CHAPTER 4  The Accident.

Eva POV

Richard called me into the study that evening. I knew before I even sat down what he was going to say, but I still held my breath and waited for him to say it out loud.

"The results came back," he said, no greeting, no softness in his voice at all. "The child is mine."

I let out a breath I did not know I had been holding. "You believe it now."

"I do not have a choice. It is confirmed." He said it the way he might read a line from a contract, like the words had nothing to do with a person growing inside me at all.

"So what happens now?"

"I will support the child financially. Whatever it needs, it will have. That is not in question."

"And us?"

He looked at me like the question surprised him, like he could not understand why I would even ask it after everything. "There is no us, Eva. There was never going to be an us again after last night. This changes what I owe the child. It does not change anything between you and me."

"I was not asking for that," I said, though some small part of me had been, and hearing him say it out loud so plainly still landed like a blow. "I only wanted to know if the divorce still moves forward the same way."

"It does. Nothing about this delays it. If anything, it settles things faster, now that there is no question left to argue about."

He reached into the drawer of his desk and pulled out a folder, the same kind of folder his lawyer always sent over, thick with paper and tabbed where my signature was needed. He set it down in front of me and opened it to the first marked page.

"Sign it now," he said. "Tonight. I do not want this dragging into another week."

I stared down at the papers, at my own name printed neatly at the top of the page, Eva Brooks, soon to be nothing again, soon to be whatever I had been before any of this started.

"Richard, can't we do this tomorrow? I am tired."

"Tonight," he said again, sliding a pen across the desk toward me. "I want this finished."

I looked up at him one last time, searching his face for even a trace of the man who used to look at me differently before his grandfather's arrangement had turned us both into strangers living under the same roof. I did not find him. I picked up the pen instead.

I signed where he told me to sign, page after page, my hand steadier than I expected it to be, until there was nothing left to sign and the folder sat closed on the desk between us like it had never held anything that mattered.

"That is everything," he said, closing the folder and squaring the edges with both hands. "My lawyer will handle the rest."

I stood up. He did not stand with me. He did not walk me to the door. He simply reached for his phone on the desk, already moving on to whatever came next in his evening, and I understood, finally and completely, that there was nothing left here for me to wait for anymore.

I went up to my room and packed one bag. I did not take much, only what I could carry easily, clothes, my old identification papers, the small amount of cash I had been saving since out of some instinct I never let myself question. I left the ring on the dresser where he would find it eventually, or where Marta, my house cleaner, would find it and know what to do with it.

I did not call for the driver. I did not want a car, I did not want the estate's gates closing behind me while someone else controlled how fast or slow I left this place. I wanted my own legs under me and the cold air on my face and enough distance between myself and that house that I could finally breathe.

I thought about the four years behind me as I walked down the long driveway, the gate swinging shut on its own timer somewhere behind me. I thought about the girl I had been when I first came to this house, young enough to believe that being chosen for a name meant being chosen for myself. I was not that girl anymore. I did not know yet who I was instead, only that I could not find out standing still inside walls that had never once felt like mine. The cold helped clear my head in a way the house never had. I pulled my coat tighter and kept walking, my breath fogging the air in front of me, one boot print after another disappearing behind me in the falling snow.

The road outside the estate was narrow and unlit, snow packed hard along the shoulders where the plows had pushed it days ago and never come back. I walked with my bag over one shoulder, my coat pulled tight, my breath clouding in front of me with every step. The night was quiet except for the crunch of my own boots on the ice.

I did not know where I was walking to. I only knew I needed to move, I needed my body doing something other than standing still inside that house waiting for a man who had already decided everything without me.

I had gone maybe a mile down the road when I heard the engine behind me, distant at first, then closer, headlights sweeping long shadows across the snowbanks ahead of me before I even turned to look.

I stepped to the side of the road out of habit, giving whatever car it was room to pass. The engine grew louder, faster than it should have been on a road this icy, and I glanced back over my shoulder without really meaning to, just a reflex, just a person checking that a car was where a car should be.

The headlights were too bright to see past at first, twin white beams cutting through the falling snow, and I lifted a hand instinctively to shield my eyes.

Then, for just a moment, the car passed under the one working streetlamp on that stretch of road, and the glare shifted enough that I caught the shape behind the windshield, the angle of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, a face I had spent four years learning by heart.

My whole body went still.

It was him.

The car was not slowing down. If anything, it seemed to be picking up speed, the tires losing their grip on the ice beneath them, the headlights swinging wide as the vehicle drifted across the center of the road toward the shoulder where I stood frozen, my bag slipping from my hand into the snow.

I opened my mouth to call out his name, some useless reflex, as if a name could stop two thousand pounds of steel sliding out of control on ice.

The last thing I saw was his face, close enough now that it made me really sure it was him, his eyes wide with the same shock that had locked my own feet in place, and then the world came apart in a single white flash of light and sound.