggesting — ”

“I have someone I can call.”

Zara immediately understood. “Aunt Jade?”

“Yes.”

My younger sister lived fifteen minutes away in the other direction and treated any excuse to confiscate my children as a personal victory. She would be there before my coffee went cold.

Eli brightened. “Does she have the puzzle? She bought the thousand-piece one.”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.”

“Can we go to her house anyway? She promised.”

I smiled despite the pressure building behind my ribs. “We’ll see.”

Dominic looked away.

It was such a small thing, that look. But I understood it immediately. He wasn’t witnessing proof that I had become a mother. He was witnessing years. The shorthand between my children and their aunt. The running joke about the puzzle. The negotiation over dessert. A thousand tiny rituals that made up a family language he had never once been taught to speak.

I pulled out my phone and called Jade.

“Nia — Imani. Everything okay?” She had never once called me by the wrong name. She knew better. But she was already worried, and worry made her clumsy.

“I need a favor.”

Her tone changed instantly. “What happened?”

“Nothing bad. I’m at Albion House with the kids. Could you come get them?”

Silence. Then, because my sister had always been able to hear the words I wasn’t saying, she asked, “Is he there?”

My eyes went to Dominic. “Yes.”

A beat. “I’ll be there. Ten minutes.”

I ended the call.

Zara watched me. “Who is ‘he’?”

Eight years old. Observant. Relentless.

I tucked a curl behind her ear. “Someone I used to know.”

“A long time ago?”

“A long time ago.”

Eli looked between Dominic and me. Then he frowned, and that tiny crease appeared between his brows, and Dominic made a sound like a man who had been struck.

I had seen that expression on Eli since he was a toddler. The first time, I had gone into the laundry room and cried where nobody could see me. Now Dominic was seeing it for himself, and whatever walls he had built around himself in nine years were coming down in front of forty strangers and a table of half-eaten salads.

Camille lowered her eyes.

For the next ten minutes, we performed a strange imitation of normal life. Zara got her soufflé — I caved, because I needed her busy. Eli kept drawing. I answered questions about Jade’s corgi. Dominic and Camille retreated to a table near the window, close enough to watch, far enough to pretend they weren’t.

Dominic barely spoke.

Once, I caught him staring at Eli’s hand wrapped around a pencil. Just staring. Like a man watching water after years in the desert.

When Jade arrived, she walked in with her coat half-buttoned and alarm written all over her face. She spotted Dominic and stopped dead in the middle of the restaurant.

“Oh,” she said. Just that. Oh.

“Jade,” I warned.

“I’m being perfectly — ”

“Jade.”

She bent to kiss both children. “Who wants to help me with a thousand-piece puzzle?”

“A thousand and one,” Eli corrected.

“Even better.”

Zara gathered her coat. Then she looked back at Dominic, who had stood when Jade entered. He offered Zara a small, uncertain smile.

She gave him one back. Because that was who she was — my daughter gave her smiles away like they were free, which they were, and like they cost nothing, which they didn’t.

“Bye,” she said.

Something in Dominic’s face broke for half a second. “Goodbye.”

Eli stopped beside the table. He held up the napkin he’d been drawing on — several buildings beneath a moon the size of half the sky.

“You can have this,” he said.

Dominic stared at it. “For me?”

Eli shrugged. “I made two.”

Dominic took the napkin like it was made of spun glass. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Then my children walked out of Albion House with my sister, and I watched the doors close behind them, and only then did I turn back to the table where Dominic Hayward was still holding his son’s drawing.

He looked up at me.

“They’re mine,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.