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 5

My studio sits on the second floor of a converted warehouse in the West Loop, all exposed brick and enormous windows and the particular smell of coffee, sawdust, and freshly cut fabric samples. By the time Dominic arrived the following evening, the staff had gone home and the city had turned gold outside the glass.

He was early.

I watched him cross the street from my window — dark coat, no assistant, no car waiting at the curb. He looked like a man who had slept badly and hadn’t bothered to pretend otherwise.

I opened the door before he could knock.

“Come in.”

He stepped inside and stopped, taking in the space the way he took in everything — cataloguing, filing, understanding. I had designed this room myself. The warm oak. The pendant lights. The wall of fabric samples arranged like an art installation. Forty-two people depended on this place, and it had never once depended on anyone’s name but mine.

“You built this,” he said.

“I did.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

There was something almost unbearable about how ordinary the small talk was. We were performing politeness while standing on top of nine years of wreckage.

I walked to my desk and picked up the blue folder.

Dominic didn’t sit. He stared at the folder like it might bite him.

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

I opened it. Inside were the postal receipt, the tracking number, the delivery confirmation — and beneath them, two pages written in my handwriting, dated eight years ago.

Dominic reached for the receipt first.

His face went pale as he read the signature line.

“Someone signed for it,” he said.

“Yes.”

The signature was hurried but legible.

G. Wong.

Dominic stared at the name. I watched recognition move across his face like a shadow.

“You know who that is.”

For a long moment he didn’t answer. Then he lowered himself into the chair across from my desk, and all the air went out of him.

“Grace Wong.”

“Who was she?”

“My executive operations manager.” He looked up at me, and something in his expression had changed. “She handled the executive floor. Mail, scheduling, logistics. Anything that came into the building for me crossed her desk first.”

“Would she have opened your mail?”

“Anything marked personal should have gone into the locked correspondence drawer outside my office. Unopened. That was the protocol.”

“Should have?”

Dominic looked at the delivery date on the receipt. Then he did something that made my stomach drop — he went very still, and I recognized the stillness from the restaurant. His world was rearranging itself again.

“That week,” he murmured.

“What?”

He rubbed his forehead. “We moved the executive offices that week. From the old tower into the temporary headquarters while the new building was finishing. Half the staff was split between two locations. I was in Asia closing the Aster merger — ”

“The Vanguard acquisition,” I corrected. “You were in Singapore.”

“The point is, everything was chaos. Correspondence was being forwarded between buildings. Packing crates everywhere.” He looked at the receipt again. “If a personal letter arrived during the move, and nobody flagged it as urgent — ”

“It could have been misplaced,” I finished. “Maybe it was that simple.”

“Maybe.”

I handed him the letter.

For the first time in eight years, Dominic Hayward read the words I had written while carrying his children.

His eyes moved slowly across the first page. Then the second. When he reached the final paragraph, he stopped.

I remembered every word.

I don’t know what is left between us, Dominic, and I’m not writing to ask you to fix something we’ve already broken. But these babies belong to both of us. Whatever we became to each other, I believe you deserve the chance to decide what you want to become to them.

Dominic read that paragraph twice.

When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet. “I never saw this.”

“I believe you.”

His gaze dropped back to the receipt. He turned it over, studying it, and then he went still again.

“What is this?” He pointed to a faint series of numbers stamped in the bottom corner of the receipt.

“I don’t know. It’s been there since the day it was delivered.”

Dominic angled the receipt toward the light. His expression sharpened.

“I know what it is.”

“What?”

“It’s an internal document code.”

A strange cold moved through me. “For Hayward Corporation?”

“Yes.”

He stared at the code for a long moment. Then he looked up at me, and there was something new in his eyes — not grief this time. Not guilt.

Something harder.

“That means your letter wasn’t just lost in the mailroom,” he said. “Somebody scanned it into our records system.”

I sat very still.

“What does that mean?”

“It means there may still be a copy in the archives.” He looked at the receipt again, then back at me. “And if it’s still in the archives, Nia, then somewhere inside Hayward Corporation — for eight years — the truth about our children has been sitting quietly in a file.”

I felt the room tilt.

For eight years, I had believed my letter had vanished somewhere between a crowded executive office and a man too busy to hear from me. I had built an entire life on that belief. I had raised two children on that belief.

But Dominic was looking at me now with the expression he used to wear when he’d found the one overlooked number in a forty-page contract — the number that changed everything.

“And I’m going to find out exactly where it went,” he said quietly.