Chapter 5

Five Years Later

Ava’s POV

Five years is long enough to build an entirely different life out of the ashes of an old one. I know, because I did it.

I don’t think about that night as often as I used to. The candles, the roses, the envelope on the table, for years those memories used to ambush me at the strangest moments, in elevators, in the middle of meetings, in the quiet seconds before falling asleep. Now they mostly stay where I’ve put them: in the past, filed away, useful only as a reminder of how far I’ve come.

My grandfather’s company had been a modest textile manufacturer when Richard Bennett first handed me the paperwork in his downtown office, my hands still trembling from a night I hadn’t finished processing yet. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t even particularly profitable. But it was mine, entirely and completely mine, and something about that ownership lit a fire in me I hadn’t known I had.

I threw myself into it the way only someone with nothing left to lose can. I worked eighteen-hour days while nine months pregnant, slept on office couches more nights than I care to admit, and made mistakes expensive enough to keep me awake for weeks. But slowly, painstakingly, I turned that small manufacturing company into Bennett House, now the fastest-growing luxury fashion label in the country, with flagship stores from Manhattan to Milan and a waiting list for our runway shows longer than most designers’ entire careers.

I am not the same woman who once smoothed the wrinkles out of an emerald dress, desperate for a man’s approval that would never come. That version of me cried over signed papers and swallowed insults at family dinners because she thought silence was the price of being loved. She’s still in me somewhere, I think. But she doesn’t run things anymore.

The woman who runs things now doesn’t apologize for taking up space in a boardroom. She doesn’t shrink herself to make other people comfortable. And she has learned, the hard way, that the only approval worth chasing is her own.

But if Bennett House is my legacy, Ethan is my heart.

My son turned five last spring, all dark curls and stubborn opinions and a laugh that fills up an entire room. He doesn’t know his father runs one of the largest corporations in New York. 

He doesn’t know his father exists at all, not really, to Ethan, it has always just been the two of us, plus Grandma Margaret, who insisted on staying in our lives exactly as she’d promised she would, and who Ethan adores with the same fierce devotion he gives everything else.

I’ve told myself for years that someday I’ll have to explain it to him properly. Someday. Not yet.

This week, that someday felt very far away. We’d flown to the international summit in Geneva for the announcement my entire team had been working toward for the past eight months, a partnership that would put Bennett House on shelves alongside the biggest luxury houses in Europe. 

It was the kind of deal that could double our company’s valuation within a year. I’d rehearsed my opening remarks so many times I could recite them in my sleep.

I’d brought Ethan along on this trip mostly because I couldn’t bear another week away from him, tucking him into a hotel suite with his nanny while I attended dinners and closed-door negotiations. He was thrilled about the plane, thrilled about the hotel pool, thoroughly unimpressed by the actual reason we were there.

“Just business before feelings today,” I murmured to myself in the mirror of the greenroom backstage, straightening the jacket of my dark blue suit, watching my own reflection settle into the composed, unshakable expression I’d spent years perfecting. Whatever nerves lived underneath it, nobody in that conference hall would ever see them. I’d learned to make sure of that a long time ago.

I stepped through the doors and onto the stage to a wave of applause, the lights bright enough that for a moment the audience was just a blur of shapes and movement. 

I found my mark, smiled the smile my publicist had coached into muscle memory, and let my eyes sweep across the front row the way I always did, acknowledging the executives, the partners, the faces that mattered most to tonight’s announcement.

And then my gaze landed on him, and every carefully constructed piece of my composure cracked straight down the middle.

Lucas Sterling.

Sitting in the front row of my conference hall, in a tailored charcoal suit that looked almost exactly like the one he’d worn the last night I ever saw him, staring at me with an expression I had genuinely never seen on his face before in all the time I’d known him.

Shock. Absolute, unguarded shock.

Five years, and here he was, close enough that I could see the exact moment his brain caught up with what his eyes were telling him, that the woman standing on this stage, running one of the most successful fashion houses in the world, was the wife he’d handed divorce papers to over an untouched anniversary dinner. 

The wife he’d believed guilty without a shred of hesitation. The wife who had simply vanished, and whom, apparently, he had never expected to see again.

I don’t know how long I stood there frozen, my rehearsed opening line completely gone from my mind, my heart pounding so loudly I was sure the microphone would somehow pick it up. Every instinct I had screamed at me to keep walking, to finish my remarks, to treat him like any other executive in that room.

I opened my mouth to begin my speech anyway, because that was what the version of me who had survived the last five years knew how to do, keep going, no matter what.

Before I could say a single word, I heard the small, familiar patter of sneakers against the stage floor behind me, followed by a bright, delighted voice that cut straight through the tension in the room.

“Mommy!”

Ethan came barreling out from the wings where his nanny had been watching, too excited to wait a moment longer, and wrapped his small arms tightly around my legs, beaming up at me the way only a five-year-old who has no idea what he’s just walked into can.

I froze, one hand instinctively coming down to rest on his curls, and when I finally forced myself to look up, I found Lucas no longer staring at me at all.

His eyes were locked on Ethan’s face, and even from the stage, I could see the exact moment recognition hit him the same dark eyes, the same stubborn set of the jaw, a resemblance too unmistakable for even five years of distance to hide.

He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He simply sat there in the front row, utterly frozen, staring at the son he never knew he had.