CHAPTER FIVE

Five years later, the arrivals hall of the city's largest airport churned with travelers, and through the noise of it walked a woman who turned heads without trying.

She wore a charcoal coat cut sharp at the shoulders, dark sunglasses pushed up into chestnut hair, a leather case rolling smoothly behind her. But it wasn't the clothes. It was the way she moved — unhurried, certain, like the floor belonged to her.

Almost no one would have recognized her as the trembling girl who'd fled this same country in the rain. Evangeline Hart had gone away broken and come back forged. Five years abroad had made her one of the most feared attorneys to ever walk into a courtroom. The softness hadn't left her; it had simply learned to wear armor.

A hand tugged at her coat.

"Mommy, is this really where we live now?"

She looked down at her daughter and felt the familiar pull behind her sternum. Two children walked at her sides, and they were the whole of her heart.

Theo, older by a handful of minutes, held himself like a small soldier on guard duty. He had a stillness unusual in a child, a watchful seriousness — and a face that was an almost cruel copy of a man Evangeline had spent five years training herself not to picture. The same dark hair. The same proud line of the jaw. She saw it every single day, and every single day she made peace with it again.

Aurora was sunlight where her brother was shadow — quick to laugh, quick to cry, already welling up at nothing. She'd inherited Evangeline's face down to the dimples. Everything but the eyes. The eyes were a deep, particular shade that had never come from Evangeline at all, and on the rare nights she let herself remember whose they were, she didn't sleep well.

"Yes, baby. This is home now." Evangeline kept her voice warm and her face composed. "We're going to be just fine here."

She'd sworn never to set foot in this country again. But a case had come — too important, too public, too perfect a stage for the woman she'd become to turn down — and somewhere over the years the running had quietly worn itself out. She wasn't a frightened girl anymore. If the past wanted to find her, let it. She'd be standing on her own two feet when it did.

A few days later, business pulled her downtown, and she left the twins with a nanny she trusted, along with firm instructions to stay together and stay out of trouble.

Children, of course, have their own ideas about instructions.

In the soaring marble lobby of a downtown office tower, a small disaster was unfolding near the grand central staircase. Aurora, having spotted a foil balloon drifting up toward the mezzanine, had slipped her brother's hand and darted up the steps after it — and at the top, her little shoe caught the polished edge, and she pitched forward with a cry.

A man crossing the lobby moved before he thought.

He was there in two strides, one arm sweeping out to catch the falling child and pull her safely against his side. It was pure reflex, the kind of thing a body does without consulting the mind.

"Easy, now," he said, the gruffness in his voice softening as he looked down at what he'd caught. "You're all right. I've got you."

And then he went utterly still.

Because the little girl blinking up at him through frightened tears had eyes he knew. Eyes he saw every morning in the mirror. His own eyes, set in a stranger's tiny face.

"Thank you, mister," Aurora hiccuped.

Before he could find a single word, a sharp voice rang across the marble.

"Aurora!" A boy came tearing across the lobby and seized the girl, pulling her into a fierce hug, running his hands over her arms as if checking for damage. "You can't do that. You can't just let go of my hand and run off. Do you know how scared I was?"

"I'm sorry, Theo." Aurora's lip wobbled, the tears threatening to spill again. "I won't do it again, I promise."

The boy sighed the long-suffering sigh of an older sibling and thumbed a tear off her cheek. "It's fine. Just — don't tell Mom you wandered off, okay? She'll only worry. Now come on, we have to go before she comes looking." His grip closed firm around her hand.

People nearby had stopped to watch, charmed by the small boy's grave tenderness, by how much older than his years he seemed.

"That mister caught me," Aurora announced, twisting to point a small finger back at the man, who hadn't moved. "He's very handsome, Theo. And look —" her finger swung between them, "— he has the same eyes as me."

Theo's gaze lifted and met the stranger's.

The boy's expression cooled in an instant, going flat and wary in a way no child's face should. Around them, the watching strangers glanced from the man to the boy and back, and an uneasy murmur passed through the little crowd. The resemblance was impossible to miss — the same hair, the same jaw, the same proud mouth, separated by twenty-five years and standing six feet apart on a marble floor.

It isn't possible. The thought arrived and refused to leave. Who is this boy? Why does he wear my face?

"Theo, come on." The boy was already towing his sister away, his voice tight. "Mom's waiting."

"Wait—" The man took a step after them, one hand half-raised.

But the twins had already melted into the flow of the crowd and vanished.

He stood alone in the middle of the lobby, his heart slamming against his ribs, his mind racing down a corridor he didn't want to walk.

"Sir," his assistant ventured at his elbow, having watched the whole strange scene. "That boy, he—"

"Find them." The order came out low and hard, and the man didn't turn his head. "I want to know who those two children are. Their names, their mother, where they're staying. Everything. Today."

The assistant hurried off. The man remained where he was, the noise of the lobby washing around him, one impossible thought rising up through all the rest.

The boy is mine. He has to be mine. And the girl — the girl looks just like—

His breath caught.

Evangeline.

After five years of telling himself he'd forgotten the name, Dominic Voss discovered, standing in a marble lobby with his own eyes staring back at him out of a child's face, exactly how thoroughly he had lied.