CHAPTER THREE

{Adrian's POV}

Guilt was not an emotion I was particularly familiar with. I had spent most of my adult life making decisions with clarity and conviction, and I rarely looked back at them long enough to second-guess myself. 

But for the past several hours, it had been sitting in the center of my chest like something heavy and immovable, and no amount of reasoning had managed to shift it.

It had started the moment I picked up my phone.

Missed calls from Mrs. Chen. Fourteen of them. Then a string of messages, each one more urgent than the last, and finally the one that made my stomach drop completely — the notification that my wife had gone into labor and delivered our child while I was asleep in a hotel room across the city.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time after reading that last message, staring at the screen.

Vivian had suggested I put my phone away the previous evening to avoid distractions while we worked. We had been locked in preparation for the Sterling Group investment pitch for days, and last night had been the final push — hours of revising figures, restructuring the presentation, running through every possible question the board might throw at us. By the time we finished, my body had simply given out. I had fallen into the deepest sleep I had known in weeks, and I had not heard a single call.

When I woke up and saw everything I had missed, the guilt twisted through me with a sharpness I had not expected.

She had tried to tell me. She had stood in front of me, her hands moving urgently, and I had dismissed every word of it as another one of her performances. I had called her dramatic. I had walked out of that house and left her alone, and she had given birth without me there.

I was already making my way to the hospital, that guilt still turning slowly in my chest, when I paused outside the door to her room.

Through the narrow window, I could see her and Daniel. Her face was tight with an emotion I rarely saw on her — not the quiet sadness she usually wore, not the wounded look she got whenever I said something particularly cutting — but something fiercer than that. Her hands were moving rapidly and Daniel was standing across from her with his arms folded, and though I could not make out most of what was passing between them, one sentence reached me clearly through the door.

Daniel's voice, flat and deliberate: "A son would have opened real doors."

The guilt in my chest evaporated.

She was barely twenty-four hours out of labor, lying in a hospital bed with our newborn child in her arms, and she and her brother were already at it. Already calculating, already scheming, already finding the angles. I should have known. I should have known better than to feel anything close to remorse over a woman who had never once been honest with me about a single thing.

I curled my hand into a fist, took one long breath, and pushed the door open.

Her eyes found me the moment I stepped inside. Something lit up in them — a flash of relief, or something that looked uncomfortably like it — and then her gaze moved past my shoulder to where Vivian had followed me in, and the light went out just as quickly as it had appeared. Her face closed off completely.

I told myself the display did not irritate me as much as it did.

Daniel turned the moment he registered my presence, and whatever composure he had been holding onto dissolved immediately into righteous anger.

"So you finally decided to show up." He took a step toward me, his voice rising. "What kind of man are you? You abandoned your wife on the night she gave birth, and now you walk in here with your mistress on your arm like—"

"Stop." I leveled him with a look that I made sure communicated exactly how little I thought of his opinion. "Whatever you imagine you understand about my personal affairs, I can assure you that you are wrong. You have no rights here, Daniel. None. This is between my wife and me, and you are not part of that conversation. So I am going to ask you, very simply, to leave."

His jaw worked. He looked at Ava, then back at me, something unspoken and furious passing across his face. Then he turned and walked out without another word.

The room was quieter after he left.

I moved closer to the bed and looked down at the child in Ava's arms.

My breath caught.

I had not expected that. The feeling that moved through me when I looked at her — small and sleeping and impossibly perfect — was not something I had prepared myself for, and for a moment it caught me completely off guard. Something in my chest shifted in a way that had nothing to do with strategy or obligation or the long, grinding resentment I had been carrying for ten months.

She was beautiful.

I pulled my expression back into something neutral before Ava could read anything in my face, and I looked up at her instead.

"I could not make it," I said. My voice came out flatter than I intended, but I did not try to soften it. "Vivian and I had something urgent to deal with at work. It could not wait."

Ava held my gaze for exactly one second, then dropped her eyes back to our daughter and nodded once, slowly.

I told myself the sight of that — the quiet way she absorbed it, the way she did not even try to sign a response — did not make the guilt return. I told myself I was simply watching a woman perform her wounded act for an audience of one.

My phone rang.

I glanced at the screen, then stepped out into the corridor and answered.

"Adrian." My mother's voice was sharp and familiar. "Where on earth have you been? I have been trying to reach you for hours."

"I was working. I apologize for missing your calls."

"I heard Ava has given birth. A girl, they are saying." She paused, and I could hear the displeasure in the silence before she continued. "Now that that woman has delivered, I hope you are beginning to think seriously about next steps. Divorce, Adrian. It is long overdue. That girl is a liability — she always has been — and now that the child is here, there is no reason to keep this arrangement going any longer than necessary."

"Mother—"

"I am serious. I have never understood why your grandfather insisted on this in the first place. Yes, no child of our blood should be born without a name, I understand that, but there are limits. That woman has nothing to offer you. She cannot speak. She has no real family standing, no useful connections, nothing." She softened slightly, the way she always did when she pivoted to her preferred subject. "Vivian, on the other hand — now there is a woman built for your world. She is brilliant, Adrian. Sophisticated. She understands business and she understands you, and she would never have put you in a position like this to begin with."

I leaned against the corridor wall and said nothing for a moment.

My mother had despised Ava from the very first time she laid eyes on her — long before she knew anything about the circumstances of our marriage, long before the pregnancy and the arrangement and all the rest of it. It had simply been instinct on her part, the immediate and unwavering conviction that Ava did not belong in our world. It was my grandfather who had overruled everyone when the pregnancy came to light, who had shut down every argument about alternatives with the quiet authority of a man who had built the Cole name with his own hands and was not about to let it be tarnished.

"Ava gave birth less than twenty-four hours ago," I said finally. "I would appreciate some time before we start having this conversation."