Chapter 3
Cedar Hollow was smaller than any place I’d been in years. One main street, a diner with a hand-painted sign, and houses with porches that still had swings on them.
I parked two blocks from the address Miles had traced through a rental agreement under the name A. Whitfield.
My hands were shaking. I hadn’t felt that in fifteen years.
The house was small, white, with a garden that looked cared for by someone who needed the quiet of growing things.
A little girl sat on the porch steps, maybe four years old, drawing with chalk on the wooden boards. Dark hair. My mother’s chin. Ariana’s eyes.
I stopped walking.
I couldn’t breathe.
The front door opened.
Ariana froze the moment she saw me.
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
“Ariana—”
“You don’t get to be here.”
The little girl looked up. “Mommy, who’s that?”
Ariana’s voice cracked as she stepped in front of her daughter. “Go inside, sweetheart. I’ll be right there.”
The girl obeyed, glancing back at me with quiet curiosity before disappearing through the door.
“Her name,” I said. “Please. Just tell me her name.”
Ariana’s eyes filled with tears she refused to let fall.
“Sophie.”
The name hit me harder than I expected.
“Ariana, I found the bracelet. I found your note.”
“You weren’t supposed to find anything. You weren’t supposed to care.”
“I do care. I’ve always cared. I was a coward who chose the easy path instead of fighting for you.”
“You didn’t just choose Vanessa,” she said, voice shaking. “You chose her in front of me. You let me walk out with a suitcase while she stood on the staircase in white, like she was already planning the wedding.”
I had no defense for that.
“I was pregnant, Adrian. I found out two days after you told me to leave. I called your office eleven times. Miles told me you were unavailable. Every single time.”
My stomach turned to ice.
“I didn’t know.”
“I stopped calling after the eleventh time. I decided Sophie would never grow up feeling like an inconvenience to a man who was too busy for her mother.”
“Miles never told me you called.”
“Then maybe you should ask him why.”
The words landed like a blade.
I thought of Miles’s carefully blank face every time Vanessa’s name came up. I thought of how conveniently every obstacle between Vanessa and me had disappeared over the past two years.
“Ariana, I swear to you, I didn’t know about the calls.”
She studied my face for a long moment, searching for the lie she expected to find.
She didn’t find it.
Her shoulders dropped slightly, the fight draining just enough to let exhaustion through.
“Why are you really here, Adrian? To ease your guilt? To make headlines about the billionaire who found his secret daughter?”
“I’m here because she’s mine too. And because I never stopped loving her mother, even when I was standing next to someone else.”
Ariana’s eyes glistened.
“You don’t get to say that to me.”
“I know. But it’s still true.”
Behind her, the door creaked open again. Sophie peeked out, chalk still in her small hand.
“Mommy? Is he a bad man?”
Ariana looked at me, torn between four years of protecting her daughter alone and the truth standing in front of her.
“No,” she finally said quietly. “I don’t think he is. Not anymore.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from Miles.
Vanessa knows something is wrong. She’s asking questions about Cedar Hollow.
The ground I thought I was finally standing on shifted again.
