Chapter 3: The People Who Already Knew
I set my phone down on the counter very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands are not entirely steady.
"My mother," I said.
"How long?"
Sloan shifted Willa against her shoulder.
"She called me two weeks after Willa was born.
She said she'd heard through Dominic."
Dominic.
My younger brother.
The one who had been at my wedding, at my divorce dinner, at every turning point of my adult life with a glass in his hand and an opinion ready.
The one who had called me in Singapore three weeks ago to talk about a real estate deal and had not said a single word about a grandchild, a hospital, or a woman recovering alone in my penthouse.
"How did Dominic know?" I asked.
"He ran into Jenna," Sloan said.
"At a restaurant in Tribeca.
Jenna told him I'd just had the baby.
She didn't know we hadn't told anyone." She paused.
"He called your mother that same night."
I picked up my phone and called Dominic.
It rang four times before he answered with the easy, unhurried tone of someone who had not been expecting consequences.
"Hey.
You're back early."
"You knew about Willa," I said.
"For two weeks."
A beat of silence.
Then: "Vincent—"
"Two weeks, Dominic."
"I didn't think it was my place to—"
"She was in a hospital," I said.
"Alone.
And you called Mom instead of me."
"Mom asked me not to say anything until she'd spoken to Sloan herself.
She wanted to handle it."
"Handle it." I repeated the words back to him slowly.
"Handle what, exactly?"
He didn't answer.
That was its own kind of answer.
"What did Mom say to Sloan?" I asked.
Another silence.
Longer this time.
"You should ask Mom."
I ended the call.
Sloan was watching me from the kitchen doorway.
She had that expression she used to get during our marriage when she already knew what I was about to find out and had decided not to warn me because she'd learned that warnings didn't help.
"What did my mother say to you?" I asked.
Sloan looked down at Willa for a moment.
Then she looked back at me.
"She offered me money," Sloan said.
"A significant amount.
To settle the paternity question privately and keep Willa out of your life."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Outside, forty floors down, the city moved the way it always moved — indifferent, continuous, unaware.
"She said you were finally getting your focus back," Sloan continued.
"That you had a new direction.
That a child from a failed marriage would complicate your trajectory." She said the last word the way my mother always said it, clipped and precise, like trajectory was a technical term that excused everything underneath it.
"Did you take it?" I asked.
My voice came out steadier than I felt.
Sloan's chin lifted.
"What do you think?"
I thought about the four days she'd spent alone in a hospital room counting Willa's heartbeats.
I thought about the bassinet in my bedroom and the diapers on the nightstand and the cashmere sweater she'd wrapped my daughter in because it was the softest thing she could find.
"No," I said.
"I don't think you did."
"I told her that Willa was your daughter," Sloan said, "and that what happened next was between you and me.
Not her." She shifted the baby again.
"She didn't take that well."
"She never does."
I walked to the window.
The city spread out below in every direction, all of it familiar, none of it feeling like mine in this moment.
My mother had known about Willa for two weeks.
My brother had known.
They had made decisions about my daughter's life — about whether I would ever know she existed — without asking me a single question.
"There's something else," Sloan said behind me.
I turned.
"She's coming here," Sloan said.
"Your mother.
She called this morning.
May you like
She said she'd give me until the end of the week to make a decision, and if I hadn't, she was coming to the penthouse herself."
The end of the week was in three days.
