Chapter Eighteen

Adam's POV

He called Cooper at 4:30 AM from the hospital parking lot.

"Find out about the boy," he said. No preamble. "Jules's son. His full name, his date of birth. Everything. Now."

A pause on Cooper's end. Not a surprised pause. The pause of someone who has known something for a while and has been waiting for the right moment.

"Cooper."

"Eli Thomas Arthur," Cooper said. "Born April 14th. He'll be three this spring."

Silence.

"You already have the file," Adam said.

"I've had it since shortly after he was born."

Adam stood very still in the parking lot. A car moved past on the street. Somewhere, a bird that had mistaken the streetlights for morning. "You knew. You knew and you didn't tell me."

"You told me you didn't want to hear her name." Cooper's voice was careful but unapologetic. "You were very clear about that. And I had no proof yet of the photos being falsified. All I had was a feeling. A feeling doesn't override an instruction."

"How long did it take you to get more than a feeling?"

"Four months. I found the man Henry had paid to do the technical work on the photographs. He'd been talking. I had everything I needed to bring to you. And then —" A pause. "Henry died before I could. Tonight changed the timeline."

Adam said nothing.

"I was going to tell you," Cooper said. "When I had everything in front of me. When it was airtight. I wasn't going to show up with half a story."

Adam walked to his car. He got in. He sat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off.

"She signed the divorce papers," he said.

"She did."

"While she was pregnant. She signed them while she was pregnant and alone and had just lost her grandmother and had been — had been arrested for arson that Elena —" He stopped. Breathed. "Elena arranged the arson."

"Yes." Cooper was very quiet. "I have documented evidence of that as well."

The dashboard clock read 4:48 AM.

"I need to see him," Adam said.

He went back to the hotel. He showered. He changed. He made himself eat half a piece of toast from the room service menu not because he was hungry but because he needed to be functional and his hands had been shaking since the parking lot and he needed them to stop.

He thought about what to say.

He had not, in fourteen years of running a company worth more than some small countries, ever been at a complete loss for what to say. Language was a tool he used with precision. He could negotiate, persuade, demolish, repair. He knew what words did in rooms.

He did not know what to say to Jules.

Not because he didn't have the words. But because there were no words that were equal to what had happened. I'm sorry was a thimble trying to hold an ocean. I was wrong was a single brick where a whole house needed to be rebuilt. And she knew all of this — she was the smartest person he'd ever met and she had spent three years as a single mother making this life in this city with her name on the door and her son asleep in rocket pajamas, and whatever he said now would be received by that woman, the one who had done all of that, and he needed to be honest enough to deserve the hearing.

He went back to her building at nine in the morning.

He pressed the intercom for apartment seven.

It was a long wait.

"Go away, Adam," her voice said through the speaker.

"I need to talk to you about Eli."

The silence that followed was the kind that has texture. He could almost feel her on the other side of it — the way her jaw would have set, the way she'd be looking at the intercom panel the same way she looked at anything that had ambushed her, with the brief, total stillness before she decided what to do.

The door buzzed open.