Andrew Blackwood had not slept either.
He sat in the study of his Central Park West penthouse at two in the morning with a glass of scotch he hadn’t touched and the photograph open on his laptop and looked at it for the past three hours.
The lady on the terrace.
He had known her the moment the pieces had assembled themselves — and the moment they had he had understood why they had taken so long.
Because his mind had refused the information.
Had held it at a distance and examined it from every angle before finally, reluctantly, accepting what his eyes were telling him.
Sophia.
Five years.
She had walked away from him on that terrace without a second glance and he had stood there in the November cold and watched her go and felt something shift in his chest that he had no name for and did not want to examine too closely.
He looked at the photograph again.
Whoever had taken it had caught the exact moment — the two of them facing each other, the space between them charged with something the camera had no business capturing.
She looked composed.
Completely, terrifyingly composed.
He looked like a man who had just seen a ghost.
Because he had.
***
Ethan Chen appeared in the study doorway at two thirty.
His chief of staff had the particular talent of materialising exactly when he was needed without ever appearing to have been summoned.
Andrew had relied on that talent for eight years and had stopped questioning it.
“You saw the photograph,” Andrew said.
It wasn’t a question.
“An hour ago.” Ethan crossed the room and sat across from him.
“The Post is running a piece tomorrow. Our PR team has already seen an advance copy.”
“And?”
“It mentions Lumière. It mentions the gala. It mentions—” A pause.
“A history between you and the founder of Lumière.”
“They don’t know who she is.”
“Not yet.” Ethan looked at him carefully.
“But they will. These things move fast and Sophia Bennett is not an easy woman to research quietly. She’s been very visible for the past three years. Vogue. The Paris shows. The Lumière launch campaign.” He folded his hands on the desk.
“Someone will connect the names.”
He looked at the scotch.
He looked at the photograph.
He looked at the city through the window, dark and indifferent outside.
“She built all of that,” he said finally.
It wasn’t really directed at James.
“In five years she built all of that.”
Ethan didn’t answer.
“I reached out to her PR team yesterday morning,” Andrew said.
“I know. They declined to respond.”
“She told them not to.” He leaned back in his chair.
“She’s not hiding. She came to the gala. She let herself be photographed. She’s controlling exactly what gets seen and when.” He paused.
“This is deliberate.”
“Yes,” Ethan said.
“It appears to be.”
Andrew was quiet for a long moment.
He had spent five years telling himself he had made the right decision.
That the evidence had been clear.
That any reasonable man in his position would have done the same thing.
He had built the narrative carefully and maintained it and on most days he had believed it.
Looking at that photograph he could not find the narrative anywhere.
“Find out everything,” he said.
“Lumière. The Paris operation. Who she’s been working with, who’s been backing her, how she built it.” He paused.
“All of it.”
“That will take time.”
“Then start tonight.”
Ethan nodded and stood.
“Andrew.” His voice was careful.
“There were photographs of her arrival at JFK as well. I didn’t mention them earlier because I wasn’t sure they were relevant.”
Andrew looked at him.
“Why would they be relevant.”
“She wasn’t alone.” Ethan turned back to face him.
“She arrived with her assistant and—” He stopped.
Choose his next words with visible care.
“A child. A little girl. The photographers caught her briefly before the car left.”
The room was very quiet.
“How old,” Andrew said.
“The estimates online are—” Ethan paused.
“Four or five.”
The scotch glass was in Ethan’s hand.
He didn’t remember picking it up.
Four or five years old.
Sophia had left five years ago.
He set the glass down very carefully on the desk and looked at it and did not look at Ethan and did not say anything for a long time.
“Find out about the child,” he said finally.
His voice came out steady.
He was not sure how.
“Quietly. Nothing that gets back to her.”
“Understood.”
“Ethan.”
His chief of staff paused at the door.
“Don’t mention this to anyone else,” Andrew said.
“Not yet.”
Ethan nodded once and left.
Andrew sat alone in the study with the photograph and the untouched scotch, the city outside, a calculation that his mind kept running and arriving at the same answer to, an answer that he was not ready to sit with, not at two thirty in the morning, not with five years of decisions stacked behind him that he could not undo.
Four or five years old.
He reached for the scotch and this time he drank it.