Ava read the message three times before she moved.
Come to my office when you arrive.
She sat in her car outside Blackwood for a full minute, phone gripped tight in one hand, her stomach twisting with a nervous energy she couldn't quite explain. Probably work, she told herself, gathering her bag.
She didn't fully believe it.
She knocked on his office door a few minutes later.
"Come in."
Adrian stood beside his desk, jacket off, sleeves rolled to his forearms, dark shadows sitting heavy beneath his eyes. Ava noticed immediately he hadn't slept. Again. But something in the careful, guarded way he held himself told her this wasn't the usual insomnia.
This time, she didn't ask. Something told her he was carrying a weight much larger than tired eyes could explain.
"Sit," he said, gesturing toward the chair across from his desk.
She sat, hands folding carefully in her lap. He remained standing a moment longer before finally lowering himself into the chair across from her, his eyes finding hers, then sliding away toward the window.
"The woman you saw yesterday is Victoria Hale," he said finally.
Ava's heart sank slightly at the name, though she couldn't have said exactly why.
"She was someone important in my life once." He paused, jaw working slightly before he continued. "We were engaged."
The word landed harder than Ava expected it to. Her fingers curled slowly against her palm, nails pressing faint half-moons into her skin.
"You were going to marry her?" she asked, quiet.
He nodded once.
"It ended years ago," he went on, his voice carefully even. "Badly. We haven't spoken since, until she showed up here yesterday. I thought that whole chapter of my life was finished."
Ava listened without interrupting, her eyes dropping to her folded hands, unwilling to let him see whatever was showing on her face right now.
He noticed anyway. She could feel him watching her, even without looking up.
She lifted her eyes finally. "Why is she here now?"
His jaw tightened. His fingers tapped once against the surface of the desk, then stilled.
"There's something from the past I need to deal with."
She waited, hoping for more. Nothing came.
"Do you still have feelings for her?" The question left her before she'd fully decided to ask it.
Adrian looked directly into her eyes. "No."
The answer came fast. Too fast, maybe, though Ava believed him completely.
It didn't make her feel any better.
Because the question underneath the question the one she couldn't quite bring herself to ask out loud sat heavy in her chest the whole walk back to her desk.
If you don't love her, why does she still have the power to change you like this?
After she left, Adrian opened the bottom drawer of his desk.
The photograph sat exactly where he'd placed it that morning. He picked it up, staring down at the boy's small, familiar face, his hand trembling faintly around the edges of the paper.
"Not yet," he whispered, to no one, to the empty office.
Not until the test came back. Not until he actually knew what he was dealing with. He closed the drawer slowly and sat there a long moment, the weight of the unspoken truth pressing down on his chest.
Ava returned to the operations floor distracted, staring blankly at her monitor for a full minute before she registered that Ethan had said her name twice.
"Hey. You okay?"
"Yeah. Fine." She forced a small smile.
He clearly didn't believe her, tilting his head, studying her face for a moment before deciding on a different approach entirely: a ridiculous story about a guest who'd tried to smuggle a small dog into the hotel disguised as a large purse. She laughed despite herself, the tension in her shoulders easing slightly.
Across the lobby, Adrian watched the exchange from a distance, arms crossed, jaw tight.
He didn't like it. The easy warmth between them, the sound of her laugh carrying faintly across the room, the way Ethan so effortlessly pulled a smile out of her that Adrian, apparently, could no longer manage himself today.
He had no right to feel that. He knew it even as the feeling settled hot and uncomfortable in his chest, and the realization only made him angrier with himself.
That afternoon, his phone buzzed with a message from an unfamiliar number he already recognized.
We need to talk before the test. There are things you don't know.
Adrian's expression hardened. He dialed her number immediately.
No answer.
He tried again. Still nothing.
The silence unsettled him more than the message had, sitting there at his desk with his phone gripped tight, staring at a screen that refused to give him anything more.
That night, Ava sat cross-legged on her bed, a small wooden box open in front of her.
Inside were old birthday cards, most of them faded slightly with age, corners soft from years of handling. She lifted one out carefully, Adrian's careful, familiar handwriting on the inside, a short, kind message he'd written when she turned sixteen, back when he was just her father's friend, and she was just a girl who admired him from a careful, harmless distance.
She ran her fingers slowly along the edge of the card, remembering how certain she used to feel that she understood him.
Now she realized there were entire rooms of his life she'd never even glimpsed the door to.
She closed the box gently, her eyes stinging.
"Maybe Lily was right," she whispered to the quiet room.
Maybe she'd been building too much of her heart around a man whose past she barely understood at all.
Across the city, Adrian sat alone in his penthouse, the photograph resting on the table in front of him.
His phone lit up again.
The DNA test isn't the only truth you need to know.
His eyes narrowed, reading the message twice, something cold settling low in his stomach.
Then the phone rang. Victoria's name lit up the screen.
He answered.
"Adrian." Her voice was quiet, careful in a way he hadn't heard from her yet. "We need to talk about what happened the night you left me."
His entire body went still, phone pressed hard against his ear, the room around him suddenly very, very quiet.