Chapter 6: Doubts.

Julian’s pov

Three days had passed since I saw those kids at the park and their faces replayed in my mind.

I tried everything to get them out of my head. Work helped for a while, contracts, figures, meetings but the effort felt mechanical.

I ran at five in the morning until the streets were empty and my legs hurt, but the girl’s bright smile and the boy’s serious face still wouldn’t leave my mind. Their likeness stuck with me like a tiny splinter.

By Thursday, I was pacing in my office. Each coffee Raymond brought grew cold on my desk while I stared at the city, trapped in the same thought.

“Sir?” Raymond’s voice pulled me back. “Your ten o’clock with the board is in fifteen minutes.”

“Cancel it,” I said without turning.

He paused. “Sir, this is the quarterly review.”

“I said cancel it.” My voice, sharp.

He paused, then stepped out.The door clicked closed and I was left with the silence and the thought I had been avoiding: those children weren’t random. They had the look of someone I used to know.

Six years. Lily had vanished six years ago, the night before her wedding to Adrian. No note, no explanation. Just gone. For years I’d assumed she left because she wanted to, or because something had driven her away.

Seeing her again, the way she’d looked at me like I was a stranger and then those two kids had stirred something cold and electric in me. The math was ugly and simple. The coincidence felt impossible.

I found Marcus Chen’s name in my contacts and dialed. Marcus had dug up more than one unpleasant truth for me before. He was discrete, efficient, and expensive.

“Julian Stone,” he answered on the second ring. “Been awhile.”

“Marcus. I need you. Quietly.”

“What are we doing?”

“A background check. Lily Harper. She might be living under another name.”

A pause. “What do you need?”

“Everything. Where she’s been, what she’s doing, and if she has children.”

There was silence long enough that the line hummed. “Understood. This is personal.”

“Very.” I hated how vulnerable the admission sounded. “I need it fast. Confidential.”

“You’ll get preliminary tonight.”

When he hung up I sagged into my chair, oddly emptied. I’d taken a step I could not undo. Hiring someone to look into her life felt like betrayal and relief wrapped into one.

__

The day passed in a haze. I rescheduled the board, signed papers with my name, nodded in meetings, but I wasn’t there.

Every vibration of my phone jolted me.

By evening I’d snapped at Raymond twice and hung up on a client. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t watch television. I sat in my office and watched the light shift until the evening came by.

At eight p.m. Marcus called.

“You got something?” I asked before hello.

“I have what you asked for,” he said. “Lily Harper left London for six years, she just got back. She runs an events company. No criminal record, no debts.”

I let out a slow breath. “ Does she have children?”

“She has twins. Eva and Ethan. Born six years ago. Birth certificates list no father.”

The room tilted. Six years ago. Twins. No father listed. The logic slammed into me like a train I hadn’t seen coming.

“Send me everything,” I said.

He said he already had and was attaching documents. My laptop pinged; an email appeared. I opened it with shaking hands.

There they were: school photos, candid snapshots from birthday parties, a scanned medical file. Eva in a little tiara, cheeks flushed, smiling with a missing front tooth. Ethan with that stubborn, serious face — the exact expression I’d seen in the mall and recognized immediately as mine.

The last attachment made my breath stop. Marcus had included a side-by-side comparison. On the left: a school portrait of the twins. On the right: a photograph of me at six, sitting in our family library, wearing a tiny suit and scowling at the camera. The likeness was more than coincidence. It was a mirror.

Marcus’ voice on the phone was flat. “Interesting genetics. Those look like your kids.”

I couldn’t form the words. My throat tightened until speaking became impossible. When I finally managed it, the sentence felt foreign. “They’re mine.”

Rage rose first — hot and immediate. How could she keep them from me? How could she let me walk past their faces in the mall, look straight at her, and not know? Six years of birthdays, scraped knees, first jokes, first words gone. A life I had no part in.

Under the rage came something softer and more desperate: grief. And beneath grief, something fragile and unbearably hopeful: a need to see them again, to touch them, to know these children who carried my features and the shape of my jaw.

I let Marcus finish. “I can find out where she lives, where the children go to school, and more about her company. Surveillance, if you want.”

“No.” I surprised myself with how firm the word was. “Not yet. I want to handle this carefully”

“Understood. But if you change your mind—”

“I will.” My voice came out stiff.

I ended the call and sat in the dark office, the laptop’s glow casting faintly lit up the room.

Fury had a direction. It wanted confrontation, answers, explanations. It wanted to tear into her and demand why she had kept this from me. But a quieter voice, practical spoke up: approaching her blind and with anger could ruin everything. Scaring the children, exposing them, pushing Lily into a corner, none of it would help.

I thought back to the way she had looked at me when I saw her. Not surprised. Not guilty. Just… careful. Protective. Her eyes had slid away when I tried to speak to her. Did she imagine I would follow? Or had she been waiting for me to notice? Had she rehearsed every interaction so she could look like a stranger if need be?

There were so many questions I wanted to shout across the room. Why had she left? Where had she gone? Why no father on the birth certificates, was that her choice, a legal maneuver, or something darker? Had she kept them secret to protect them from me, from Adrian, from our family’s name? Maybe she feared what I would do if I'm aware?

I closed the laptop and bent back on my seat. For years I had convinced myself I wanted nothing to do with the messy parts of life. I’d built a fortress of control and certainty. Now that fortress felt like a thin wall between me and something raw and urgent.

If Lily had wanted to keep her life separate, she had succeeded. She had created a life in another city, raised two children by herself, and built a business that worked.

She had kept them away from the problems linked to my name.

I was not sure if she was protecting them from me or from someone else, but not telling me felt like betrayal.

But what could she have done when I shunned her off after that night.

I imagined telling them who I was and watching the expressions that followed. But then I imagined the fear in their eyes, how my presence could disrupt the life Lily had built for them. The idea of causing them pain made my chest ache.

In the end, I had only one choice: find out more, but quietly.

Understand what she had built and why. Find the edges before making any abrupt move.

Marcus could find out more if I gave the order. I could hire lawyers, set up legitimate channels, or force a meeting with careful legal steps. Each option felt heavy with consequence.

I felt tired in a way I hadn’t been in years. The world, which had always been framed in contracts and predictable outcomes, had blurred into a personal mess I wasn’t prepared for.

My phone lay on the desk. Beyond it were two photos that made the room both unbearably small and impossibly wide. Eva’s grin. Ethan’s chin. Their faces looked back at me from the screen like accusations and invitations.

I reached for the phone, thumb hovering over Marcus’ contact. The urge to tell him to dig, to find out where they were, who their teachers were, who lived in that apartment building, the urge was violent. But I stopped myself. I needed a plan that didn’t begin with a raid or end with a headline.

I closed my eyes and breathed in slow, controlled pulls.

She was protecting them from me. The question now was, how was I going to respond?