Chapter 5

Zane's POV

The moment we stepped through the doors of the Ministry of Marriage and into the open air, I released Skylar's hand.

I had held it inside purely for practical reasons — the kind of quiet, controlled image management that had become second nature to me over the years. A man of my position did not attend a government registry without someone, somewhere, having a camera ready. And sure enough, as we emerged, shutters clicked and flashed from three different directions before we'd even reached the bottom step.

I let them.

A few well-placed photographs of Zane Hills leaving a marriage registry were far less damaging than the story they'd construct if they thought he was hiding something.

"Congratulations, Mrs. Hills," I said, adjusting my jacket. I kept my voice light — almost bored, the way I delivered most things I actually meant. "Welcome to what I can only assume will be a significantly more interesting life."

I got into my car without looking back.

I didn't need to see her face. I could imagine it well enough — that particular expression she got when she was caught between wanting to argue and not having the energy left to do it. I'd become something of a student of Skylar Miller's expressions over the past two years without ever consciously deciding to be.

Skylar Hills, I corrected myself.

I drove home with that thought sitting quietly in the back of my mind.

The lights were on inside the house when I pulled through the gate, which told me everything I needed to know before I even opened the front door.

My parents.

Sitting in my living room like they'd been invited, my mother with her spine perfectly straight and her expression arranged into the specific configuration that meant she had something to say and had been rehearsing it since she sat down.

"What are you both doing here?" I asked, setting my keys on the console table.

"What were you doing at the marriage registry?" my mother returned, without missing a beat.

I went still for half a second. Composed myself. "How did you—"

"Zane." Her voice sharpened on the single syllable. "You are my son. Did you genuinely believe I wouldn't find out within the hour?"

"Mom." I kept my voice even. "I've had a long day. Whatever this is, it can wait until—"

The sound of small feet on hardwood cut me off.

Kai came running from the hallway, still in his school clothes, hair slightly disheveled, wearing the expression he always wore when he had a question he'd been holding onto too long and it was starting to leak out at the edges.

"Daddy!" He skidded to a stop in front of me and I crouched automatically, catching him by the shoulders. "Grandma said you have a new wife. Grandpa said it's on the news. Is my new mom Mrs. Clara?"

Something tightened in my chest.

I looked at him — at his wide, earnest eyes, at the complete and uncomplicated hope in his face — and I felt the familiar pull of guilt that came with being Kai's father. The guilt of everything he deserved that I hadn't yet figured out how to give him.

"Hey." I smoothed his hair back from his forehead. "Let Daddy breathe for a second, yeah?"

"But Daddy—"

"It's not Mrs. Clara," I said quietly. "I promise you it's not Mrs. Clara."

His face relaxed incrementally.

"Will I meet her soon?"

"Soon," I said. And meant it more than I expected to.

I stood. Looked at my mother.

"Clara is flying here?" The control in my voice slipped slightly. Just slightly. "Mom. Tell me you didn't."

"She's a good woman, Zane. Stable. Appropriate. She understands your world—"

"She is not coming into my house." I crossed to the other side of the room, lowering my voice because Kai was still in the room and I refused to do this in front of him. "I have told you, repeatedly, that Clara and I are finished. That chapter is closed. It was closed before it properly started."

"Zane—"

"I'm asking you both to leave." I said it the way I said most difficult things — quietly, without decoration. "I need to put my son to bed. Whatever conversation you want to have, we can have it another time."

My father, who had been watching the exchange with the expression of a man who had learned decades ago when to stay silent, put a hand on my mother's arm. She looked at him. Something passed between them that I had never fully been able to read, even after thirty years of watching it happen.

She rose. Crossed to Kai. Bent and pressed a long kiss to his forehead, cupping his face with both hands the way she'd done since he was an infant.

"Grandma will come and take you somewhere fun soon, okay? Somewhere Daddy won't follow."

Kai giggled. "Okay, Grandma."

She straightened. Didn't look at me on her way to the door. My father followed, pausing briefly at my shoulder.

"Take it easy, son," he said. Not unkindly.

Then they were gone, and the house exhaled.

Dinner was quiet in the way that dinners with Kai were never actually quiet — he talked through every course, narrating his day at school, complaining about a boy in his class who had allegedly cheated at football, asking three separate questions about dinosaurs that I answered to the best of my ability. I watched him across the table and felt the thing I always felt watching him — that specific combination of fierce love and low-grade terror that came with being solely responsible for a small human who trusted you completely.

After I'd tucked him in and turned off the light, I was almost to the door when his voice came from the pillow.

"Daddy."

I paused. "Yeah."

"I know you like Miss Skylar."

The sentence landed in the quiet room with surprising weight. I turned slowly.

He was lying on his side, looking at me with those dark eyes that saw considerably more than a seven-year-old had any right to see.

"Is that so," I said carefully.

"I watch you." He said it simply, matter-of-factly, the way children state observations they've been sitting on for a while. "When she's not looking at you, you look at her differently than you look at other people."

I leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, studying my son.

"You're very observant for someone your age," I said.

"Is she my new mommy?"

I was quiet for a moment.

"Would that be okay with you? If she was?"

His face broke into the kind of smile that rearranged everything. "I would love that, Daddy. I like Miss Skylar. She's funny and she's not scared of you like everyone else is."

A laugh — real, unguarded — escaped me before I could catch it.

"That's fair," I said. "Get some sleep. And Kai?" He looked up. "This is between you and me. Grandma doesn't need to know our business."

He mimed zipping his lips.

I shook my head, still smiling, and pulled the door nearly closed behind me.

My room was dark and still. I sat on the edge of the bed without turning on the lamp, loosening my tie, and let the day settle over me like sediment.

Zane Hills. I turned the thought over quietly. You have a wife.

The idea should have felt transactional. Clinical. The contract had been designed to be exactly that — a clean exchange, mutual benefit, no complications. I was good at clean exchanges.

But sitting there in the dark, I found myself picking up my phone.

It rang twice.

"Hello." I kept my voice even.

"Hey." A pause. "I thought you weren't going to call."

"I've been dealing with things since I got home." I leaned back against the headboard. "Nothing work-related. You weren't out of the loop."

"Oh." Another pause, smaller this time. "Okay."

"Happy married life, Skylar Hills."

The silence that followed was different from the others — something in it shifted, turned over.

"Happy married life, Zane Hills," she said. Her voice was flat. Carefully flat, the way voices get when someone is deliberately keeping something out of them.

"That didn't sound particularly enthusiastic."

"I know about Kai's mother."

Two seconds of silence.

"Right," I said.

She didn't press it. I didn't explain. We both let it sit there between us on the phone line, taking up space, acknowledging itself.

"I called to check on you," I said finally. "And to tell you not to lose the ring."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm joking." I paused. "Mostly." Another pause. "If you need anything — within reason, outside of the contract salary — you can ask me. That's not nothing."

A beat. Then, quietly: "Thank you."

"Goodnight, Skylar."

I set the phone face-down on the nightstand.

The room was still dark. The house was quiet — the specific quiet of a large home after a child has gone to sleep in it, which was a different kind of quiet than any other.

I sat with it for a while.

My parents, I thought, have spent my entire adult life making decisions on my behalf and calling it love. They meant well — I had never seriously doubted that. But meaning well and doing right were not the same thing, and the gap between them had cost all of us considerably.

Clara was the latest iteration of that gap. A woman I respected, distantly, the way you respect furniture in a house you used to live in. Whatever my mother believed about her suitability, whatever campaign she had been quietly running on Clara's behalf for the past two years, it ended here.

I was married.

To my assistant.

Who had signed a contract this morning with shaking hands and the expression of someone making a calculated leap off a building and hoping something soft was at the bottom.

I don't think you'll regret this, I had told her outside the Ministry.

I meant it. I was not in the habit of saying things I didn't mean — it was inefficient and, eventually, expensive.

Whether she believed me yet was a different question.

I lay back. Closed my eyes.

From down the hall, faintly, I could hear Kai shifting in his sleep.

Is she my new mommy?

I pressed the back of my hand over my mouth.

And for the first time in a long time, in the dark and the quiet of my too-large house, I smiled.