Anna and Richard

Colton was born into wealth, but what he remembered most about being young wasn't the money. It was the way his parents looked at each other at a dinner table twenty years into their marriage, as though they'd only just met.

Richard and Anna built an empire together from nothing, and somehow neither of them let it harden them. His father used to come home from closing million-dollar deals and still stop in the kitchen doorway just to watch his mother cook, like the sight of her never got old. His mother touched his father's arm the same easy, familiar way whether they were alone or hosting a room full of investors, and they finished each other's sentences so often that Colton grew up thinking that was simply what marriage was supposed to look like. They were partners in every sense the word could carry, building the company side by side, raising their only son side by side, and facing every setback the business ever handed them without once turning on each other.

He was seven the day his father pulled him onto his lap in the study and told him, with a book open and forgotten between them, that his mother was his best friend, his partner, his entire world, and that finding someone who loved you like that was the greatest gift a life could hand you. Colton remembered the smell of his father's study that afternoon, old paper and the faint trace of his mother's perfume drifting in from the hallway, and the sound of her humming to herself somewhere else in the house. Colton didn't understand the weight of it yet, but he tucked the words away somewhere permanent, the way children do with the things that matter more than they realize at the time. He decided, without quite deciding it out loud, that he wanted exactly what his parents had. He wanted a partnership that felt unbreakable, the kind two people built brick by brick and never let anyone tear down.

He was twenty and away at university when a call came through about a business trip gone wrong, heavy rain and a truck that lost control on a slick highway and crossed into his parents' lane before either of them had a chance to react. Colton remembered almost nothing about the days that followed except fragments, the phone slipping out of his hand, his legs giving out beneath him, a funeral he stood through without absorbing a single word, two caskets in the rain that he watched from somewhere just outside his own body. The house he came home to afterward was unbearably quiet, stripped of the laughter that used to fill every room, and he understood for the first time what it meant to be entirely, permanently alone.

He handled it the only way he knew how, by taking over the company at twenty years old and disappearing into it completely. He worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, turned the business into something even larger than his parents had built, and became successful and wealthy and powerful enough that most people assumed he had everything. None of them saw him standing in his kitchen at midnight eating dinner alone over the sink, or noticed that he'd stopped keeping food in the house that took longer than five minutes to prepare, because there was never anyone there to cook for. None of them saw how hollow the winning felt without anyone coming home and telling them about it.

Even after everything Isabella later put him through, some stubborn part of him kept wanting what his parents had shown him was possible. He watched other couples sometimes, at business dinners or on the street outside his office, the easy way they leaned into each other, and felt a longing settle in his chest that no amount of work could talk him out of. At one dinner, a colleague's wife had reached over without looking and straightened her husband's collar mid-conversation, an absent, practiced gesture that meant nothing to anyone else at the table, and Colton had to excuse himself early because watching it made something in his chest ache in a way spreadsheets never could. He wanted a partner. He wanted a family. He wanted, more than he ever admitted to anyone, someone waiting for him at the end of a long day the way his mother had always waited for his father.

But wanting it and trusting himself to have it were two entirely different things. What if he chose wrong again? What if he handed someone his whole heart and watched it come back to him in pieces a second time. His father's voice still surfaced in his head some nights, telling him that finding someone who truly loved him was the greatest gift life could offer, and Colton believed it completely. He simply no longer believed he was brave enough to go looking for it, which was exactly why, years later, he told his assistant he wanted a surrogate and nothing more, a clean, contained way to have the family he craved without ever having to risk his heart on another person again. He had no idea yet how badly that plan was about to fail him, or how thoroughly one quiet, unassuming analyst was going to undo every rule he'd built his life around.