“Damien!”
His mother’s voice sliced through the air with the kind of precision that had once made entire boardrooms fall silent theif.
I didn’t turn around right away tools.
For a moment, I only stood there with my sons’ small hands in mine, feeling the warmth of their palms, the slight tug of Ethan’s restless fingers, the steady softness of Noah’s grip. Around us, Westbridge Mall kept moving. Someone laughed near the escalators. A child cried over a dropped pretzel. Music floated faintly from a clothing store, bright and cheerful, as though nothing extraordinary had happened.
But everything inside me had gone still.
Because I knew that voice.
Vivienne Mercer.
Five years had done nothing to blur the memory of her polished smile, her pearl earrings, her quiet perfume, or the cold way she had looked at my stomach as if the life growing inside me were a problem to be solved before lunch.
“Damien,” she said again, closer now. “We need to go.”
Only then did I turn.
She looked exactly as I remembered, though perhaps a little thinner, a little sharper around the edges. Her silver-blonde hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, not a strand out of place. Her cream coat probably cost more than my first car. A pair of leather gloves covered her hands, but even from several feet away, I could see the tremor in her fingers.
Her eyes met mine.
The color vanished from her face.
For one small, terrible second, Vivienne Mercer looked afraid.
Not annoyed.
Not offended.
Afraid.
Then her gaze dropped to Ethan and Noah.
The reaction was almost invisible, but I saw it. Her lips parted. Her shoulders stiffened. Her eyes moved from one boy to the other, taking in the gray eyes, the dark hair, the familiar shape of their brows.
Recognition passed across her face like a shadow.
Ethan leaned closer to me.
“Mom,” he whispered, “who is that lady?”
I swallowed.
“No one we need to talk to right now.”
Vivienne heard me. I knew she did, because something hardened in her expression.
Damien stepped toward us, ignoring the coffee still dripping from his fingers onto the polished floor.
“Mara,” he said, his voice rough. “Please.”
I looked at him then.
He wasn’t the confident man who had once walked through the world as though doors opened for him before he even reached them. That Damien Mercer had been calm, controlled, almost impossibly sure of himself. The man in front of me looked shaken down to the bones.
His eyes moved from me to the twins again.
“Are they mine?” he asked.
Noah looked up at me, his brow furrowing in confusion.
“Mom?”
There it was.
The question I had known might come one day, but never like this. Never in the middle of a crowded mall, with my children standing between me and the past I had spent years trying to survive.
Vivienne’s voice came quickly.
“Damien, this is neither the place nor the time.”
He didn’t look at her.
“Mara,” he said again.
I drew in a quiet breath. “You don’t get to ask that here.”
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