Chương 4
“I’m not asking you to let me in.”
She looked at the door.
“I brought your medication.”
She glanced at her handbag.
Her thyroid pills were inside it.
For a moment she almost admired the tactic.
Then she remembered he knew she kept a duplicate bottle in her office.
“Leave,” she said.
Silence.
“I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You had eighteen months to practice.”
“I know.”
“No, you keep saying that as if knowledge is a form of punishment.”
He was quiet.
She stood and crossed to the door but did not open it.
“What did you think would happen if you told me?”
“I thought you’d try to take him.”
The answer was so fast she knew it was true.
Her hand remained on the dead bolt.
“And you thought that would be wrong?”
“I thought it would destroy Lauren.”
“What about me?”
“I thought you were finally getting better.”
Victoria stepped away from the door.
There it was.
The excuse shaped like concern.
After the second miscarriage, she had spent three months moving through her life like someone impersonating herself. She stopped sleeping. She once stood in a grocery store unable to choose between two brands of rice and had to leave the cart in the aisle.
Daniel had been kind then.
Or she had believed he was.
He cooked. He canceled trips. He sat beside her in fertility clinics and held her hand beneath paper blankets.
Later, when Northstar told them their last embryos had been lost, Victoria had broken a bathroom mirror with a perfume bottle.
She had never told anyone that part.
Daniel had cleaned the glass.
Perhaps he had decided that moment gave him permanent authority over what truths she could survive.
“You confused protecting me with managing me,” she said through the door.
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
Another silence.
Then, softly, “Okay.”
She heard him walk away.
In the morning, the airport video was online.
Not all of it.
Only eleven seconds.
Victoria crossing the terminal.
The slap.
Lauren falling.
The stroller rolling backward in George’s hands.
The clip ended before Bennett appeared.
By eight thirty, the headline on one financial site described Victoria as a “Billionaire CEO in Airport Altercation With Husband’s Alleged Mistress.”
She was not a billionaire.
She noticed that first.
It irritated her enough to make her laugh.
Her assistant, Priya Shah, looked at her from across the hotel suite.
“I’m glad something’s funny.”
“They’ve promoted me financially.”
“Congratulations.”
Victoria handed back the phone.
Priya had worked for her for nine years and possessed the rare skill of being unimpressed by crisis.
“Legal wants to know whether Daniel is pressing charges.”
“He isn’t.”
“Security footage?”
“Exists.”
“Witnesses?”
“Plenty.”
“Any chance you plan to slap anybody else this week?”
Victoria looked at her.
“No.”
“Good. I’ll tell them current projections are favorable.”
Victoria nearly smiled.
Then Priya’s face softened.
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to ask again later?”
“Yes.”
It was the most useful kindness anyone offered her that day.
By noon, Daniel had released a statement calling the incident “a painful private family matter” and asking the public to respect the privacy of “all children involved.”
Children.
Plural.
Victoria read the sentence three times.
She called him.
He answered immediately.
“What do you know?”
“About what?”
“You wrote children.”
“Victoria—”
“What do you know about the second child?”
“Nothing more than I told you.”
“You said childREN.”
“Because Bennett said there may be another.”
“You wrote the statement before we left the airport.”
Silence.
There was traffic behind him.
“Where are you?”
“In the car.”
“Where?”
“Going to my lawyer.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Another pause.
She ended the call.
At two, Victoria met Mara Levin, a family-law attorney recommended by the company’s general counsel. Mara was in her fifties, wore no visible jewelry, and began by moving Victoria’s phone to the far end of the conference table.
“Before we discuss biology,” she said, “we discuss your expectations.”
“I expect to find my children.”
“Reasonable.”
“And bring my son home.”
Mara shook her head.
“Not reasonable as an immediate expectation.”
Victoria stared at her.
“He’s genetically mine.”
“Maybe. We need valid testing.”
“We have records.”
“You have evidence of a catastrophic clinic error. That is not the same as a court order changing a child’s legal parentage.”
Victoria disliked her almost immediately.
That was probably why Priya had chosen her.
Mara continued. “Lauren gave birth to him. Lauren has raised him. He knows her as his mother. You cannot treat her like a person holding stolen property.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You thought it.”
Victoria looked at the window.
Below them, Manhattan traffic barely moved.
“Yes.”
“Good. Think it here. Don’t act on it.”
Mara folded her hands.
“If the records are correct, you have suffered something enormous. So has Lauren. So has the child. Those harms overlap. They do not erase one another.”
“What do I do?”
“First, no direct confrontation. Second, no public statements about parentage. Third, we seek preservation of Northstar’s records before anything disappears. Fourth, we request an independent DNA test with Lauren’s consent or, if necessary, through the court. Fifth, we find out what Patient 6442 means.”
“And Daniel?”
“What do you want from Daniel?”
Victoria opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Mara waited.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s allowed.”
It was the first permission Victoria had received in years that she did not resent.
Lauren called that evening.
Victoria was sitting in the back of a car outside her apartment building, unable to make herself go upstairs.
She almost rejected the call.
Then she answered.
Neither woman spoke.
Finally Lauren said, “Did you leak the airport video?”
“No.”
“Did your people?”
“No.”
“Daniel?”
“I don’t know.”
Lauren breathed into the phone.
Noah made a noise somewhere near her, then a cartoon voice chirped in the background.
“I gave Bennett permission to give you the transfer page.”
“I saw it.”
May you like
“I’m not giving you Noah.”
Victoria closed her eyes.
