Five years ago, the man I loved walked away after asking me to end my pregnancy.
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.”
