Chapter Six: What He Told Himself

I stood in that lobby for a long time.

People moved around me. A security guard glanced over twice. A woman with a rolling suitcase cut around me like I was furniture. I did not move. I just stood there with the photograph in my hand and my son's face looking up at me and absolutely nothing functioning correctly in my chest.

Eli.

I said his name again, quietly, just to hear what it felt like a second time.

It felt like something I should have known for six years and didn't.

The lobby kept moving. Phones rang at the front desk. Two men in suits walked past arguing about a quarterly report. The whole world was just continuing, completely unbothered, while I stood in the middle of it holding a photograph of a little boy who had my jaw and had never once heard my name.

I do not remember walking to my car.

I was just suddenly in it, sitting in the driver's seat in the underground car park with the photograph on the passenger seat and my keys in my hand and no idea what I was supposed to do next.

I started the engine. I drove.

Not toward the office. Not toward anywhere. I just drove the way you drive when staying still feels unbearable — through streets I was not seeing, past buildings I could not name afterward, the city moving past the windows like a film I was not watching.

I kept thinking about the silences.

Three years of marriage and I had never understood the silences. The moments I would find Amelia standing at the kitchen window, completely still, looking at something that was not there. The way she watched me sometimes across a room — not with love exactly, more like someone calculating the distance between where they were and where they needed to be. I had always assumed it was just how she was. Reserved. Private. The kind of woman who kept things close.

I had never once thought to ask what she was carrying.

I had never once thought to ask.

There was a version of our marriage I had been living inside for six years — the version where she left without warning, without reason, without giving me a chance to fix whatever had broken. That version had been comfortable in the way that self-pity is comfortable. It required nothing of me except to be the person who got left.

This version was different.

This version had a child in it.

I pulled over on a street I did not recognise. Cut the engine. Sat there.

My hands were shaking. Not dramatically. Just a low, steady tremor that I could not stop no matter how hard I pressed them flat against my thighs.

She had been pregnant.

She had sat across from me in our living room, carrying my child, four days from telling me, and I had looked her in the eye and said the word mistake. I had used that word about us. About her. About everything she had quietly been building around me without me ever seeing it clearly enough to protect it.

And she had left. She had walked out at eleven-thirty at night and she had not said a single word about what I had just destroyed without knowing it existed.

I picked up my phone and called Marcus, my lawyer.

He answered on the third ring. "Sebastian. I was going to call you about the injunction—"

"Not the injunction. I need something else." I stopped. Started again. "Amelia Rhodes. I need everything the public record has on her. Movements after she left six years ago. Any registrations. Any filings."

A pause. "Sebastian—"

"Today, Marcus."

He called back forty-seven minutes later. I was still parked on the same street. I had not moved the car. I had not moved at all.

"There isn't much. She kept a very clean record." His voice was careful. "She returned to the country about eight months after she left. There's a business registration for Rhodes Legacy eighteen months after that." Another pause. "And a birth registration. Seven months after she left. Private hospital."

I did not speak.

"The birth certificate," Marcus said quietly. "Father's name is listed as unknown."

Unknown.

Not absent. Not blank. Unknown.

She had erased me so completely that on the document that recorded my son coming into the world, I did not exist. I was not even a name with a line through it. I was nothing. A blank space where a father should have been.

I understood why she did it.

That was the part that broke something in me that I could not name. I understood it completely. I had called her a mistake while she was carrying my child. Of course she erased me. Of course she did. What else was she supposed to do — hand a newborn to a man who had just told her she was nothing?

I did not blame her.

I sat with that — not blaming her — and it was so much heavier than anger would have been. Anger would have been easier. Anger would have given me somewhere to put it all. This had nowhere to go. It just sat in my chest and took up space and asked me questions I did not have answers for yet.

I drove to Daniel's.

I did not call ahead. I just needed to sit across from someone who had known me for fifteen years and talk to a real person — not a lawyer, not a memory, not a ghost. Someone who would look at me and just be present while I figured out what came next.

His house was at the end of a quiet road, set back from the street. The lights were on inside. I pulled up, got out, walked up the path.

Through the front window I could see him clearly. He was on his phone, leaning against the kitchen counter, completely relaxed. Glass of something in his free hand. Laughing at whatever the person on the other end had just said.

I raised my hand to knock.

Then I heard it.

Not the whole conversation. Just one sentence, clear through the glass, in the voice of the man I had trusted with everything for fifteen years.

"She's rattled him. Good. Stay close to Victoria."

My hand stopped.

Three inches from the door.

I stood there completely still while that one sentence rearranged every single thing I thought I understood about the last six years.