Chapter 8

Ezra’s POV

“Say it again,” said Aya.

“It’s mine.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can count.” I set the wallet on the table between us, very carefully, the way you put down a thing that might break. “Five weeks ago, in a bar, we spent a night together. Five weeks later, you fainted in a bank, and a doctor told your friend you were five weeks along. I didn’t mean to hear. I was standing at the window.”

“You eavesdropped.”

“I did.”

“That’s the second thing you’ve done without asking.”

“The third,” I said. “I also had you followed to the bank.”

She stared at me. Her mouth opened and shut. For a moment I thought she might throw the fountain pen at my head. Instead, very slowly, she sat down on the edge of the bed with her bag in her lap, and put both hands over her face.

I didn’t move. I didn’t speak.

The city went on beyond the glass. A ferry crossed the lake. The light turned amber.

“I was going to tell you,” she said, through her fingers. “I was. I just needed to be safe first.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I know you didn’t want me to feel trapped.” I crouched in front of her, so that my eyes were level with hers. “You thought, if I tell him, he’ll think I’m using it. He’ll think I planned it. He’ll think it’s a play for money.”

Her hands dropped.

“How do you...”

“Because it’s what I’d think,” I said. “If I were as tired as you are.”

She let out a long, shaking breath.

“I never wanted anything from you,” she whispered. “I only wanted to see if it was real.”

“Aya.”

“And then I found out who you were. And I thought, it’s not. It can’t be. Nobody good arrives in a bar on the one night I need someone, and looks at me like that, and turns out to be my mother’s dead friend’s son. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a plot.”

“It’s not a plot.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s the worst timing in the world.” I rubbed my face. “I didn’t come to Seattle to find you. I came to find out what happened to my father.”

She lifted her head.

I hadn’t told anyone the whole thing in fourteen years. I had told Idan the outline. I’d told my mother nothing at all. But she looked at me, with her eyes red and her chin trembling, and I found I couldn’t stop.

“My father was Daniel Blackwell,” I said. “He was a chemist. He worked in a rented lab in Ballard with a woman named Hannah Rivers, and they built a perfume they thought would change their lives. Elliot Sterling stole the formula. He paid my father with a check that bounced. My father took Sterling to court. Two months later, my mother found him in the garage.”

Aya’s breath caught.

“They called it suicide. It happened three weeks after your mother died.” I said it flatly. It was the only way I could. “I was eighteen. I never believed it. And I never had a way to prove it.”

“Ezra.”

“So I made money. A great deal of money, very quickly. I bought companies the way other men buy shoes. And when Sterling’s debts came up for sale, I thought, at last.”

“You bought Sterling to punish them.”

“Yes.”

“And me?”

“I didn’t know you existed.”

“But you knew my mother’s name.”

“Only that she was in the photograph. I didn’t know she had a daughter.” I stopped. “Not until the badge.”

The room was very quiet.

“I saw your name on that lanyard,” I said, “and I thought, that’s Hannah’s girl. And I thought, I’ve just spent the night with the daughter of the woman my father loved as a friend. I have a company I mean to destroy, and she works for it. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. And I did the most cowardly thing I have ever done.” My throat closed. “I left.”

“You should have stayed.”

“Yes.”

“You should have told me.”

“Yes.”

“I would have understood.” Her voice cracked. “I would have. I’d been alone in that house for twelve years, Ezra. I would have understood more than anyone.”

I didn’t have an answer.

She looked at me for a long time.

“I’m still angry,” she said at last.

“I know.”

“It isn’t over. I’m going to be angry for a while.”

“I’ll wait.”

“And I’m still going to marry you. On paper. Because it’s the smartest thing I can do, and I’d be a fool to throw it away for pride.” She wiped her face. “But you don’t get to decide what happens after that.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You’d try.”

“I’d try,” I admitted. “And you’d stop me.”

That pulled a sound out of her that was almost a laugh. She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth.

“Can I ask you one thing?” I said.

“What?”

“May I touch...”

I couldn’t finish. I looked at her hands, at the way they rested over her stomach, and I felt the whole of my life turn quietly over like a ship in a tide.

She followed my eyes.

A long moment passed.

Then, very slowly, she took my hand. She turned it over. She pressed my palm flat against the soft gray cotton of her sweatshirt, low, below her ribs, and held it there.

I felt nothing. It was much too early. There was only the warmth of her skin, and the quiet rise and fall of her breath, and the beat of her pulse under my fingers.

But I put my other hand over my mouth.

“It’s very small,” she whispered. “The doctor says it’s the size of a sesame seed.”

“A sesame seed.”

“I’m told it has a tiny heart.”

I couldn’t speak. I closed my eyes. I stayed there, kneeling on the floor, with my palm against the future, for what might have been a minute or an hour.

Then the door banged.

“Sir.” Idan stood on the threshold, breathing hard. His glasses were crooked. His tie had come loose. I had never once, in nine years, seen him run. “I’m sorry. You need to see this. Now.”

“What is it?”

“Diane Sterling’s holding a press conference. Live. It started four minutes ago.”

He picked up the remote from the coffee table and pressed a button.

The wall opposite lit up.

A podium. A bank of microphones. A cluster of reporters in a hotel ballroom, and behind them, a banner. STERLING FRAGRANCE HOUSE. On the stage, in a black dress and a single strand of pearls, with her husband gray and silent at her shoulder, stood Diane Sterling. She looked tired and elegant and grief-stricken. She was holding a folded handkerchief.

“We have loved Aya Rivers as a daughter,” Diane said. Her voice trembled. “We took her in when she had no one. And I regret to say that she has repaid our kindness in the cruelest way imaginable.”

Aya’s fingers went cold in mine.

“Yesterday, we discovered that Aya has stolen trade secrets from our company,” said Diane, “in league with our competitor, Blackwell Group. She has also,” her voice caught, “she has also, I’m ashamed to say, carried on a long affair with my son-in-law to be, Eitan Blake.”

A gasp went round the room. Cameras flashed.

“We have since learned that Aya is expecting a child.” Diane dabbed her eyes. “And that the father is Eitan.”

The room stopped.

I felt Aya’s hand go rigid in mine. I felt the tremor start in her wrist and travel up her arm. She stared at the screen, white-lipped and unblinking, and I saw the moment that cold, quiet clarity came down over her face like a shutter.

“They’re telling everyone it’s Eitan’s,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Every newspaper in the state will print it by tonight.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes came up to mine. They were huge and dark and very, very steady.

“Then we’re going to tell them whose it really is,” said Aya.