“Damien!”
His mother’s voice sliced through the air with the kind of precision that had once made entire boardrooms fall silent.
I didn’t turn around right away.
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.
