Chapter 2
Politicians smiled too carefully around him.
Businessmen who mocked everyone else called him Mr.
Moretti.
The men who worked for him called him Boss.
I had called him Adrian.
And for years, I had convinced myself that the man everyone feared belonged to a different world than the husband who warmed my side of the bed before I climbed into it.
Then Vanessa Hale came back.
She had been his first love.
The woman whose name he rarely said and never seemed to completely forget.
One rainy night, Vanessa called during dinner.
I still remembered the exact sound of Adrian’s chair scraping backward across the floor.
He answered, listened for less than thirty seconds, then stood.
“She’s in the hospital.”
He was already reaching for his coat.
“So?”
His eyes shifted toward me.
“Evelyn.”
Even now I could remember the warning hidden inside the way he said my name.
I followed him anyway.
Rain poured over the driveway as I hurried after him.
“Adrian, don’t go.”
He never slowed.
I stepped off the porch too quickly, my heel slipped on wet stone, and suddenly the world tilted.
I hit the pavement hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs.
Pain exploded through my hip and side.
“Adrian!”
He stopped.
He turned.
For one desperate heartbeat, I believed my husband would come back.
Rain ran down his face as he looked at me on the ground.
Then his phone rang again.
Vanessa.
His gaze dropped to the screen.
When he looked at me again, something had already changed.
He got into his car.
And he left me sitting in the rain.
The next morning, divorce papers waited on our dining table.
I had stared at them until the printed words became meaningless shapes.
Finally, I found him in his office.
“What was our marriage?”
Adrian had looked at almost anything except me.
Then he gave me the sentence I carried for the next six years.
“A mistake.”
Three weeks later, alone in Cambridge, I discovered I was pregnant.
I remembered staring at the test until the lines blurred through my tears.
Despite everything, my first instinct had been to call him.
Then came the ultrasound.
The technician smiled.
“There are two.”
I turned my head toward her.
“What?”
She pointed toward the monitor.
Two tiny heartbeats flickered on the screen.
Twins.
When I walked out of the clinic that afternoon, Adrian’s number was still saved in my phone.