Chapter 2 - The Anatomy of a Lie
"Dying?" The word tasted like ash in my mouth.
I took two steps forward, closing the distance between the doorway and the hospital bed, but my legs felt leaden. I stared down at the small boy. Ethan. His chest barely rose and fell beneath the white sheet.
"What are you talking about?" I demanded, keeping my voice low, though every nerve ending in my body was screaming. "Explain this to me right now, Emma. No riddles. No hiding. Who is he?"
Emma stood up slowly, her joints popping in the oppressive quiet of the room. She looked smaller than she had in my mansion, stripped of her housekeeper's uniform, wearing a faded gray sweatshirt and worn jeans. She walked over to the window, keeping her back to me for a long moment as she watched the heavy rain sheet down against the glass.
"He is your son, Preston," she whispered.
The heart monitor beeped. Beep. Beep. Beep.
The sound filled the silence, deafening in its steady indifference.
"My... son?" I let out a harsh, disbelieving laugh. It sounded foreign, even to me. "Don't play games with me. We... we never—we only talked, Emma. That night in the library, we drank whiskey, we talked about our parents, and you went back to your quarters. Nothing happened!"
"Not that night," Emma turned around, her eyes flashing with a sudden, desperate fire that took me aback. "Not the library night. But do you remember three and a half years ago? Six months before that night? Right after your engagement to Victoria Whitmore crashed and burned?"
My breath hitched.
Victoria. The socialite who had treated me like a corporate asset rather than a human being. The woman I had caught in bed with my own lead legal counsel the week before our wedding.
"What does Victoria have to do with this?" I growled.
"Everything," Emma said bitterly. "You were drowning yourself in scotch at a private lounge downtown. You don't remember much of that night, do you? You were blind drunk, stumbling out into the rain, ready to throw your entire life away."
Memories flashed through my mind in jagged, broken fragments—a dark street, burning anger, the taste of cheap scotch, a blurry face helping me into the back of a town car...
My eyes widened in absolute horror as the puzzle pieces slammed together with brutal force.
"It was you," I choked out. "You were there."
"I was working part-time catering private events to pay off my mother’s mounting medical bills before I ever stepped foot in your house," Emma said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "I saw you collapse against a brick wall outside the venue. I called a car, and since your wallet had your home address embossed on a membership card, the driver and I brought you back to your empty mansion."
She took a shaky breath, wrapping her arms tightly around herself as if shielding herself from a physical blow.
"You were sobbing, Preston. You told me nobody would ever love you for who you are, only what you own. You pulled me close, calling me Victoria in your haze, weeping over how she betrayed you. And in that moment... in that messy, drunken blur of grief and anger... things happened."
The room spun.
I gripped the metal guardrail of Ethan's bed so hard my knuckles turned stark white.
"And you didn't say a word?" I hissed, fury roaring in my ears. "You kept my own flesh and blood a secret from me for nearly three years? You walked into my house, applied as a housekeeper, and cleaned my floors while my own son was growing up just miles away?"
"What choice did I have?!" Emma finally snapped, her voice breaking as tears spilled over her lashes. "If I had told you the truth back then, what would you have done? You were a broken, ruthless billionaire nursing a shattered ego! You would have thrown money at me, bought me off with a non-disclosure agreement, and either paid me to disappear or fought me tooth and nail for custody out of sheer pride!"
She stepped closer, pointing a trembling finger at the tiny, pale boy in the bed.
"I didn't want your money, Preston! I wanted him to have a mother who could protect him. I took the job at your house because I was desperate, because I needed the salary to survive, and because... god help me... I wanted to see if the man behind the cold empire had any humanity left in him."
She choked back a sob, burying her face in her hands.
"And you did. Day by day, watching you read, watching you struggle with your own loneliness, I realized you weren't just a monster. But by the time I knew you could be a good man... it was already too late."
"Too late?" My voice dropped to a dangerous whisper. I stepped right up to her, towering over her, my chest heaving. "What does that mean, Emma? Why is he in this hospital? What's wrong with him?"
May you like
Emma dropped her hands, her eyes locking onto mine with a look of pure, unadulterated devastation.
"He has congenital heart failure," she whispered. "And the only thing keeping him alive right now... is a matching organ donor. Which we don't have. And time is running out."
