Chapter 2- Three Years Ago

Alexandre's POV

Three years.

That was the number sitting in the center of my chest like a blade while I looked at the woman across my desk — the woman I had spent a significant and embarrassing portion of the last three years trying not to think about.

I had failed, for the record. Tried and failed, repeatedly, in the specific way that you fail at something you pretend isn't happening. A face that surfaced without invitation. A laugh I heard once in a crowded restaurant that made me turn around so fast I knocked over a wine glass. Small, inconvenient hauntings that I had attributed to the particular intensity of that night and refused to examine further.

I was examining it now.

She was sitting across from me in a blazer that was slightly too big for her — borrowed, maybe, or bought for an older version of herself — with her hands folded in her lap and her green eyes doing something complicated that I recognised as the expression of a person deciding how much truth they could afford to give.

I knew that expression. I had worn it myself, more times than I could count.

"Is he mine?" I asked again.

She breathed in. Just once. The kind of breath that is less about oxygen and more about buying a single second of time.

Then she said: "Yes."

One word.

The room didn't shake. No dramatic shift in the light, no soundtrack swelling from somewhere. Just one word, spoken quietly by a woman who looked like it had cost her something to say it, and the absolute rearrangement of everything I had understood my life to be twenty minutes ago.

I looked back at the photograph.

The boy — my son, a sentence my brain was attempting to process and failing — was laughing at whoever was behind the camera. Completely unguarded. Head thrown back in the way that children laugh when they haven't yet learned to be self-conscious about joy. Dark hair, slightly curled at the temples. And those eyes — my eyes, my mother's eyes, the Laurent grey-blue that showed up in every family photograph going back three generations — looking out at me from a face that was small and round and entirely, devastatingly his own.

My son.

I set the photograph down.

Pressed my fingers flat against my desk.

Breathed.

Three years ago I had been in the worst stretch of the best year of my life.

The Marchetti deal — the one that had taken fourteen months, four failed negotiation rounds, and one near-collapse that had cost me three weeks of sleep — had finally closed on a Thursday afternoon in October. Nine hundred million euros of Paris riverside real estate, secured. The single biggest deal in Laurent Group's history. My team had celebrated. I had shaken hands, said the right things, smiled the right smiles, and felt absolutely nothing except the particular exhaustion that comes from wanting something so badly for so long that achieving it leaves you hollow instead of full.

I had gone to the hotel bar alone that evening. Not to celebrate. Just to sit somewhere that wasn't my office and drink something that wasn't coffee and exist without anyone needing something from me for five consecutive minutes.

She was already there when I arrived.

Sitting at the far end of the bar with a glass of white wine she was clearly nursing rather than drinking, wearing a black dress that suggested she had also dressed for something she no longer had the energy for. She was looking at nothing in particular — the middle-distance expression of someone deep inside their own head.

I sat two stools away. Ordered. Didn't speak.

She spoke first, which surprised me. Not to me specifically — to the bartender, asking for water in the slightly careful way of someone who had decided they were done with wine but hadn't finished processing whatever had brought them there. The bartender moved away and she glanced sideways and caught me not-quite-looking.

"Terrible night?" she said.

"Complicated one," I said. "You?"

She considered it honestly, which I hadn't expected. "My mother died this morning," she said. "I've been sitting in the hospital for nine hours and I didn't want to go back to my apartment yet because it's going to feel very empty and I thought a hotel bar might feel less empty and I'm not sure it's working."

She said it matter-of-factly, without the performance of grief, which told me she was still in the stage before it fully landed. The numb stage. I had been there myself, at eighteen, when my father died and the weight of it took three weeks to arrive.

"I'm sorry," I said. And I meant it, which was not always the case when I said it.

"Thank you." She looked at her wine glass. "She was sick for a long time. It was — it was expected. That almost makes it worse somehow. You think being prepared will help and then it doesn't at all."

We talked for two hours.

Not about anything significant at first. Then about everything significant — her mother, my father, what it meant to lose the person who made you feel most like yourself. She was funny in the way that clever people are when they're sad — sharp and warm at the same time, laughing at things that were also painful because the alternative was too heavy to carry. She made me say things I hadn't said to anyone. Asked questions that were too direct to be polite and too honest to deflect.

I had not intended for the evening to become what it became.

But somewhere between the second drink and the third, the conversation had shifted the way conversations sometimes do — into something quieter and more charged, the space between words becoming as full as the words themselves. And at some point she had looked at me with those green eyes and I had understood that she was making a decision, and then she had said, very simply: "I don't want to be alone tonight."

Not a performance. Not a line. Just the truth, offered directly, the way she seemed to offer everything.

I had said: "Then don't be."

We had one night. No last names — not deliberately, just the way it happened, the way time moves differently at 2 a.m. in a hotel that feels separate from the rest of the world. She had laughed at something I said and covered her mouth with her hand in the way of someone surprised by their own laughter, and I had thought: I would like to make her do that again.

I had thought a great many things that night that I had spent three years declining to examine.

When I woke at six she was gone.

No note. No number. Just the faint impression of her on the other side of the bed and the absolute confirmation that I had let something significant walk out of a hotel room and had no way to find it again.

I had tried.

I was not proud of how hard I had tried, given that I had only her first name and a hotel bar in the 8th arrondissement to go on. But I had asked the hotel. They had no record of a reservation under Claire — she must have been there independently, not as a guest. I had tried to convince myself it didn't matter. That it was one night, that these things happened, that the specific hollow feeling I was carrying was just the come-down after fourteen months of high-pressure deal-making and had nothing to do with a woman in a black dress who made me say true things.

I had almost believed it.

And now she was sitting across my desk in a blazer that was slightly too big for her, and she had a son who was two years and almost three months old, and I was doing the arithmetic again except this time I didn't need to because the calculation was already complete and the answer was sitting in a photograph under my fingertips.

I looked up from the desk.

She was watching me carefully — not with guilt, I realised, but with the expression of someone who has been braced for impact for so long that the impact almost comes as a relief.

"You didn't know who I was," I said. It wasn't a question but she answered it anyway.

"I'd never heard of Laurent Group. I found the job listing on a recruitment site. I swear to you I had no idea—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "I know how that sounds."

"It sounds true," I said. Because it did. The colour that had left her face when she walked through my door was not the colour of a woman executing a plan. It was the colour of a woman whose plan had just detonated under her feet.

"I couldn't find you," she said. "I only knew your first name. You'd booked the hotel through your company account, not personally — I went back, I tried—"

"You went back to the hotel."

A pause. "Six weeks later. When I found out." Something moved across her face. "I wasn't — I didn't want to do it alone. I just couldn't find you."

Three years.

She had spent three years raising my son alone because I had given her nothing to find me with. Because I had let her walk out of a hotel room with only my first name and had told myself it was fine, it was one night, these things happened.

The thing I had been keeping controlled — the thing I had been pressing flat with both hands since the moment she walked through my door — shifted.

I stood up.

Came around the desk.

She tracked me with those green eyes, chin up, not retreating, which told me everything I needed to know about what the last three years had made her. She had come in here today desperately needing this job and she was still not going to flinch. I filed that away.

I crouched down and picked up the photograph again.

Looked at it one more time — really looked, the way I hadn't allowed myself to in the first shock of it. My son's face. My son's laugh. My son, who was almost three years old and had never heard my name.

I set the photograph on the edge of the desk facing her.

Straightened up.

And said, in a voice that came out considerably quieter than I intended: "What is his name?"

Her expression did something I wasn't prepared for — something that cracked open just slightly at the edges, a hairline fracture in all that composure, there and gone in a single second.

"Theo," she said. "His name is Theo."

I nodded.

Walked back around the desk.

Sat down.

Picked up my phone and said to my PA on the other end: "Cancel my afternoon. Everything. Yes, all of it."

I set the phone down and looked at Claire Whitfield — the woman from the hotel bar, the mother of my son, the stranger who was no longer going to be a stranger — and said:

"We need to talk about what happens next."

Her chin lifted. "I'm not giving him up."

"I'm not asking you to." I held her gaze steadily. "But I have missed two years and eight months of my son's life, Claire. I will not miss another day. So yes — we are going to talk about what happens next. And you are going to listen."

The air between us was electric.

Whatever she had expected from this conversation, it wasn't this.

Good.

Neither had I.