Chapter 3 3

The tablet felt heavy in her hands. Too light, somehow, for what it contained-her son's face, reduced to pixels and glass, waiting on the other end of a video call she wasn't ready to make.

"He's at the office," Jordi said from behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder with careful neutrality. "I told him I needed to discuss something urgent. He doesn't know-" A pause. "He doesn't know anything."

Isadora stared at the screen. The call button glowed green, patient and terrible.

"Maybe this isn't the right way." Jordi's thumb traced circles against her collarbone, a nervous habit she'd forgotten he had. "Maybe I should go to him first. Explain. Prepare him for-"

"For what?" She didn't look up. "How do you prepare someone for this?"

The silence stretched. She could feel him searching for an answer, finding nothing. They'd spent the last hour in a strange limbo-eating food she didn't taste, dressing in clothes that fit perfectly because apparently he'd kept her sizes on file, or maybe he'd bought new ones, she couldn't bring herself to ask. Learning the basic facts of her absence like students cramming for an exam she was destined to fail.

Hector. Twenty-three. VP of Strategic Development at Vaughan Holdings, which meant he'd been fast-tracked through an MBA and straight into the family business. Single, according to Jordi's careful recitation, though there'd been a "situation" with a colleague last year that Jordi clearly didn't want to discuss.

Blossom and Benjamin. Twenty. Fraternal twins. Blossom at NYU studying art history, though Jordi's mouth had tightened when he said it, suggesting the studying was theoretical at best. Benjamin at Oxford, something about economics and a "phase" involving polo and a minor scandal with a minor royal that Jordi had handled with lawyers and money.

They were outlines. Sketches of people who shared her DNA and nothing else.

"Call him," she said.

"Issy-"

"He's my son." Her voice was softer, laced with desperation. "Jordi, please. I need to see him. Even if he hates me, I just need to see what he's become."

His hand tightened on her shoulder, then released. She heard him move, felt the sofa cushion shift as he sat beside her, close enough that their thighs touched. He reached past her, his finger hovering over the green button.

"Whatever happens," he said, "remember that he doesn't know. That he can't know. Not until-"

"Not until what? Until you decide he's ready? Until I've passed some test?" She turned to look at him, saw the fear and hope warring in his expression, the desperate need to control an uncontrollable situation. "He's my son. I don't need your permission to speak to my son."

The words came out harsher than she intended. She saw him flinch, saw something shutter behind his eyes, and hated herself for it. But she didn't apologize. Couldn't. Not when her heart was hammering against her ribs like it wanted out, not when her hands were sweating against the tablet's cool surface.

Jordi pressed the button.

The connection took forever. Ringing tones that sounded like they came from another century, another world. Isadora counted them-one, two, three-her breath shallow, her vision narrowing to the small rectangle of screen where her son's face would appear.

He answered on the fifth ring.

And he was beautiful.

She'd prepared herself for change. For the passage of time, the hardening of boy into man. But nothing could have prepared her for this-this stranger with her husband's jaw and her own eyes, looking at her with polite impatience that shifted, in the space of a heartbeat, to confusion.

"Father?" Hector's voice was deeper than she remembered. Polished, almost, in a way that suggested expensive education and careful cultivation. "What's going on? I'm in the middle of-"

He stopped. His eyes-her eyes, she could see it now, the exact shade of gray-green that she'd inherited from her mother-found her face on the screen. Moved across her features with methodical precision. Returned to her eyes.

And filled with hatred.

"Who is this?" The polish cracked, revealing something raw and furious underneath. "What the hell is this, Father? Some kind of joke?"

"Hector, listen-" Jordi leaned forward, his hand reaching for the tablet, but Isadora held it away. She needed to see. Needed to be seen.

"I'm not a joke," she said. Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too high, too desperate. "Hector, I'm-"

"Don't." The word was a whip crack. Hector's face filled the screen as he leaned closer to his own camera, his expression contorted with something that looked almost like pain beneath the rage. "Don't you dare say it. Don't you dare pretend to be-"

"She's not pretending." Jordi's voice was iron now, the voice he used in boardrooms and hostile takeovers. "Hector, I need you to calm down and listen-"

"Calm down?" The laugh that followed was worse than Jordi's had been in the bathroom-sharper, more broken, the sound of a young man who'd learned young that emotion was weakness and was failing that lesson in real time. "You bring some-some imposter into your home, put her on a video call with me, and you want me to calm down?"

Imposter.

The word hit Isadora like a physical blow. She felt Jordi tense beside her, felt his hand close around her wrist with warning pressure, but she couldn't look away from the screen. From her son's face, twisted with grief she'd caused and couldn't heal.

"She's wearing Mother's bathrobe." Hector's voice had dropped to something almost conversational, which was somehow worse than the shouting. "Did you plan that, Father? Did you think that detail would convince me? That seeing some stranger in her clothes, in her-" He stopped, his jaw working. "Fifteen years. Fifteen years, and this is how you decide to move on? With some cheap replica?"

"She's not-"

"I don't care what she is." Hector's eyes found hers again, and she saw it then-the grief beneath the rage, the little boy who'd lost his mother and never learned how to mourn. "I don't care what you're paying her. What you've promised her. Get her out of my father's house, or I will make you regret ever taking this job."

The screen went black.

Isadora sat frozen, the tablet heavy in her lap, her son's hatred echoing in the sudden silence. She felt Jordi take the device from her unresisting hands, felt him set it aside, felt his arms come around her with desperate gentleness.

But she couldn't respond. Couldn't move.

My son, she thought. My baby.

Who thought she was a monster.