Chapter 2

I sat on the couch until the sky outside turned the color of cold ash.

Julian had come home sometime after midnight, but he didn’t turn on the light. He walked past me without a word, and I didn’t call out to him.

Eighteen years. We had good years once.

When he was first building Vance Group, We had eaten cold takeout off the floor while I sketched circuit diagrams on the back of his résumé.

We'd had nothing then.

*When the company takes off,* he used to say, *I'll give you the world, Aria.*

The company got big.

He stopped coming home.

I said the apartment felt empty. He said, “You have Caleb.”

I said I wanted to go to a concert. He said, “Have the assistant take you. I can’t get away.”

Eventually, I stopped asking.

I told myself this was what marriage was supposed to be—the heat cooling into companionship, passion settling into something quieter.

Now I wondered if I had been the only one who turned into family.

And he had turned into something else.

At seven a.m., I heard the kitchen come alive.

The sound of bread going into the toaster, the soft thud of the refrigerator door.

When I came out in my robe, he was at the stove in a fresh shirt, sleeves rolled neatly to the forearm, plating two eggs onto two plates with the focused care of a man who hadn’t cooked breakfast in years.

“You’re up,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. Dark circles under his eyes. “I made you something.”

I sat.

The table held milk, toast, and eggs—the edges a little burnt, the way he knew I liked them.

He sat down across from me. Neither of us mentioned yesterday.

"Cal's coming home next weekend." His voice was gentle. He had always done this—reset a conversation by force of pleasantness.

I wrapped both hands around the warm cup of coffee he'd set in front of me “I know.”

"Aria." His tone softened to the one he used in boardroom he'd carefully rehearsed.

I looked up at him.

This face—I had watched it for eighteen years, from young man to middle age. I used to know exactly when he was lying.

Now I couldn’t read him at all.

"I need you to know I'm sorry about last night. I—I lost my head."

"I know that."

"Then can we please—" He set down his fork. "Can we please put this behind us? I know I haven't been around. I'm going to fix that."

I looked down at my toast and sipped my coffee.

“When will you do the DNA test?”

The tenderness on his face froze.

“You’re really doing this?”

His chopsticks clattered against the porcelain.

For one half-second—I could see his mind running the options the way it ran a quarterly forecast.

Not angry. Not hurt. Calculating.

Then the mask slid back on. “Fine. Do your test. But don’t expect it to change anything.”

"Maybe."

"You're going to be embarrassed when it comes back, Aria."

He pushed back his chair and walked out of the kitchen. He almost said something. He thought better of it.

The front door closed behind him without slamming.

Good. Now we both knew where we stood.

......

I remembered something then. When Caleb was small, everyone said he looked just like Julian. No one ever said he looked like me.

I stood up and walked to the balcony. Julian’s car pulled out of the garage, the taillights bleeding red through the gray morning.

I watched him go.

Then I turned and walked to his study.

On the desk, I placed two documents: a divorce papers and a proposed asset division. The patents that kept Vance Group alive—I held one hundred percent of the rights.

But Julian had been using them for so long, he had started treating them as his own.

My phone buzzed. My mother.

“Aria, are you feeling better?” Her voice was light, almost cheerful.

“Celeste is flying back next week. Julian knew you’ve been down, so he bought her a ticket. He’s even setting her up with a director position at Vance Group. Isn’t that wonderful? You two haven’t seen each other in ages. We’ll all have dinner.”

I said nothing.

Celeste.

The name made my jaw tighten. Not since the last time she'd flown home, eaten dinner in my apartment, kissed the top of Caleb's head at the door.

Now the moment she returned, she landed a office—at the company I had built with my patents.

I kept my voice steady. “What time?”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’ll bring everything. Just rest.” She paused. "And Aria, baby—be sweet to Julian tonight. Men need to feel admired. You know how he is."

I couldn’t listen anymore. I made a vague sound and hung up.

Then I opened my phone and booked a rush DNA test at a private lab outside the city—one Julian’s people couldn’t reach.

I went to Caleb’s room and collected strands of hair from his brush.

I sealed them in an envelope and sent them out.

Then I messaged the private investigator I had hired three days ago.

*Run Julian’s financials. Everything. Offshore accounts, personal gifts, anything going to Celeste.*

The PI replied within minutes: *Understood. Initial read in twenty‑four hours.*

I set down the phone and looked out the window.

Eighteen years. Enough waiting.

Tomorrow, I would start finding out who I had really been married to.

---

That night, I didn’t go to bed.

I sat in the study, the divorce papers still on the desk, and waited.

At 11:47 p.m., my phone buzzed with an email from the lab.

*Your results are ready.*

I opened the link. The page loaded slowly—too slowly.

I went straight to the last line.

*“Aria Sinclair is excluded as the biological mother of the tested subject.”*

Eighteen years.

One sentence.

I read the line three times. Then I closed the report and set down my phone.

My hands were shaking.

Not because I had been wrong. Because I had been right.

Then I picked up my phone.

I forwarded the report to three places.

The first was my attorney.

The second was the private investigator.

The third was a single name in my contacts under no last name at all.

**Adrian.**

I walked to the window. The city lights stretched out beneath me—Ashford at night, cold and indifferent.

Somewhere out there, my husband was probably still at his office, or maybe he had gone to the apartment he kept for “late nights.”

Somewhere out there, Celeste was packing for her flight home.

And somewhere I didn’t even know existed—there was a child who should have been mine.

I pressed my palm against the cold glass.

Tomorrow, I would tell Julian I wanted to go to the old house. I would find whatever Celeste had left behind. And I would start digging up every secret they had buried.