Chapter 1

At first, I apologized to the pharmacist.

“That's someone else's record.”

She checked my date of birth, then the patient number on the screen. “No. It's yours.”

The hospital was updating its records system. An archived delivery note had opened instead of the prescription. I leaned over the counter and read it again.

Two babies. Two sets of measurements. Two times of birth, eleven minutes apart.

A daughter. A son.

“Could you print that for me?”

My voice sounded so ordinary that she did.

I carried the page upstairs to the obstetrics department. Dr. Miller was between appointments. When his receptionist said he couldn't see me, I placed the paper on her desk.

“Tell him Elena Bennett is here.”

He let me in within a minute.

The color left his face before I asked my first question.

“Where is my son?”

He told me to sit. Asked whether Dante knew I was there. Reached for his phone.

I put my hand over it.

“Look at me. Not at the name on your donor wall. At me.”

He lowered his eyes.

The pregnancy had meant bleeding, admissions, and scans by specialists Dante selected. They'd told me a shadow on one scan was a placental abnormality. Later, they'd sedated me for an emergency delivery.

Miller admitted there had been a second baby all along. My son had a congenital heart defect. Dante had arranged his immediate transfer to Saint Agnes, a private pediatric hospital across the city.

“He said the news could destabilize you,” Miller whispered. “You were already struggling. There were concerns about how you would cope if the boy didn't survive.”

“So you decided I shouldn't know he existed?”

“I was told you would be informed once he was out of danger.”

“By whom?”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

I recognized my husband's instructions even when they arrived disguised as a medical decision.

“Did he survive?”

“Yes.”

The room tilted. I held the edge of the desk until it steadied.

“Who has him?”

Miller swallowed.

“Vivienne Laurent. Mr. Bennett handled the placement. The file contains adoption documents.”

Vivienne.

Dante's first love. The woman his father had paid to leave the country before Dante took over his father's company.

She'd come back the day I went into labor.

Someone had mentioned her flight while I was doubled over a hospital bed. Dante had stepped into the corridor to take a call. Then another. Then he'd kissed my forehead and said he had to deal with something.

I spent the next fourteen hours asking nurses whether my husband had come back.

Afterward, he'd knelt beside my bed and told me Vivienne had threatened to hurt herself if he didn't meet her. He'd made sure she was safe, put her on another plane, and ended it. He swore.

“I couldn't have someone's death hanging over the day our daughter was born.”

I'd wanted to leave him then.

But there was a baby against my chest, and I was bleeding through hospital pads, and the thought of beginning motherhood alone frightened me more than his absence had hurt.

I stayed.

Then came nights when sleep wouldn't come, mornings when breathing felt like work, a love for my daughter so fierce that it terrified me. My doctors called it postpartum depression. Dante called every specialist he could find.

All that time, he knew there was something else I was grieving without a name for it.

My illness hadn't begun and ended with this secret. But now I knew why every question about the delivery made Dante change the subject.

“Where does she live?” I asked.

Miller hesitated again.

I unfolded the record on his desk.

“Decide whether you're going to lie to me twice.”

Her house was ten minutes from ours.

Ten minutes. Less time than it took me to walk our daughter to the park.

I found it behind a wrought-iron gate that wasn't fully closed. Through the front windows, I could see a man I knew better than anyone sitting on a sofa with a little boy on his lap.

The boy was three.

He had my dark hair and my mother's stubborn chin.

Vivienne sat close enough that her knee touched Dante's. The child's hand rested comfortably against his father's throat.

Then Vivienne spoke.

“When are you going to leave her? Luca needs a father who lives here. I need you.”

Dante's face hardened.

“You have me here almost every day. Don't confuse that with a promise I never made.”

“He calls you Daddy.”

“Because I am his father.”

“And I'm his mother. What does that make us?”

“It makes us responsible for him. Elena is my wife.”

Vivienne looked down, letting the silence fill with all the things she wanted him to apologize for.

“I can't give him a normal family by myself.”

“You wanted a child. I gave you the chance to raise one. Elena has Sofia, and she has me. Luca has both of us looking after him. No one has been abandoned. Everyone is taken care of.”

He glanced down at the boy, then back at her.

“I gave you the chance to be a mother, Vivienne. I didn't offer you my marriage.”

My fingers slipped on the gate.

Gave you.

As though our son were a house key. A favor. Something he owned and could hand over without consulting anyone.

I couldn't stay long enough to hear more.

By the time I reached home, my palms were marked with crescents from my nails. I locked myself in the bedroom and sat on the floor beside the bed.

Our housekeeper called Dante. Normally, if she said I was having a difficult episode, he'd be home before she put down the phone.

This time, I heard his answer through the door.

“I can't leave right now. Get her some water. Let her rest.”

I pictured the little hand at his throat.

The familiar room next door to my own stolen life.

Then I picked up my phone.

“Emergency services. What is your emergency?”

I took one breath. Then another.

“My baby was taken from me while I was unconscious in the hospital,” I said. “I've just found out where he is.”