Too Late To Learn How To Love You

Chapter Five

Ethan's POV

Ethan missed an entire afternoon meeting without ever quite registering that he'd missed it.

"Sir?" His PA knocked twice before he heard her. "You've been staring at the same page for forty minutes."

Ethan looked down at the report in front of him. He had no memory of a single word on it.

"Cancel the rest of my afternoon," Ethan said, already reaching for his coat.

She didn't ask why. After five years working for him, she'd learned which of his silences were worth questioning.

He went to collect his other two children from school instead of going home. His daughter ran up to him first, four years old and full of a school days’ worth of things to report all at once.

"And then the hamster got out," she said, "and Mrs. Smith screamed, and—"

"Slow down," Ethan said, crouching to her level, grateful, for exactly as long as her story lasted, for something ordinary enough to think about instead.

"Are you even listening?" his daughter asked, hands on her hips in an exact, unconscious imitation of her mother.

"Every word," Ethan lied.

His son, younger and quieter, simply took his other hand and said nothing, the way he always did on the mornings Vanessa dropped him off instead of Ethan. Ethan crouched down to his level too; on the off chance he might want to say something. He didn't. Ethan didn't push.

She had left that morning for a two-week cruise, the same one he'd seen her off for at the airport, hours before he'd collided into a family that had apparently been his all along.

He called the investigator from the car, still tasting the school pickup line's bad coffee on the back of his tongue.

"I need everything on the boy," Ethan said, low enough that the mother pushing a stroller past him at the pickup line couldn't overhear. "Where they've been the last five years. Who the man traveling with them is."

"The math doesn't add up for you, does it," the investigator said.

"No," Ethan said firmly. "It doesn't."

"I'll have something by tomorrow. Whatever I find, it might not be an answer you want."

"I stopped wanting comfortable answers about five years ago," Ethan said, and ended the call before the man could offer any more warnings he didn't need.

He saw her again the next morning, at the conference itself, and barely recognized the woman standing at the podium, poised in a way that had nothing left in it of the wife who used to wait up for him.

"How did you rebuild so fast," one of the younger founders in the audience asked, half starstruck, "after everything that happened?"

"I hired people smarter than me and got out of their way," Sophia said, and moved to the next raised hand before anyone could push further.

Ethan, three rows back, found he could not look away.

During the coffee break, he watched three separate people approach her, and watched her handle each of them with the exact same unhurried warmth, no visible hierarchy in who deserved her full attention and who didn't. He remembered, uncomfortably, that he had never once managed that particular skill himself, not even when he'd had considerably more reason to try.

His phone buzzed on the table between his knee and the armrest. Vanessa. He let it ring out without looking at it, the way he'd started doing months ago, and felt, as he always did, the small, guilty relief of a problem successfully postponed rather than solved. He could not remember the last time seeing her name had made him feel anything else.

His investigator called again before the session ended.

"I found her hotel," the voice finally said. "Two blocks from the conference center."

"Do you want the room number too," the investigator asked carefully, in a tone that suggested he already knew the answer and did not entirely approve of it.

"No," Ethan said. "Just tell me where the lobby actually is."

He hadn't asked for a meeting. He'd only asked for an address, and then found himself, less than two hours later, sitting in a hotel lobby he had no legitimate business being in. He'd ordered a coffee he didn't drink and watched the elevator doors more times than he wanted to admit to himself, rehearsing three different versions of an opening sentence, discarding all three before he'd finished any of them. A part of him kept waiting for enough sense to arrive and send him back to his car. It never did.

Ethan had been waiting nearly half an hour when he finally saw her walk through the front doors, laughing at something the man beside her said, her assistant trailing behind them both with a tablet still open, already narrating the next morning's schedule to no one in particular.

He stood before he'd fully decided to.

Sophia's whole body went still in the middle of the lobby the way a person goes still when the thing they've been afraid of has already caught up with them. Adrian's hand went instinctively to the boy's shoulder, a small, protective gesture Ethan noticed and understood completely, and resented anyway, for reasons he didn't examine too closely in that particular moment.

The assistant, sensing something none of the rest of them were saying out loud, quietly steered the conversation about dinner reservations toward the front desk instead, giving the three of them the illusion of privacy in the middle of a public lobby.

Neither of them moved for a long moment.

Then Ethan crossed the lobby and stopped in front of her.