— “Mr. Hayes? Are you feeling alright?” Davison’s voice was laced with concern, pulling Ethan back to his own table. He couldn’t seem to draw a full breath. His mind, usually a well-oiled machine of calculations and projections, had seized completely.
He was no mathematician, but the arithmetic was brutally simple. They had divorced six years ago. Five years. Olivia had walked out of his life, and his pride, that stubborn, foolish pride, had prevented him from going after her. Was it possible she had been…
— “Excuse me,” he managed to say, pushing his chair back so abruptly it nearly toppled over. “I need a moment.”
But his feet didn’t carry him toward the exit. They moved with a will of their own, drawing him inexorably toward Olivia’s table. She was smiling at something one of the little girls was saying when her eyes lifted and met his. The light in them vanished.
— “Ethan,” she breathed, her voice a quiet shock. It held no anger, no joy, only a profound, weary surprise.
The children all turned to look up at him, their faces full of innocent curiosity. The boy’s eyes were his. Not just similar. They were his own eyes, staring back at him from a five-year-old’s face.
— “Are they…?” The words caught in his throat, a knot of hope and terror.
Olivia’s expression hardened, a shield of maternal ferocity snapping into place.
— “They’re mine,” she stated, her tone leaving no room for argument.
— “Mommy, who is that man?” asked one of the girls, the one who possessed Olivia’s exact smile.
— “Just someone Mommy used to know,” Olivia replied, her gaze locked on Ethan’s. “A very long time ago.”
The room began to spin. These children. These exquisite, perfect little beings. They had to be his. The timeline, the features, the almost imperceptible mannerisms. How could he not have known? Why had she never told him?
— “We have to talk,” he said, his voice a raw whisper.
— “No, Ethan, we don’t,” she countered, though he detected a slight tremor in her hands. “You made your choice years ago. You chose your empire. You chose it over me. Over us.”
— “But they are…” He lowered his voice, suddenly aware of the discreetly curious glances from the neighboring tables.
— “Mine,” Olivia repeated, her voice a steel blade. “They are mine. I tried to tell you, Ethan. When I discovered I was pregnant, I called your office a hundred times. I wrote letters. You had changed your number, your address. Your assistant—not Susan, the one before her—told me you had given explicit instructions not to be disturbed.”
The memory hit him like a physical blow. Those frantic, pain-filled months after Olivia left. He had thrown himself into his work with a self-destructive fervor, changing his number and hiring a new, ruthlessly efficient assistant, Ms. Albright, to build a fortress around himself, anything to avoid confronting the gaping wound her absence had left.
— “I didn’t know,” he whispered, the words tasting like ash.
— “And would it have mattered?” Olivia’s question was heavy with the weight of years of pain. “Would you have made a different choice?”
Before he could formulate an answer, one of the girls tugged on Olivia’s sleeve.
— “Mommy, you promised we could have dessert.”
Olivia’s features softened instantly as she gazed down at her daughter. Their daughter.
— “Of course, sweetie. Why don’t you three take a look at the dessert menu and decide on something special?”
As the children eagerly dove into the menus, the momentary distraction gave Ethan a chance to truly see them. The boy, with his mother’s raven hair, already possessed the strong, determined jawline that was a Hayes family trait. The girls were identical, a perfect, miraculous fusion of them both.
— “What are their names?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
Olivia paused, a silent battle playing out behind her eyes. Finally, she relented.
— “The girls are Lily and Chloe. The boy is Noah.”
Noah. The name of Ethan’s grandfather. The man who had taught him to fish, before the world of corporate finance had consumed him. Was it a coincidence?
— “They’re beautiful,” he said, his voice thick with a storm of unshed tears.
— “Yes, they are,” Olivia’s tone had softened almost imperceptibly. “And they are happy. We are happy.”
— “Olivia, please. We have to discuss this. For real.”
She looked at him, a long, appraising stare, then reached into her purse and pulled out a business card.
— “This is my office number. You can call me tomorrow. Not for us, Ethan—that ship sailed a long time ago. But for them. Call me if you’re serious. If you’re finally ready to be there for someone other than yourself.”
Ethan accepted the card, his fingers trembling. As he stumbled back to his own table, he could feel the eyes of his colleagues on him, their feigned disinterest a thin veil for their rampant curiosity. His meticulously structured universe had been shattered, and he knew with bone-deep certainty that it would never be the same. The sound of his children’s laughter followed him, a melody he was hearing for the first time. And suddenly, his entire empire of glass and steel felt like a cold, empty tomb compared to the family he had lost, and the one he had just, impossibly, found.
Sleep was a stranger to Ethan that night. Each time he closed his eyes, he was haunted by three small faces. His children. The phrase felt foreign, an ill-fitting garment on the tongue of his thoughts. He was a father to three children he had never met, and he had been absent for the first five years of their lives.
He arrived at his office before the sun had fully risen over the East River. Susan was there, a pillar of calm efficiency in his chaotic world, his morning coffee already waiting on his desk.
— “Susan,” he began, his voice grave. “I need you to be completely honest with me. Five years ago, did Olivia attempt to contact me?”
Susan’s professional composure fractured for a moment. She placed the coffee cup down with deliberate care.
— “Yes, sir. On numerous occasions.”
— “And what became of those messages?”
— “Ms. Albright, your assistant at the time… she informed me you had left strict orders that you were not to be bothered by your ex-wife. She had the calls blocked and returned all correspondence unopened.”
Ethan collapsed into his leather chair, the air rushing from his lungs.
— “Why didn’t you tell me when you took over the position?”
— “By that point, sir, several months had passed. I… I assumed you were aware of the situation and had made your decision. You never spoke her name. Not once in all these years.”
He pulled Olivia’s card from his wallet. It was already soft and worn at the edges from his constant handling. Reed & Associates Law Firm. She had pursued her dream and become an attorney.
— “Get Ms. Albright on the phone,” he said, his voice dangerously quiet. “I want a record of every letter, every call log, every message that Olivia sent. I want everything.”
— “Sir, that was five years ago. I doubt Ms. Albright would have kept—”
— “Find them,” Ethan cut her off. “I don’t care what it takes. And clear my schedule for the entire afternoon.”
At precisely one o’clock, Ethan found himself standing before a modest brownstone that housed Olivia’s law firm. It was a world away from the gleaming, impersonal monolith of Hayes Tower, yet it possessed a warmth and character that was so quintessentially her. A receptionist guided him to a small, sunlit office.
Olivia was at her desk, engrossed in a legal brief, a pair of reading glasses perched on her nose. She looked up as he entered, her expression revealing she had anticipated his arrival.
— “You came,” she stated simply.
— “Did you expect I wouldn’t?”
— “Honestly?” she replied, removing her glasses. “I wasn’t sure. The Ethan I once knew would have moved heaven and earth. But the man you became… I couldn’t be certain.”
— “I spoke with Susan. I know about Ms. Albright, about the letters you sent, the calls you made.”
— “And does that change anything?”
— “It changes everything!” His voice rose with a surge of anger and regret, and he consciously forced it back down. “Olivia, if I had any idea you were pregnant, I would have—”
— “What?” she challenged him. “Sent a check? Had your lawyers draw up an agreement? Squeezed us into your calendar between a hostile takeover and a board meeting?”
— “That’s not fair.”
— “Isn’t it? Tell me, Ethan, that dinner last night at Aurelia. It was business, wasn’t it? Some high-stakes deal.”
He could only nod, the truth a bitter pill.
— “And how many of those nights do you have a week? A month?”
— “That’s different. I didn’t know I had children.”
— “But you knew you had a wife,” she countered, her words striking him with the force of an indictment. “You had me. And I wasn’t enough.”
The raw, undeniable truth of her statement silenced him. Even before their marriage had officially ended, he had been emotionally absent, prioritizing the ascent of his empire over the foundation of their love.
— “Tell me about them,” he pleaded, his voice soft with desperation. “Please.”