Gabriel POV
The acquisition report had been on his desk for two hours and Gabriel had read the same paragraph four times without absorbing a single word.
He set it down.
Outside the penthouse windows the city moved in its usual indifferent way. Morning traffic. Buildings catching early light. A world going about its business completely unconcerned with the fact that Gabriel Stone was sitting at a desk worth more than most people's cars and could not concentrate on a single thing.
Three years.
He didn't count days anymore. He had stopped doing that around month eight when he realized that counting days was something a person did when they were waiting for something, and he was not waiting for anything. Iris Mercer had walked out of this apartment and off the edge of the earth and that was her right and he had accepted it and moved forward because moving forward was what he did.
He looked at the empty space on the left side of the desk where she used to leave his coffee when she came in early.
She had done that exactly twice. Both times she had set it down quietly without saying anything and left before he could respond. He had pretended not to notice. He had been exceptionally good at pretending not to notice things that mattered.
He picked up the acquisition report again.
The door opened without a knock, which meant Henry.
Henry Walsh walked in looking exactly as he always did, expensive and easy, with the relaxed confidence of a man who had never once doubted that any room he entered was better for his presence. He dropped a folder on the corner of the desk and sat down in the chair across from Gabriel without being invited.
"Board approved the Singapore numbers," Henry said. "We close end of month."
"Good."
"Your mother called the office again." Henry's tone shifted into something carefully neutral. "Third time this week."
Gabriel said nothing.
"She wants you at the charity event this afternoon. The children's health screening thing at the community hall." Henry slid a printed invitation across the desk. "Photo opportunity. Good press. She's already confirmed your attendance to the organizers apparently."
"She confirmed my attendance without asking me."
"She's your mother. When has she ever asked you anything." Henry shrugged. "It's two hours. You show up, you smile, you sign some things, you leave. The PR team thinks the optics are good right now. Public-facing philanthropy, community engagement. It helps the quarterly image report."
Gabriel looked at the invitation without touching it.
Sophie Stone had been managing his public image since before he was old enough to understand what an image was. She had decided what schools he attended, what clubs he joined, what causes his name appeared beside. When he was thirty she had started managing his marital status, which was how he had ended up with a contract marriage in the first place, to silence her and her country club opinions about bachelor billionaires looking unstable to investors.
He had done what she wanted then.
He was less inclined to do what she wanted now.
"Tell her I'm reviewing the Singapore files," Gabriel said.
Henry didn't move. "Gabriel."
Something in his tone made Gabriel look up.
Henry had a careful expression on. The one he used when he was about to say something he had been sitting on for a while.
"The detective agency called me," Henry said. "The one you hired eighteen months ago."
Gabriel went still.
He had hired them quietly. Told no one, or so he thought. He had hired them to find Iris, a search that had come back empty every single time. She had dissolved into the world like she was made of smoke.
"They've been feeding me updates too," Henry said. "In case you shut them down before they found something useful." He paused. "Don't be angry. I was trying to help."
"What did they find."
Henry reached into the folder and pulled out a single sheet. He set it on the desk and pushed it across slowly, like a man delivering something he wasn't certain he should deliver.
Gabriel looked at it.
An address. A professional name. A photograph printed in black and white, small and slightly blurred, taken from a distance. A woman coming out of a building in a city three hours from where they were sitting. Dark hair. Her face slightly turned.
He would have known her anywhere.
Iris.
She was here. Not London. Not abroad. She was in this country, in this city, three hours from this building, and she had been here long enough to have an address and a professional registration.
He sat with that fact for a long moment.
She had been this close for an unknown amount of time and she had not called. Had not reached out. Had built herself a new life with a new professional name at a careful distance and simply continued existing without him.
He had known she would. He had always known that about her. Iris Mercer was not a woman who waited to be rescued. She built things. She always built things.
He looked at the photo for a long time.
"The charity event," Gabriel said.
Henry blinked. "What about it."
"It's in this city." He looked at the address on the sheet. Then at the invitation on his desk. The same suburb. A twenty-minute drive between them. "She's in this city."
"Gabriel, I don't think—"
"I'll go." He stood and picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "Call my driver. Tell my mother I'm attending."
Henry stood too, something shifting in his expression. "This is not a good idea. If you show up there looking for her, if there's a scene, the press will turn it into a story about you being unstable. The board is already watching you since the Singapore restructure."
"Then I won't make a scene." Gabriel straightened his collar. "I'll go for the photos. For the PR. That's all."
Henry looked at him with the expression of a man who did not believe a word of that but had calculated that saying so would change nothing.
"Fine," Henry said. "Two hours. Photos and out."
Gabriel was already moving.
He told himself this was strategy. He told himself that seeing her, proving to himself with his own eyes that she was fine and living well and had simply moved on the way he had supposedly moved on, would close something in his chest that had been open for three years.
He told himself a lot of things in the car on the way over.
The event was busier than he expected. He walked in with his PR manager beside him and a photographer from the agency behind them. Children everywhere. Doctors with clipboards. Parents with strollers. The cheerful controlled chaos of a well-run charity function.
He smiled for two photos at the entrance. He spoke briefly to the event organizer. He accepted a program and held it without reading it and looked around the room with his jaw set and his expression professionally neutral.
He was not looking for her.
He was absolutely not doing that.
He was almost at the far side of the hall when a nurse in a blue shirt stopped him with an apologetic smile.
"Mr. Stone? I'm so sorry to interrupt. There seems to be a mix-up with some sample registrations. Our system flagged your name in connection with a database entry." She looked slightly embarrassed. "It's almost certainly an administrative error but our doctor asked if you wouldn't mind stepping to station three just to verify a detail."
Gabriel frowned. "My name shouldn't be in your database at all. I haven't submitted a sample."
"That's exactly why the system flagged it." She gestured toward a screened area near the back of the hall. "It should only take a moment."
He followed her, more out of mild annoyance than genuine curiosity.
The doctor at station three was young and looked like she was working very hard to keep her expression professionally neutral. She had a tablet in her hands and she looked at it, then at Gabriel, then at it again.
"Mr. Stone," she said carefully. "Thank you for coming over. I want to confirm before I say anything further, you are Gabriel Nate Stone, CEO of Stone Industries?"
"I am."
She turned the tablet to face him.
He looked at the screen.
He read the information on it once.
Then he read it again because the first time hadn't fully made it through to the part of his brain responsible for processing impossible things.
Two genetic matches in the database. Registered today. Paternal connection. Confidence level ninety-nine point eight percent.
Two children.
His children.
And at the bottom of the screen under the heading registered guardian, one name.
Iris Mercer.
The hall kept going around him. Children running. Parents talking. The cheerful noise of an ordinary Tuesday morning.
Gabriel stood completely still and felt his entire life rearrange itself around three words on a screen.
She had his children.
She had been three hours away.
She had been here today.
He looked up slowly and scanned the room with new eyes, the kind that were no longer neutral or professional or controlled.
Near the exit at the far end of the hall he saw a flash of midnight dark hair moving fast through the crowd. A woman with a child on her hip and another child's hand in her grip, moving toward the door with her head down.
Even from this distance he knew exactly how she walked.
He was already moving.