I wanted to cling to the version of the story that had kept me alive all those lonely months: Adrian was dangerous, leaving was necessary, love was weakness.
But doubt had already entered.
And doubt, once inside, was merciless.
“Why didn’t you come after me?” I asked.
His expression darkened with pain.
“I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“I found the note.” His voice lowered. “The one that said you hated me. That you had been planning to leave for months. That there was someone else.”
My lips parted.
“I never wrote that.”
“I know that now.”
Silence fell.
Not peaceful silence.
The kind that arrives after a wall collapses and reveals the bodies hidden behind it.
I turned my face away as tears slipped into my hair.
“I was alone,” I whispered.
Adrian came around the bed, but he did not touch me.
“I searched for you for five months before the private investigator disappeared.”
My eyes snapped to his.
“Disappeared?”
“He was found two weeks later in Boston. Alive. Paid off. Terrified.” Adrian’s mouth tightened. “He told me someone inside my family office had blocked every trace of you.”
“Vivienne.”
“Yes.”
Another contraction seized me before I could answer.
This one stole every word from my mouth.
Adrian was at my side instantly.
“You don’t have to forgive me,” he said, taking my hand again when I reached blindly for something to hold. “You don’t have to believe me today. But I need you to survive this. Hate me tomorrow. Scream at me tomorrow. Take every dollar I have tomorrow. Just stay with me now.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t hate him.
That would have been easier.
Hate was clean.
What I felt was ruined love, still beating under rubble.
The hours that followed stripped everything down to pain, breath, and Adrian’s voice.
He counted with me.
He wiped my forehead with a cool cloth.
He let me crush his hand until his knuckles went white.
And never once did he ask again whether the baby was his.
Near dawn, as the rain softened outside, a cry filled the room.
Small.
Fierce.
Alive.
The world stopped.
Then the nurse smiled.
“It’s a boy.”
A sob broke out of me so suddenly I didn’t recognize it as my own.
They placed him against me, warm and wriggling beneath a soft blanket. His tiny face was scrunched in protest, his dark hair damp, his mouth opening in outraged little cries.
My son.
