All Chapters of FORGOTTEN IDENTITY: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

The weeks following our gathering passed in a strange, suspended quality, my body growing heavier and more insistent with each passing day, the abstract idea of motherhood slowly transforming into something terrifyingly, wonderfully concrete. We'd settled, after considerable discussion, into a single shared home, a decision that had taken longer to reach than any other we'd navigated, mostly because none of us had a template for what living arrangements were supposed to look like for three people raising a child together. "We could each keep our own places," Kade had suggested initially, ever cautious, ever inclined toward preserving everyone's independence. "And simply spend whatever time makes sense together." "That feels like exactly the kind of separate, divided arrangement I refused to accept months ago," I'd countered. "I don't want a child constantly shuffled between three different addresses. I want one home. Ours." It had taken Killian, surprisingly, to find the actual sol

Killian's idea of a date, it turned out, was significantly less predictable than his brother's.He picked me up himself, no driver, no security trailing two cars back, just him behind the wheel of a car that looked far too unassuming to belong to a man who owned half the skyline."This isn't your usual style," I said, eyeing the modest sedan with open suspicion as I climbed in."My usual style got you ambushed in a lobby and photographed for a gossip blog," he said, pulling away from the curb with an ease that suggested he drove far more often than his reputation implied. "I'm trying something new. Humility, allegedly.""Allegedly being the operative word."He didn't tell me where we were going, which would have annoyed me from anyone else, but from Killian it felt almost like an apology for every other time he'd tried to control the terms of my own life without asking. We ended up at a small, unglamorous bowling alley on the edge of the city, fluorescent lights buzzing over scuffed l

"A man called me," I said carefully, watching Kade's face for any flicker of the answer he hadn't given yet. "Said he used to work for your family. Said he had information about the attack five years ago that your mother left out when she told me her version."Kade set his coffee down with deliberate, controlled precision, the kind of movement that told me far more than his expression did. "What exactly did he tell you?""That your father authorized the attack. Not Vivienne's family. Not rivals settling some old corporate score. Your own father, targeting Killian, to clear a path for you in the company's succession."The silence that followed stretched long enough that I started to wonder if I'd finally said something that could break whatever fragile thing had been building between us over the last several weeks."It's true," Kade said finally, his voice flat, stripped of all its usual warmth. "Most of it, anyway."My stomach dropped even though I'd half expected the confirmation. "M

He chose the bowling alley.I almost laughed when I saw the address, the absurdity of it landing somewhere between sweet and devastating, given everything that had happened since the last time we'd stood under those buzzing fluorescent lights together.The lanes were empty when I arrived, the place closed to the public for the evening, which meant Killian had bought out an entire bowling alley just to have a private conversation with me, an act so quietly extravagant it almost made me forget, for a single charitable second, that the man doing it had spent the last several days disappearing without a word to anyone who loved him.He was sitting on the same bench from before, his rental shoes already on, a single bowling ball resting untouched beside him."You actually came," he said, standing as I approached, his voice rougher than usual, like he hadn't used it much over the last three days."You asked.""I half expected you to send Kade instead. Or my mother. Everyone else in this fam

A month passed the way months do when you finally stop bracing for disaster. Quietly. Almost without my noticing.The Henderson merger closed, my name attached to the final filing in the kind of clean, unremarkable victory I used to live for before two brothers turned my entire life into a corporate thriller. Madeline stopped double-checking the front desk logs quite so anxiously. Clover's old office sat empty for three weeks before marketing finally hired someone new, a quiet, unassuming woman named Priya who had absolutely no interest in my personal life, which I found, after everything, to be the single most refreshing quality a coworker could possess.I saw both twins regularly, though differently now than before. Killian and I fell into something easy, almost domestic, movie nights and terrible bowling and long, meandering conversations about nothing important, the kind of intimacy that didn't announce itself with grand gestures because it didn't need to anymore. He'd started vol