Chapter 1
“Whose child is that?”
Felice’s lips parted.
No answer came.
Behind me, banknotes drifted lazily across blue water while thirty guests pretended not to breathe.
Anwen pressed the empty pay envelope against her chest.
Her eyes met mine.
I had seen fear in those eyes before tonight.
I had mistaken it for the ordinary caution staff used around me.
Now I understood it had a name.
Felice.
“Anwen.”
My voice remained low.
“Look at me.”
She did.
Her entire body shook.
Then she said the words that split my engagement party open.
“Yours.”
Nobody moved.
For a second, even I forgot how.
Felice whispered:
“She’s lying.”
Anwen flinched.
I saw it.
Not guilt.
Conditioning.
The reflex of someone who had heard that sentence used against her too many times.
“How old?”
I asked.
“Eight months.”
I calculated automatically.
Fourteen months earlier, before Felice and I were engaged, Anwen and I had spent one week together at my coastal house after she worked a private Wycliffe event there.
It had not been an affair.
Felice was not yet in my life.
Anwen and I ended it quietly when she accepted work in another city.
I had thought that was the end.
Apparently she had left carrying my son.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her expression broke.
“I tried.”
Felice turned sharply.
Too sharply.
There.
I looked at her.
“How?”
Anwen swallowed.
“I wrote you after he was born.”
Felice said:
“No.”
I ignored her.
“What happened?”
“I received a reply.”
My stomach tightened.
“What reply?”
Anwen’s eyes moved toward Felice.
“It said you wanted nothing to do with us.”
I became completely still.
“I never received your letter.”
She stared at me.
I continued.
“And I never sent a reply.”
Felice stepped backward.
One step.
Enough.
I looked at my fiancée.
“You knew.”
Silence.
Then Anwen whispered:
“She knew before I came back to work here.”
That was worse.
Because Anwen had entered my house three months earlier.
May you like
Which meant Felice had not merely discovered the secret.
She had brought the mother of my child directly under her control.
