Chapter 2

The Sentence I Wasn't Supposed to Hear

Virelle's POV

A photo could lie. Angles could lie. A hand on a back could mean nothing. I'd had four years of practice giving Kael the benefit of the doubt, and I wasn't going to stop over one blurry picture from a stranger who probably had their own reasons for sending it.

I put the baby shoes in my purse, still wrapped in tissue paper. Maybe this was the moment. Maybe I'd walk in, find some boring explanation, and tell him about the baby right there in the lobby and years from now we'd tell our son this was the night his mother refused to give up on his father.

I told the driver to take me to the Windermere.

My hands wouldn't sit still the whole ride. I pressed them flat against my knees and tried to breathe the way I used to when I was a kid and scared of the dark. I wasn't a kid. I was a grown woman going to check on her own husband, and the shame of that thought almost made me turn the car around.

I didn't.

The lobby was soft gold light and quiet piano music, built for people who never had to think about the cost of anything. I found him near the far corner with two men I didn't recognize. Selene sat close beside him on a velvet chair, her legs crossed, a tablet balanced on her knee, laughing at something one of the men said before Kael had even finished the sentence.

I stepped behind a marble pillar before anyone could spot me. Selene was pointing at something on the screen, numbers, charts, something about quarterly projections. Kael nodded, his jaw doing the thing it did when he was working through a problem. One of the men said something and Kael's mouth curved into a small, tired smile.

Business. Just business, the way I'd told myself it would be. Relief made me dizzy for a second.

I should have walked away right there. Gone home. Waited for him properly, the way a wife who trusted her husband would. I didn't move. Some part of me wanted to hear his voice a little longer, even from behind a pillar, even if he didn't know I was there.

That was my mistake. The older man, gray at the temples, leaned back and grinned. "You spend more hours with Selene than most men spend with their own wives. Does Virelle ever complain?"

I went still, my fingers gripping the cold marble.

Kael laughed…short, easy, the kind of laugh he hadn't given me in longer than I wanted to think about. "Virelle doesn't complain about anything. She's good like that."

Something in my chest loosened. He knew me. He saw me, even a little. Then he kept going.

"Honestly," he said, swirling his drink, not even looking up, "if Virelle disappeared tomorrow, nothing in my life would change."

Selene laughed at that, warm, delighted, like he'd said something clever.

I don't remember deciding to lean back against the pillar. I just remember my purse slipping off my shoulder, the tissue paper crackling as the little shoes hit the carpet at my feet.

I looked down at them. White with blue ribbons. Bought that morning with more hope than I'd had in years, and now it felt like it belonged to a different woman entirely, someone who still believed a pair of baby shoes could fix four years of silence.

Four years of birthdays planned around his schedule. Four years of dinners eaten across from an empty chair. Four years of telling myself a man like Kael just needed time, that eventually he'd look at me and actually see what I'd given him.

Now I knew. I could vanish tomorrow and his life would keep running exactly the same. No gap. No absence.

I thought about the baby, about a child who might grow up thinking his father's love was something you had to earn instead of something you were simply given, and my hand went to my stomach without me telling it to.

I bent down and picked up the shoes. My hands weren't quite steady. His laugh was still sitting somewhere behind my ribs, easy and careless in a way that made it worse.

I turned to leave.

"Virelle?"

I went still. When I turned my head, Kael was already on his feet, his drink forgotten on the table, his eyes locked on mine across the lobby. Whatever had been easy in his face a second ago was gone.

He knew I heard him.