Adrian chose the restaurant carefully: quiet, private, tucked into a corner of the city where no one from Blackwood was likely to recognize either of them. Not the penthouse. Not his office. Somewhere neutral, somewhere he could keep at least that much control over the evening.
Victoria was already seated when he arrived, composed as always, her hands folded loosely on the white tablecloth in front of her.
He sat across from her, his own hands clasped together tightly, knuckles pale. His eyes were hard, unwilling to soften even slightly.
"You said there was something I needed to know."
"There is." She reached into her handbag.
"Start with the night you left," he said, cutting her off before she could pull anything out.
Her hand stilled. Something shifted in her expression, old grief surfacing briefly before she smoothed it back into composure.
"We were in love, Adrian. Genuinely." Her voice was quiet, careful. "This wasn't ever some arrangement to me. You know that."
"I know." His jaw tightened. "I remember."
"You'd talked about stepping back from some of the business. Building something smaller. A family." She looked down at her hands for a moment. "And then everything changed."
"You found something," he said. "About my business dealings."
"I believed you'd betrayed me." Her eyes lifted back to his, steady. "I was wrong."
Adrian went still. "What do you mean, wrong?"
"You didn't betray me." She held his gaze. "Someone else did."
The words landed heavy between them, settling into the space where the restaurant's quiet clatter of dishes and low conversation suddenly seemed very far away.
"Someone made it look like you were involved with another woman," Victoria said. "Photographs. A pattern of messages that seemed damning, at the time. I believed it. I confronted you."
"And I shut down," Adrian said slowly, the memory surfacing now, old and painful. "I was furious you'd think that of me. I didn't explain myself. I just"
"You went cold," she finished. "And I left, expecting you to chase me."
"I expected you to come back," he said, quiet. "Neither of us moved."
"Two stubborn people," Victoria said, something faintly, sadly amused in her voice, "letting silence become permanent."
Adrian looked down at his own hands, old anger and old grief tangling together in his chest. "That's not everything, is it?"
Victoria's expression tightened. "No."
"I found out I was pregnant a few weeks after I left," she said. "I tried calling you. Messages. Calls. Nothing ever reached you. I assumed you'd blocked me. That you wanted nothing to do with any of it."
Adrian's face changed, something cold moving through him. "I never blocked you."
Victoria stared at him. "What?"
"I never blocked you," he repeated, his voice lower now, careful. "I never got a single message from you after that night. Not one."
Silence stretched between them, heavy and disbelieving.
Both of them, in the same slow moment, arrived at the same terrible question.
Someone had kept them apart.
Adrian stood abruptly, his chair scraping hard against the floor, drawing a glance from a nearby table before he lowered his voice again.
"Who had access to my phone?" His hands curled into fists at his sides, years of carefully held composure finally beginning to crack. "Who could have done that?"
Victoria hesitated. "I don't know for certain. But there was someone who knew we were struggling. Someone who knew your schedule. Your business. Everything."
"Who?"
She looked at him steadily. "Daniel."
Adrian froze. "Daniel?"
"He was always around, Adrian. At every dinner. Every trip. He knew things about us that even I hadn't told anyone else." Her voice stayed careful, not accusing, simply laying the fact down between them. "I'm not saying I know what happened. I'm saying his name is the only one that makes sense."
"You're wrong," Adrian said immediately, though his voice lacked its usual certainty.
Daniel was his best friend. His family, in every way that mattered more than blood. The man who'd stood beside him through every difficult year of building Blackwood into what it had become.
And yet, standing there, memories began to surface that he hadn't examined in years. Conversations that hadn't quite made sense at the time. Messages he'd been told never arrived. Meetings Daniel had insisted he attend, urgent enough to pull him away at exactly the wrong moments.
Small things. Things he'd dismissed without a second thought.
He sat back down slowly, his hands pressed flat against the table, staring at nothing.
"Before you destroy a decades-long friendship over a suspicion," Victoria said gently, "get the test first, Adrian. Know what's actually true before you tear anything else apart."
He looked past her, toward the window, his own tired reflection staring back at him in the dark glass. He looked exhausted. Older than he felt he should be.
A son who might be his. A fiancée who may have been deliberately kept from him. And now, somehow, Daniel's name sitting in the middle of all of it, unwelcome and impossible to ignore.
Everything he thought he understood about the last several years of his life had suddenly gone uncertain.
Across the city, Ava sat cross-legged on the couch with Chloe, a mountain of laundry between them, the TV playing something neither of them was really watching.
"Everything okay at work?" Chloe asked, folding a shirt without looking up.
"Yeah." Ava reached for the next item in the pile.
"You've been quiet all week."
"Just busy."
Chloe glanced over, unconvinced, and then, gently, without any particular weight behind it: "How's Adrian doing? You mentioned some woman showed up at Blackwood."
Ava's hands stilled over the laundry. "He's fine. It's complicated. I don't really know the details."
Chloe studied her for a moment, something soft and careful in her expression, and didn't push further. Instead, she reached over and squeezed Ava's knee once, warm and reassuring.
"Just remember your own dreams are supposed to be the point of all this," she said quietly. "Not his."
Ava nodded, throat tight, folding the next shirt with more focus than it required.
She knew Chloe was right. She just wasn't sure anymore how to separate the two her own dreams, and the man who'd somehow become tangled up inside them.
The next morning, Adrian arrived at Blackwood and saw Ava in the lobby before she saw him.
She was laughing with Ethan near the front desk, head tilted back slightly, entirely unguarded, the easy, uncomplicated happiness of someone whose biggest concern that morning was probably which floor needed her attention first.
He would normally have walked past without breaking stride. Today he stopped, just for a moment, watching her.
She looked young. Happy. Everything his own life currently wasn't.
Ava's eyes found his across the lobby, and she smiled instinctively, warm and easy.
He made himself smile back.
Inside, something in his chest ached at the sight of it. He wanted, more than he expected to, to protect that uncomplicated happiness of hers, to keep whatever was coming from ever touching her at all.
He was no longer certain that would be possible.
That night, Adrian sat alone in his study, a drawer pulled open in front of him.
Inside was an old photograph of Victoria, years ago, both of them younger, Adrian smiling in a way he hadn't managed in a very long time. He stared at it for a long moment, then set it down beside the newer photograph, the little boy's gap-toothed grin looking back up at him from the desk.
Two photographs. Two lives he might have lived. Two futures he no longer knew how to choose between.
His phone rang.
Daniel's name lit up the screen.
Adrian stared at it for several seconds before he finally answered.
"Daniel."
"Adrian." Daniel's voice sounded entirely normal, warm and easy as always. "We need to talk."
Adrian's eyes narrowed slightly. "About what?"
A pause on the line.
"About Ava."