Eli was observant.
Noah climbed everything.
Eli dismantled everything.
Both had dark hair.
Both developed stubborn little chins.
And by their third birthday, both had unmistakable gray-green eyes.
Adrian’s eyes.
Sometimes I would look at them across the breakfast table and feel guilt move through me like a knife.
“Do we have a daddy?” Noah asked once.
I nearly dropped his cereal bowl.
“Everyone has a father,” I said carefully.
“Where’s ours?”
I looked at two faces waiting for an answer I couldn’t give them.
“Far away.”
Eli frowned.
“Does he know us?”
I couldn’t lie.
“No.”
“Why?”
Because I ran.
Because he betrayed me.
Because I was afraid.
Because your aunt smiled while destroying my life.
Because I still don’t know what happened that afternoon.
Instead I said, “Because sometimes adults make decisions when they’re scared.”
Noah accepted that.
Eli didn’t.
He rarely did.
Five years after my wedding disappeared beneath Chicago snow, I was living in Monterey, California.
My friend Sophie married a marine architect named Julian at a cliffside estate overlooking the Pacific.
She asked me to coordinate the reception because I had somehow become very good at making beautiful events happen for other people.
I almost said no.
Weddings still did strange things to me.
But Sophie knew my history.
Not all of it.
Enough.
“You deserve to see one end happily,” she said.
So I went.
I wore midnight-blue silk.
Noah and Eli wore matching gray suits.
Around Noah’s neck hung a leather cord.
On it was Adrian’s silver cufflink.
He had found it in my jewelry box months earlier.
“Treasure,” he called it.
I should have taken it away.
I didn’t.
Maybe some part of me was tired of hiding.
The reception began at sunset.
The estate glowed with hundreds of lanterns.
The Pacific crashed against the cliffs below.
I was standing near the champagne table when I heard glass shatter.
Every instinct in my body recognized the voice that followed.
“Amelia?”
Five years disappeared.
I turned.
Adrian Blackwood stood twenty feet away.
He looked older.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
A little silver at his temples.
Sharper cheekbones.
More weight behind his eyes.
He was staring at me as though he’d seen a dead woman.
Then Noah ran past me after his brother.
Adrian’s gaze followed him.
His face changed.
Eli stopped beside me.
Adrian looked at him.
Then at Noah.
Then at me.
His lips parted.
“No.”
I couldn’t move.
He walked toward us slowly.
His eyes stayed on the boys.
Gray-green meeting gray-green.
“Amelia…”
“Don’t.”
His voice cracked.
“Are they mine?”
Before I could answer, a woman’s voice came from behind him.
“Adrian?”
I knew that voice too.
Vanessa stepped onto the terrace.
