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 8

The second Saturday, I took them to the science museum.

Dominic met us on the steps, and I watched Zara assess him for exactly three seconds before deciding he was acceptable company and dragging him toward the dinosaur hall by the hand. Eli hung back, studying the building’s cantilevered roof the way other children studied ice cream menus.

“You designed this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “But I know who did.”

“Can we see the plans?”

“Maybe the gift shop has the book.”

That was how Dominic Hayward — one of the most powerful men in Chicago — spent a Saturday afternoon being led around a museum by an eight-year-old girl who corrected his dinosaur facts with unshakable confidence.

“You said the T. rex could run fast,” Zara informed him. “That’s wrong. It probably walked.”

“I stand corrected.”

“You should research before you speak.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Eli, meanwhile, had discovered the architecture wing and was standing in front of a scale model of a Frank Lloyd Wright house with his nose almost touching the glass. Dominic drifted over.

“You like buildings?”

Eli shrugged. “They stay where you put them.”

Dominic was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “That’s the most sensible thing anyone’s said to me all week.”

Eli almost smiled.

Lunch that day was a small diner near the museum. Zara interrogated Dominic with the precision of a prosecutor: favorite color, favorite movie, whether he’d ever met the mayor, why his socks were boring.

“These socks have a pattern,” Dominic protested.

“I see one dot. That’s not a pattern.”

“It’s subtle.”

“It’s boring.”

Eli, for his part, said almost nothing. But I caught him watching Dominic when he thought no one was looking — studying his hands, the way he held his fork, the particular angle of his shoulders.

A week later came the bookstore.

Dominic found Eli standing in the architecture section, holding a book that cost more than my first car. Eli put it back when he saw the price. Dominic bought it without comment and handed it over wrapped in brown paper.

“You don’t have to — ” Eli started.

“Take it,” Dominic said. “Books aren’t debts.”

Eli carried that book everywhere for a month.

Then came the skating rink.

I should have warned Dominic. I didn’t.

He laced up his skates with the confidence of a man who had never once been asked to perform a physical activity in front of witnesses. Twenty seconds after stepping onto the ice, he was on the ground.

Zara screamed with laughter.

“I’m fine,” Dominic said, from a seated position. “This is a strategy.”

“Getting up is a strategy,” Eli pointed out.

“I’m implementing that next.”

It took Dominic three falls to reach the wall. He gripped the rail with both hands and looked at me with the expression of a man reassessing his entire life.

“You could have told me,” he said.

“And missed this?”

He laughed, and I laughed, and for a moment the years between us felt less like a wall and more like weather we had simply walked through.

He did not get better at skating.

But the twins didn’t care. By the end of the afternoon, Zara was teaching him to glide with one hand on the rail, and Eli had stopped pretending he wasn’t enjoying himself.

That evening, I sat on my back steps and watched the city lights come on.

The weeks were teaching me something I hadn’t expected.

Those small moments — the dinosaur corrections, the books, the laughter on the ice — they hurt. Not because they were wrong. Because they were right. They showed me, with terrible clarity, how natural so much of this could have been.

At night, after the twins slept, I sometimes wandered into the alternate life.

Dominic carrying a baby through our old apartment.

Dominic assembling a crib badly.

Dominic in the front row at school plays, checking his phone like every other parent, ordinary in the best possible way.

Then I reminded myself that imaginary lives were always easier than real ones.

The man I had divorced had not been ready for those things.

And perhaps I had not been ready to forgive him.

The man standing beside the skating rink was different.

But different wasn’t the same as healed.

On a Thursday morning, a message arrived on my phone from a number I didn’t recognize.

Imani. This is Camille Prescott. I know this is strange. Would you be willing to have coffee with me? No agenda. There is something I think you should know.

Every instinct told me not to go.

I read the message three times.

Then, because the woman who had walked out of Albion House with such quiet grace deserved at least the courtesy of a reply, I typed one word.

When?

Her answer came a minute later.

Tomorrow. Ten o’clock. The café on North Avenue. I’ll be the one who looks nervous.

I stared at the screen.

Dominic and Camille were still married. As far as I knew.

And yet his wife was asking me to coffee.